The Fall of Berlin 1945 (29 page)

On Zhukov's far right flank, the ist Polish Army and the 61st Army had little in the way of bridgeheads. They had to cross the Oder under fire. Their leading battalions used amphibious vehicles - American DUKWs driven by young women soldiers, but most of the troops crossed in ordinary boats. Casualties were heavy in the crossing. Assault boats leaked and a number sank, 'producing losses'. The German resistance was also strong. When one battalion of the 12th Guards Rifle Division made the crossing, 'only eight men reached the west bank of the Oder'. One can deduce that there must have been a good deal of panic by the comment that 'some political officers showed indecisiveness when crossing the river'. The coded phrase implies that they should have used their pistols more.

On the extreme left flank, the 33rd Army, in its bridgehead south of Frankfurt an der Oder, and the 69th Army, north of it, were to advance to cut off the town with its fortress garrison.

Once the coloured signal flares streaked up into the overcast sky, the Soviet riflemen rose from the ground to move forward. Zhukov, the least sentimental of generals, sent the infantry through minefields which had to be cleared before he unleashed his tank armies. 'Oh, what a terrible sight it is to see a person blown up by an anti-tank mine,' a captain remembered. But the advance of the 8th Guards Army progressed well at first. The troops were encouraged by the lack of resistance. The ground-attack Shturmoviks of the 16th Air Army screamed in low over their heads to attack positions on the escarpment and heavier bomber regiments of the 18th Air Army flew to raid other targets and communications centres further back. There were 6,500 sorties that day on the 1st Belorussian Front sector, but the bad visibility, with river mist, thick smoke and dirt from explosions, concealed their targets. As a result, comparatively little damage to defensive positions was achieved by bombing and strafing. Unfortunately for the Ninth Army, whose ammunition situation was already disastrous, a main stockpile of shells at Alt Zeschdorf, west of Lebus, was hit and blown up.

Troops caught in the open were naturally the most vulnerable. The Volkssturm company of Erich Schröder, a forty-year-old called up only ten days before, was rushed to the front in trucks at 7 a.m. when they received the order 'Maximum Alert'. There was no time to dig in before the air attacks started. He remembered two almost simultaneous bomb explosions. One splinter took off a big toe, another penetrated his left calf and a third impaled him in the small of the back. He tried to limp to cover. Most of the vehicles in which they had just arrived were ablaze and the panzerfausts still on them began to explode. Eventually, he was taken in a surviving vehicle to a dressing station in Fürstenwalde, but that night a heavy Soviet bombing raid destroyed the whole building save the cellar in which they had been sheltered.

The young German conscripts and trainees had been panic-stricken by the bombardment and the searchlights. Only the seasoned soldiers prepared to open fire, but the problem was to identify a target in the virtually impenetrable mixture of river mist, smoke and dirt drifting in the air from the shellbursts. The defenders could hear the Russians calling to each other as they advanced, but it was impossible to see them. They could also hear in the distance the engines of Russian tanks straining. Even the broad tracks of the T-34 had trouble coping with the mud of the waterlogged flood plain. Survivors from forward positions who had abandoned their weapons fled back through the second line, yelling, '
Der Iwan kommt!
' One young soldier running back saw someone ahead and shouted the warning to him, but the figure who turned round proved to be a Red Army soldier. They both leaped for cover and began to fire at each other. The German boy, to his astonishment, killed the Russian.

The ground had been so broken up by the massive bombardment that Soviet anti-tank guns and divisional artillery found it very hard to follow the infantry. This was particularly true of the katyusha batteries mounted on the backs of trucks. Nevertheless, the Guards mortar regiments who fired the katyushas watched with satisfaction as the first German prisoners sent to the rear cringed on seeing the weapon which had struck more fear into the Wehrmacht than any other.

What the prisoners might also have seen were the huge traffic jams of vehicles in heavy mud, waiting for Chuikov's 8th Guards Army and Berzarin's 5th Shock Army to make a breakthrough. But progress that morning had been very slow. Zhukov, in the observation post on the Reitwein Spur, was losing his temper, swearing and threatening commanders with demotion and a
shtraf
company. He had a furious row with General Chuikov in front of staff officers, because the 8th Guards Army was bogged down on the Oderbruch below the escarpment.

By the middle of the day, an increasingly desperate Zhukov, no doubt dreading the next radio-telephone conversation with Stalin, decided to change his operational plan. The tank armies were not supposed to move forward until the infantry had broken open the German defence line and reached the Seelow Heights. But he could not wait. Chuikov was horrified, foreseeing the chaos this would cause, but Zhukov was adamant. At 3 p.m. he called the
Stavka
to speak to Stalin. Stalin listened to his report. 'So you've underestimated the enemy on the Berlin axis,' he said. 'I was thinking that you were already on the approaches to Berlin, but you're still on the Seelow Heights. Things have started more successfully for Konev.' He seemed to take Zhukov's change of plan in his stride, but Zhukov knew only too well that everything depended on results.

Katukov received orders in the afternoon to attack with the 1st Guards Tank Army in the direction of Seelow, while Bogdanov's 2nd Guards Tank Army was ordered to attack the Neuhardenberg sector. This premature movement of the tanks meant that the close-support artillery, which the rifle divisions had been demanding to deal with strongpoints, could not get forward, because of the state of the ground. There was indeed chaos, as Chuikov had predicted, with so many thousands of armoured vehicles packed into the bridgehead. Sorting out the different formations and units was a nightmare for the traffic controllers.

On the right, Bogdanov's tanks suffered badly from both the 88mm guns dug in below Neuhardenberg and fierce counter-attacks from small groups with panzerfausts. A platoon of assault guns led by Wachtmeister Gernert of the 111th Training Brigade suddenly appeared out of the smoke on the Oderbruch near Neutrebbin and engaged a mass of Soviet tanks. Gernert alone accounted for seven of them: his personal tally rose to forty-four enemy tanks the following day. 'His outstanding bravery and tactically clever leadership saved the flank of the brigade,' General Heinrici wrote, confirming the award of a Knight's Cross. But by the time he signed it on 28 April, the brigade, and indeed the Ninth Army as a recognizable formation, would have ceased to exist.

Eventually the leading brigades of the tank armies reached the bottom of the Seelow Heights and started the ascent. Engines began screaming with the effort. In many places the gradient was so steep that tank commanders had to find alternative routes. This often made them blunder into a German strongpoint.

Katukov's leading brigades on the left received their nastiest shock when advancing to the Dolgelin—Friedersdorf road south-east of Seelow. A murderous armoured engagement began there when they found Tiger tanks of S S Heavy Panzer Battalion 502 holding the line. The Soviet tank brigades were hampered by deep ditches and suffered heavy casualties.

In the centre, meanwhile, between Seelow and Neuhardenberg, Göring's vaunted 9th Parachute Division had buckled under the hammering. When the bombardment had begun that morning, the 27th Parachute Regiment had moved its headquarters from Schloss Gusow on the ridge back to a bunker in the woods behind. Hauptmann Finkler remained in the manor house connected by field telephone. He could see little through the smoke to report back, but the stream of young Luftwaffe personnel running from the front, having abandoned their weapons, indicated the collapse that was taking place. Eventually, a lieutenant arrived with the warning that the Soviet troops were already advancing towards the edge of the village. Colonel Menke, the regimental commander, ordered an immediate counter-attack. Finkler scraped together some ten men from the forward headquarters, charged out and ran almost straight into the enemy. Nearly all the paratroopers were shot down. Finkler and the lieutenant found an abandoned Hetzer tank-destroyer and sheltered in that.

In the headquarters for the defence of Berlin on the Hohenzollerndamm, Colonel Refior, General Reymann's chief of staff, was 'not surprised' when they were awoken that morning by 'a dull, continuous rolling thunder from the east'. The intensity of the bombardment was so great that in Berlin's eastern suburbs, sixty kilometres from the target area, the effect was like a small earthquake. Houses trembled, pictures fell off walls and telephone bells rang of their own accord. 'It's started,' people murmured anxiously to each other in the streets. Nobody had any illusions about what this signified. In the grey light of that overcast morning, 'women and girls stood around in huddled groups, listening in dread to the distant sounds of the front'. The most frequently asked question was whether the Americans would get to Berlin in time to save them.

The authorities' loudly stated confidence in the defence line on the Oder was rather undermined by the flurry of activity back in the capital, sealing barricades and manning defence points. Goebbels made a passionate but unconvincing speech about this new storm of Mongols breaking itself against their walls. The immediate preoccupation of Berliners, however, was to fill their larders before the siege of the city began. The queues outside bakeries and food shops were longer than ever.

Amid the frenzied denial of reality at the top, somebody that morning fortunately had the sense to order the children's clinic of the Potsdam hospital to move further away from the capital. The Potsdam hospital had been almost entirely destroyed in the Allied air raid on the night of 14 April. The devastation had been increased by an unlucky hit on an ammunition train standing in the station. The sick children in the infants' clinic were moved in a German Red Cross ambulance, towed very slowly by two emaciated horses through the rubble-filled streets to the Cecilienhof palace. The rather elderly crown prince had abandoned it only a few weeks before, but several ancient officers from the old Prussian army and their wives continued to shelter in the cellars. They had no idea that Potsdam was destined to be part of the Soviet zone of occupation.

On the morning of 16 April the nurses heard that they were to move the children south-westwards to Heilstätten near Beelitz. Almost all the Berlin hospitals, including the Charité, the Auguste-Viktoria and the Robert-Koch clinic, were allocated accommodation there in a camouflaged stone-built barracks. This complex had also served as a hospital during the First World War. Hitler had spent two months there at the end of 1916, after being wounded. But the sick children were not yet out of danger. As they were being unloaded from buses, there was a cry of 'Take cover! Aircraft!' A Soviet biplane - the antiquated Po-2 crop-sprayer which the Germans called a 'coffee-grinder' - appeared at tree height and opened fire.

In the underground headquarters in Zossen, telephones were ringing continually. An exhausted General Krebs kept going on glasses of vermouth from a bottle kept in his office safe. As the Soviet artillery and aviation destroyed command posts and cut telephone cables, there were soon many fewer headquarters to report in, but the calls from ministers and General Burgdorf in the Reich Chancellery bunker increased. Everyone in Berlin's government quarter was demanding news. The thoughts of staff officers, however, were with those at the front, imagining what they were going through.

At the 11 a.m. conference, officers wanted to know what the evacuation plans were. They all knew that Zossen, in its position south of Berlin, was extremely vulnerable the moment that the 1st Ukrainian Front broke through on the Neisse. One or two acid remarks were made about Hitler's prediction that the attack on Berlin was a feint and that the Red Army's real objective was Prague. To Heinrici's horror, Hitler had even transferred three panzer divisions to the recently promoted Field Marshal Schörner's command.

General Busse, the commander of the Ninth Army, needed them desperately as a reserve for counter-attacks. His three corps - the CI Army Corps on the left, General Helmuth Weidling's LVI Panzer Corps in the centre and the XI SS Panzer Corps on the right - were conspicuously short of tanks. They were doomed to a static defence until they broke. The V SS Mountain Corps south of Frankfurt an der Oder, although between the two main Soviet thrusts, faced the attack of the 69th Army, which it managed to hold back.

On the Oderbruch and the Seelow Heights, the battle continued in chaotic fashion. Because of the lack of visibility, much of the killing was done at close range. One member of the
Grossdeutschland
guard regiment wrote later that the marshland was 'not a killing field but a slaughterhouse'.

'We moved across terrain cratered from shellfire,' the Soviet sapper officer Pyotr Sebelev wrote in his letter home that night. 'Everywhere lay smashed German guns, vehicles, burning tanks and many corpses, which our men dragged to a place to be buried. The weather is overcast. It is drizzling and our ground-attack aircraft are flying all over the German front line from time to time. Many of the Germans surrender. They don't want to fight and give their life for Hitler.'

Other Red Army officers were more exultant. Captain Klochkov in the 3rd Shock Army described the ground as 'covered with the corpses of Hitler's warriors who used to boast so much'. He then added, 'To the astonishment of our soldiers, some corpses would rise unsteadily to their feet from the bottom of trenches and raise their hands.' But this account overlooked their own casualties. The 1st Belorussian Front lost nearly three times as many men as the German defenders.

Subsequent inquests about that day of fighting established numerous shortcomings on the Soviet side. The 5th Shock Army apparently suffered from 'bad organization'. Radio discipline was lacking and communications were so bad that 'commanders did not know what was going on and gave false information'. To make matters worse, the excess of coded signals traffic meant that army headquarters could not cope with the deciphering. Many urgent signals were therefore delayed.