The Second World War

by Antony Beevor

  John Rabe, the German diarist who had recorded events during the Rape of Nanking, was now in Siemensstadt on the north-western edge of Berlin. The Russian soldiers ‘are very amiable–so far’, he noted. ‘They don’t bother us, even offer some of their food, but they’re crazy about any kind of alcohol and are unpredictable once they’ve had too much.’ The pattern of seizing watches and then women began. Rabe was soon writing about how neighbours committed suicide, having killed their children, and ‘a seventeen year old girl was raped five times, then shot’. ‘The women in a bomb shelter on Quell Weg were raped while their husbands looked on.’

  In Berlin there was less violence and sadism than during the furious revenge against East Prussia. Soviet soldiers took time selecting their victims, using torches in the cellars and shelters to examine their faces first. Mothers tried to conceal daughters in attics, despite the risk of shellfire, but neighbours would sometimes give away their hiding place to divert a soldier’s attention from themselves or from their own daughters. Even Jewish women were not safe. Red Army soldiers had little idea of the Nazis’ racial persecution, which had been concealed by Soviet propaganda during the Nazi-Soviet Pact, and then because Stalin did not want the Jews to be seen as a special category of victim. As a result, the reaction was simply one of ‘Frau ist Frau’. The Jewish women and girls still held in the Schulstrasse transit camp in Wedding were raped after the SS guards vanished.

  The two main Berlin hospitals, the Charité and the Kaiserin Auguste Viktoria, put the number of women raped at between 95,000 and 130,000. Most had suffered attacks many times. One doctor estimated that around 10,000 had died, either as a result of gang-rape or from suicide later. A number of daughters had been encouraged to kill themselves by their fathers to wipe out the ‘dishonour’. Altogether on German territory some two million women and girls are thought to have been raped. East Prussia had seen by far the worst violence, as numerous reports from NKVD commanders to Beria confirm.

  In Berlin even the wives and daughters of Communists, who volunteered to help in Red Army canteens and laundries, suffered the same fate. Members of the German Communist Party, the KPD, who emerged to greet their liberators, were in many cases shaken to find themselves arrested as ‘spies’. The NKVD regarded their failure to help the Soviet Motherland as a betrayal. ‘Why were you not with the partisans?’ was the killer question, formulated beforehand in Moscow.

  On 27 April the 8th Guards and the 1st Guards Tank Army broke the defence line of the Landwehr Canal, the last major obstacle before the government district. To the south of Berlin, Busse’s 80,000 men were still fighting their way across the Berlin–Dresden autobahn, which several divisions of Konev’s forces manned as a stop-line. They felled trees in the forests of immensely tall pines, to block the forest tracks leading to the west. But many of Busse’s units, spearheaded in some cases by one of the few SS Tiger tanks which still had fuel, managed to find gaps in the Red Army cordon. All other vehicles which had not been abandoned were loaded with wounded, who screamed with pain as they were thrown about by the potholes. If any fell off they were simply crushed by the next vehicle. Hardly anybody stopped to help.

  Their vanguard heading west was spotted by a Luftwaffe aircraft and the sighting communicated to the Führer bunker. Hitler could hardly believe that Busse would disobey his order. He sent off a series of signals telling him that his duty was to save Berlin, not his Ninth Army. One of them read: ‘The Führer in Berlin expects that the armies will do their duty. History and the German people will despise every man who in these circumstances does not give his utmost to save the situation and the Führer.’ But Hitler’s orders were now disregarded by all his commanders. General Heinrici, without telling Führer headquarters, told Generaloberst Hasso von Manteuffel to withdraw in the north through Mecklenburg as Rokossovsky’s 2nd Belorussian Front advanced from the lower Oder. When Keitel discovered his disobedience, he ordered Heinrici to report to the OKW’s new headquarters north-west of Berlin, but Heinrici’s staff officers persuaded him to save himself by disappearing until the end of the war. In Berlin itself more and more houses displayed sheets or pillowcases as a sign of surrender, despite the risk from SS patrols, who had been ordered to execute every man found in such buildings.

  On 28 April American troops entered the concentration camp of Dachau, north of Munich. Around thirty of the SS guards tried to resist from watchtowers, but were soon shot down. More than 500 SS guards were killed, some by the prisoners, but most by American troops sickened by what they saw in the camp. By the side of camp, they found cattle wagons filled with skeletal bodies. One lieutenant had 346 of the SS men machine-gunned against a wall. Of the 30,000 surviving prisoners, 2,466 were in such a bad state that they died over the following weeks, despite medical help.

  Hitler’s supicions of treason within the SS were confirmed when Swedish radio announced from Stockholm that Heinrich Himmler had been attempting to negotiate with the Allies. The evening before, Hitler had noticed the absence of Obergruppenführer Hermann Fegelein, who was Himmler’s representative at Führer headquarters as well as being married to Eva Braun’s sister. Officers were sent out in search of him. They found Fegelein drunk with his mistress in his apartment. Their bags were packed for an imminent departure. Fegelein was brought back under close arrest to the Reichschancellery. Eva Braun refused to intercede on behalf of her unfaithful brother-in-law.

  Hitler was even more bitter about the defection of ‘der treue Heinrich’ than he had been about Göring’s attempt to take the leadership. And after Steiner’s failure to attack, he saw betrayal all around him. He telephoned Dönitz in Flensburg on the Baltic coast. Dönitz questioned Himmler, who denied the report. But Reuters then carried the story. Hitler, white with rage, ordered Gruppenführer Müller, the head of the Gestapo, to interrogate Fegelein. After having confessed to knowing of Himmler’s approach to Count Bernadotte, Fegelein, stripped of his medals and badges of rank, was taken up to a courtyard and executed by members of the Führer’s escort. Hitler claimed that Himmler’s treason was the final blow. According to Speer, it was Hitler’s decision to punish the Waffen-SS divisions in Hungary by stripping them of their armbands that had helped push Himmler down the path of betrayal.

  Just a few hours after the execution of her sister’s husband, Eva Braun married Adolf Hitler. Goebbels and Bormann were the witnesses. It was a daunting task for the bewildered registrar, who had been dragged back from a Volkssturm detachment. He had to ask both Hitler and Braun, according to Nazi law, whether they were of pure Aryan descent and free from hereditary diseases.

  In the early hours of 29 April, Hitler left his bride to dictate his last will and testament. Returning to his usual deluded rant, he declared that he had never wanted war. International Jewish interests had forced it upon him. He appointed Dönitz president of the Reich in his place. Goebbels was to be Reich chancellor. Gauleiter Karl Hanke, then in Breslau managing its savage defence until he sneaked out by light aircraft, was to replace Himmler as Reichsführer-SS. When Hitler’s secretary Traudl Junge had finished her dismal task, she discovered that nobody had fed the Goebbels children. She went in search of food up in the Reichschancellery, only to find a shocking orgy in progress between SS officers and young women they had tempted back with promises of food and alcohol.

  Hitler’s entourage were waiting anxiously for him to commit suicide. After Fegelein’s execution, they could not hope to escape until he died. The sound of fighting intensified, with remnants of the Nordland Division and the French SS defending the southern end of the Wilhelmstrasse. The ruins of the Anhalter Bahnhof and Gestapo headquarters on the Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse had been taken by Soviet combat groups. The French SS volunteers had proved remarkably successful at stalking Soviet tanks and knocking them out with Panzerfausts. The Tiergarten now looked like a First World War battlefield, with smashed trees and shell craters.

  Two divisions from the 3rd Shock Army had crossed the Spree from Moabit to seize the
ministry of the interior, which they called ‘Himmler’s House’. At dawn on 30 April, they launched their attack on the Reichstag, which Stalin had chosen as the symbol for the capture of Berlin. The first soldier to raise the Soviet flag above it was promised the order of Hero of the Soviet Union. The Reichstag was defended by a mixture of SS, Hitler Youth and some of the sailors who had been crash-landed in the Junkers transport planes. The great danger for the attackers came from behind. The huge Zoo flak tower in the Tiergarten could fire at them as they crossed the vast expanse of the Königsplatz, where Speer had planned to build the Volkshalle, the centrepiece of the new capital, Germania.

  In the Führer bunker that morning, Hitler tested one of the cyanide ampoules on his adored Alsatian bitch Blondi. Satisfied that it worked, he began to make his own preparations. He had just heard of Mussolini’s death and that of his mistress Clara Petacci. Their bodies, riddled with bullets, had been strung up from the gantry of a petrol station in Milan. The details had been typed for him on one of the special typewriters with out-size script, to allow him to read without glasses. (The sheet is preserved in a Russian archive.) At around three in the afternoon, the Führer made his farewells to his entourage. The solemnity of the occasion was rather undermined by the sound of partying up in the Reichschancellery, and then by Magda Goebbels becoming hysterical at the idea of losing him.

  Hitler finally retired to his sitting room with his bride, who had been cheerful during lunch although she knew exactly what was about to happen. Nobody heard the sound of the shot, but just after 15.15 hours Linge his valet entered followed by others. Hitler had fired a bullet through his head, while Eva Hitler had taken cyanide. Their bodies were wrapped in grey Wehrmacht blankets and taken up to the Reichschancellery garden, where they were set alight with petrol according to Hitler’s instructions. Goebbels, Bormann and General Krebs snapped to attention and gave the Nazi salute.

  That evening, while the Soviet troops fought their way into the Reichstag to hoist the flag of victory in time for the May Day celebrations in Moscow, General Weidling planned a breakout to the west with as many troops as possible. But an SS officer made his way through the shellfire to summon him to the Reichschancellery. Goebbels told Weidling the news of Hitler’s death, and added that General Krebs would act as an emissary to negotiate terms with the Soviet commander.

  Krebs, although supposedly a loyal apostle of total resistance, had been brushing up his Russian in the privacy of his shaving mirror each morning. As soon as a ceasefire had been arranged on the 8th Guards Army sector, he was led to its headquarters. Chuikov rang Zhukov, who immediately sent his chief of staff General Vasily Sokolovsky over. Zhukov did not want his severest critic to be able to claim that he had taken the surrender of Berlin. Zhukov then rang Stalin, insisting he be woken, to tell him that Hitler was dead. ‘Now he’s had it,’ said Stalin. ‘Pity we couldn’t take him alive. Where’s Hitler’s corpse?’ Stalin told Zhukov that no negotiations were permitted. Only unconditional surrender would be accepted. Krebs wanted a truce. He tried to argue that only the new government of Grossadmiral Dönitz could offer unconditional surrender. Sokolovsky sent Krebs back with the message that if Goebbels and Bormann did not agree to an unconditional surrender by 10.15 hours, later that morning on 1 May, they would ‘Blast Berlin into ruins’. No word came, so ‘a hurricane of fire’ was unleashed on the city centre.

  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 gi
ve 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.

  49

  Cities of the Dead

  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.’