The Second World War (146 page)
The most tenacious defenders of the government district were foreign detachments of the Waffen-SS, both Scandinavian and French. Sappers from the
Nordland
Division blew the S-Bahn tunnel under the Landwehr Canal with explosives shaped in a hollow charge. Twenty-five kilometres of S-Bahn and U-Bahn tunnels flooded. Estimates of the numbers who drowned range from just fifty right up to 15,000, but the true figure is unlikely to be much more than fifty. Many of the corpses found floating underground were already dead, because the field hospitals in the tunnels had stacked their bodies down there.
South of Berlin, some 25,000 men from the remnants of Busse’s Ninth Army emerged from the forests near Beelitz, totally exhausted and weak from hunger. Several thousand civilians had escaped with them. Wenck’s divisions, which had opened the corrider for them and for the Potsdam garrison to escape, had gathered every vehicle it could find to drive them to the Elbe to escape Soviet imprisonment.
That afternoon, Brigadeführer Wilhelm Mohnke, who commanded the defence of the government district, gave orders for the last Tiger tank with the SS
Nordland
to pull back. Although Goebbels still refused to consider unconditional surrender, Martin Bormann and Mohnke had already smuggled civilian clothes into the Reichschancellery ready to make a breakout that night. They expected the troops holding back the Soviet forces round the government district to fight on while they escaped. In the evening, those who wanted to get away from the Reichschancellery waited impatiently for Magda Goebbels to kill her six children with poison, and then commit suicide with her husband.
At 21.30 hours, the Hamburg radio station Deutschlandsender played funereal music before Dönitz addressed the nation to announce Hitler’s
death, fighting ‘
at the head of his troops
’. Once their children were dead, Joseph and Magda Goebbels finally went up to the Reichschancellery garden. She clutched Hitler’s own Nazi Party gold badge, which he had presented to her. Husband and wife crunched on cyanide capsules at the same time. One of the propaganda minister’s aides then fired a bullet into each of them to make certain they were dead, sprinkled petrol on their bodies and set them on fire.
The delay meant that the escapers did not leave until eleven that night, two hours later than planned. In two groups, they followed different routes to cross the Spree on their journey north. Troops from the
Nord-land
with the Tiger tank and other armoured vehicles tried to smash a way through in a charge across the Weidendammer Bridge. The Red Army, which had expected a breakout and therefore reinforced the sector, killed most of them in the chaotic night battle. Several managed to get through in the confusion, including Bormann and Artur Axmann, the Hitler Youth leader. Bormann, who became separated, appeared to have blundered into a group of Soviet soldiers and to have taken poison.
With Weidling’s surrender due to come into effect at midnight, another even larger group based on the remnants of the 18th Panzergrenadier Division and the Panzer Division
Müncheberg
tried to break out to the west. A furious battle took place around the Charlottenbrücke over the River Havel to Spandau. The armoured vehicles again attempted to act as a battering ram against the troops of the Soviet 47th Army. A chaotic massacre ensued with waves of civilians and soldiers rushing the bridge, under the covering fire of self-propelled flak vehicles. It is impossible to tell how many died, but only a handful reached the Elbe. Zhukov gave orders that every body and vehicle had to be checked to see whether any of the Nazi leaders were among them, but most bodies were burned beyond recognition.
An unnatural calm descended on the blackened, smoking city on 2 May. Only distant shots from SS soldiers committing suicide and occasional bursts of Soviet sub-machine-gun fire broke the silence. In the Reichschancellery, General Krebs and Hitler’s chief adjutant General Wilhelm Burgdorf had shot themselves, after consuming a large amount of brandy. Troops from the 5th Shock Army occupied the building and hung a large red banner from it, as a companion piece to the flag which had finally been raised over the Reichstag.
For civilians emerging cautiously from their cellars and air-raid shelters, the urban battlefield of corpses in the rubble-strewn streets was a shock. Burned-out Soviet tanks lay all around, knocked out at close range with Panzerfausts by the foreign SS and Hitler Youth. German women covered the faces of the dead with newspapers or pieces of cloth. Most had been little more than boys. The older men of the Volkssturm had surrendered
at the first opportunity. Soviet troops carried on rounding up their prisoners, with shouts of ‘Davai! Davai!’ Anyone in uniform, whether soldier, policeman or fireman, was pushed into columns to be marched out of the city. Many were in tears as their wives came to see them off, and give them food and clothes. They feared that they would be sent to labour camps in Siberia.
The Berlin Operation, from 16 April to 2 May, had cost Zhukov’s, Konev’s and Rokossovsky’s fronts a total of 352,425 casualties, of whom nearly a third were killed. The 1st Belorussian Front had suffered the worst losses because of Zhukov’s desperation on the Seelow Heights.
Stalin, eager to hear every detail of Hitler’s death and ensure that he was truly gone, had ordered a group from the SMERSh detachment of the 3rd Shock Army to investigate. The Reichschancellery bunker was sealed off as they went about their work. Even Marshal Zhukov was refused entry, on the excuse that sappers had not finished checking the place for mines and booby-traps. An interrogation team began to work on any prisoner who had witnessed events there, and the bodies of Joseph and Magda Goebbels were taken away for forensic examination outside Berlin. Pressure from Moscow became intense when they could not find Hitler’s corpse. SMERSh operatives found it only on 5 May, buried in a shellhole along with that of Eva Braun. It was smuggled out in the greatest secrecy. No Red Army officer, including Zhukov, was allowed to know of its discovery.
MAY–AUGUST 1945
’
I
am unable
to find any beautiful words,’ a Soviet soldier wrote home from Berlin. ‘Everyone and everything is drunk. Flags, flags, flags! Flags on Unter-den-Linden, on the Reichstag. White flags. Everyone hangs out a white flag. They are living in ruins. Berlin has been crucified.’ The Soviet conquerors appeared to believe in the old Russian saying that ‘
Victors are not judged
.’
Many Germans tried simply to survive rather than ponder on the events which had brought them to a far greater state of humiliation than the defeat of 1918.
‘People were living with their fate
,’ a Berliner remarked. The majority of Hitler loyalists persuaded themselves that the behaviour of Soviet troops proved that they had been right to try to destroy the Soviet Union. Others started to have terrible doubts.
Fritz Hockenjos, the army staff officer with the SS corps in the Black Forest, reflected on responsibility for Germany’s defeat in his diary. ‘
The people were not to blame
for losing the war. Soldiers, workers and farmers had borne superhuman efforts and burdens and they had believed, obeyed, laboured and fought until the end. Were politicians and Party functionaries guilty, economic leaders and field marshals? Had they not told the Führer the truth and played their own game behind his back? Or was Adolf Hitler not the man he seemed to be among the people? Was it possible that perspicacity and parochialism, simplicity and ferment, loyalty and falsehood, faith and delusion lived in the same heart? Was Adolf Hitler the great, inspired leader, who could not be measured by ordinary standards, or was he an impostor, a criminal, an incompetent dilettante, a madman? Was he an instrument of God or an instrument of the devil? And the men of July ’44, were they ultimately not traitors? Questions, questions. I found no answers and no peace of mind.’
Although the announcement of Hitler’s death did not bring an immediate end to the fighting, it certainly accelerated the process of final collapse. On 2 May General von Vietinghoff’s forces in northern Italy and southern Austria surrendered. British troops rushed to secure Trieste at the head of Adriatic. Tito’s partisans had already reached the city, but in insufficient numbers to make a difference.
The citizens in Prague, believing that Patton’s Third Army was about
to arrive, rose in revolt against the Germans. The Czechs were assisted by more than 20,000 men of Vlasov’s ROA, who turned against their German allies, but not by the Americans as they had hoped. General Marshall had firmly rejected another of Churchill’s appeals to advance to the Czech capital.
With the Red Army too far way to intervene, Generalfeldmarschall Schörner’s response was almost as savage as the suppression which followed the Warsaw uprising. Changing sides did nothing to spare Vlasov and his troops from Soviet vengeance. Vlasov was denounced by one of his own officers as he attempted to escape under a blanket in the back of a car. Stalin was immediately informed of the capture of ‘
traitor of the Motherland General Vlasov
’ by Konev’s 1st Ukrainian Front. He was flown to Moscow where he was later executed.
On 5 May, after negotiations with senior officers from Simpson’s Ninth Army, the wounded from Busse’s forces were allowed to cross the Elbe. Simpson refused to allow civilians through, because of the agreement with the Soviet Union that they should stay in their home areas. Soon unwounded soldiers, and young women camouflaged in Wehrmacht greatcoats and helmets, began to cross the half-wrecked railway bridge. US troops filtered the stream to stop civilians and to arrest members of the SS. Some of the foreigners in the SS, especially Dutch from the SS Neder-land Division, pretended either that they were German or that they were forced labourers trying to return home. Hiwis, terrified of capture by the NKVD, also tried to escape. Once the bridgehead defended by Wenck’s weak divisions came under Soviet artillery fire, the Americans pulled back to avoid casualties, and a stampede began to get to the west bank. Many soldiers and civilians seized boats or lashed together wood and fuel drums to improvise rafts. Some tried to grab the riderless horses and force them into the river to take them across. A large number of those who tried to swim for it drowned in the strong current. Others, who could not face the water or felt they had nothing left to live for, simply committed suicide.
General Bradley met Marshal Konev to provide him with a map showing the position of every American division. He received no information on Soviet dispositions in return, only an unmistakable warning that the Americans should not attempt to meddle in Czechoslovakia. In Austria the Soviets had set up a provisional government, without any consultation. No signals of friendship were emanating from Moscow. Molotov, who was in San Francisco for the founding conference of the United Nations, shocked Edward Stettinius when he stated that the sixteen Polish representatives, seized by the NKVD despite their safe-conduct passes, had been charged with the murder of 200 members of the Red Army.
On the afternoon of 4 May, Stalin had been angered to hear that
Generaladmiral Hans-Georg von Friedeburg and General der Infanterie Eberhard Kinzel had come to Montgomery’s headquarters on the Lüneburg Heath to surrender German forces in Holland, Denmark and northwest Germany. Montgomery sent the German delegates on to Rheims to make a full unconditional surrender at SHAEF headquarters. The procedure was unbelievably complicated. SHAEF had received no clear political instructions on the terms of the surrender and on French participation. The Germans hoped to negotiate a surrender solely with the western powers.
Not wanting to antagonize Stalin, SHAEF included in the negotiations General Susloparov, the senior Soviet liaison officer in the west. Eisenhower’s chief of staff General Bedell Smith conducted the proceedings with skill. On 6 May he threatened that if General Jodl, who had arrived to lead the German delegation, did not sign a universal surrender by midnight, then Allied forces would seal the front, meaning that they would all be taken by the Red Army. The German delegation argued that they needed forty-eight hours after signing to distribute the order to surrender, because of the breakdown in communications with subsidiary headquarters. This was in fact an excuse to obtain extra time in which to bring more troops to the west. Eisenhower agreed to the delay. The ‘Act of Military Surrender’ was signed by Jodl and Friedeburg in the early hours of 7 May, to take effect by one minute past midnight on 9 May.
Stalin could not let the final ceremony take place in the west, so he insisted that the Germans sign another surrender in Berlin at one minute past midnight on 9 May, the moment the capitulation agreed at Rheims came into effect. Word of the great events leaked out both in the United States and in Britain. Churchill cabled Stalin to explain that, since crowds were already gathering in London to celebrate, Victory in Europe Day celebrations in Britain would take place on 8 May, as they did in the United States. Stalin retorted in displeasure that Soviet troops were still fighting. German troops were still holding out in East Prussia, the Courland Peninsula, Czechoslovakia and many other places. In Yugoslavia, German forces did not surrender for another week. Victory celebrations, Stalin wrote, could therefore not begin in the Soviet Union until 9 May.
British troops stood by to be flown across the North Sea to help the Norwegians supervise the surrender of the 400,000 German troops in the country, the largest Wehrmacht force and still completely intact. Already in the far north, a Norwegian army expedition had reoccupied Finnmark, backed by Soviet forces. Although Reichskommissar Josef Terboven had plans for turning Norway into the last bastion of the Third Reich, Dönitz recalled him to Germany and told Generaloberst Franz Böhme to take full powers. On the evening of 7 May, Böhme broadcast news of the
surrender. A skeleton administration in Oslo called up some 40,000 members of the Norwegian resistance to ensure security. Terboven committed suicide soon afterwards by blowing himself up.
