by Ian Kershaw
8
Implosion
We’re issuing orders in Berlin that practically don’t even arrive, let alone can be carried out. I see in this the danger of an extraordinary diminution of authority.
Joseph Goebbels, diary entry, 28 March 1945
I
Berlin in April 1945 was a city bracing itself for the storm about to blow. All possible preparations were being hastily made to try to counter the coming onslaught from the east. Everyone knew that it could not be long before the city was engulfed in the fighting. The mood had reached rock bottom. Only the occasional expression of gallows humour punctuated the fatalistic acceptance that there was no way out.1 But as the seemingly interminable dark days of those truly terrible winter months of 1944–5 gradually gave way to a sunny and warm spring, some Berliners tried their best to shut out the war for a few fleeting moments.
For anyone passing through the Tiergarten, the beautiful park in the centre of the city (if now horribly damaged, occupied by heavy artillery and serving as a source of much needed firewood), beneath trees coming into bloom and accompanied by the chirping of the birds, or looking out from the balconies of spacious villas in the Grunewald, on the western outskirts of Berlin, the war could seem far away (though the ruins of some villas could provide a swift reminder). But fleetingly pleasant activities, unremarkable strands of peacetime everyday life, were in early April 1945 no more than an attempt to ‘seize the day’, to grasp what might be one of the last chances of enjoyment before grim reality overtook them.
Others sought to ‘seize the night’ as women and soldiers in districts of central Berlin frantically engaged in ‘a hectic search for pleasure’ in shelters, basements of buildings reduced to rubble and dark pathways through the ruins. Looting and thieving were commonplace. Despite the harsh penalties, a black market flourished in food and almost any material goods to be found. Resort to any form of alcohol – including stolen medical supplies – served for many to blot out fears of what was in store.2
Whatever illusions people still briefly entertained swiftly passed. And in any case only a few were in a position to share them. Most were too worn down by cares and worries, trying to cope with the severe privations of daily existence. For the city, like every other big city in the country, was in physical appearance and the psychological disposition of its inhabitants deeply scarred by the war. The main feature of Berlin’s outward appearance was, in fact, not just the devastated city centre, the desolate façades, the bomb craters, the ruined buildings that were no more than empty shells, but its emptiness – the lack of traffic and people on the streets, the shops bereft of goods, the houses without furniture.3 At night, ‘a ghost town of cave-dwellers was all that was left of this world metropolis’, noted one observer.4 Practically every evening, as people ate their meals by flickering candlelight – since electricity usage was heavily rationed – sirens would announce the latest air raid and lead to the nightly descent into the nearest shelter. It was a sharp tug out of any reveries – a reminder that the end was fast approaching, and that the Red Army was only a short distance away, poised to launch its attack on the Reich capital.
Hitler’s own dreamworld during nocturnal visits to the cellars of the New Reich Chancellery as he sat by the model, constructed by his architect Hermann Giesler, of his home town of Linz as it would appear at the end of a victorious war provided him, too, with a momentary distraction from the clammy pressure of the war. Beyond that, his fantasies fitted the mask that he wore even now, refusing to concede to himself or anyone else that his world had collapsed into ruins. He had, at the latest since the failure of the Ardennes offensive, known that defeat was certain. But he could not openly admit it. This was part of the continuing act of the indomitable Führer which he had unceasingly upheld throughout the mounting adversity – the constant pretence, to himself as well as his entourage, that all would eventually turn out well. His dreams and illusions were a defiance of the reality gripping him most of the time – of a lost war, and of an imminent end that had to follow his own death. Since he could never contemplate surrender, as long as he lived the immense suffering and destruction of the war would continue. And since he would not allow himself to be captured, suicide was the only way out. His monstrous ego had led him long since to conclude that the German people had proved themselves unworthy of him. Their defeat had shown them to be weak. They did not deserve to survive. He could weep no tears for them. But he had yet to decide when and where to end his own life.
For those in his entourage, who saw him on a daily basis, his authority remained utterly unquestioned. Beyond the bunker, deep below the garden of the Reich Chancellery in the centre of Berlin, that he had made his last home since returning from the western front in mid-January, it was a different matter. The Reich itself had drastically shrunk. Goebbels pointed out on 9 April that German possessions were by now reduced to little more than a narrow band running southwards from Norway to the Adriatic coast of northern Italy.5 Much of what had been the Reich was by now under enemy occupation and beyond Hitler’s reach. And for most ordinary people in areas still under German rule, Hitler had long been a shadowy presence, someone encountered only through the occasional proclamation or newsreel pictures – though they were aware that as long as he lived there would be no end to their misery. For the Gauleiter, the regional rulers of the Reich, his writ was ceasing to run. It was not that they thought of openly challenging his authority. They had been his loyal viceroys for years, the pivot of his power in the provinces. And even now the consequences of any rebellious acts were to be feared. But huge communications problems and the advances of the western Allies meant that control from Berlin was scarely possible any longer. They had to tackle the situation confronting them directly, not await often unrealistic and impracticable orders from Berlin. In any case, it was obvious that Germany could hold out at best for only a week or two longer. Most of Hitler’s henchmen thought of little beyond saving their skins. Few of them contemplated leaping into the funeral pyre with their Leader.
As Nazi rule disintegrated ever more rapidly and fragmentation took the place of any semblance of centralized governance, the regime increasingly ‘ran amok’.6 Police, SS, and regional and local Party officials took matters into their own hands in the ferocious repression of anything hinting at rebellion or attempts to prevent senseless last-minute destruction. ‘Internal enemies’ were at extreme risk as Nazi desperadoes turned on them in the last agony of the regime, determined to exact revenge for their hostility, and to ensure that they would not be able to exult in triumph at the downfall of Nazism. And the fate that had befallen the prisoners of the concentration camps in the east was inflicted upon those in the remainder of the Reich, forced out of the horrendous hellholes and, in one final spurt of intense terror, dragooned onto seemingly aimless death marches. Now, as before, as the regime visibly fell apart its leaders in the Party and in the military lacked both the unity of spirit and will and the organizational capacity – which the Italian Fascist leaders had exercised in toppling Mussolini in July 1943 – to confront Hitler and try, even at the final hour, to halt Germany’s descent into the abyss. The last act in the drama remained, therefore, to be played out.
II
With the loss of the Rhine front in March, any lingering logic to continuing the war in the west had evaporated. Nevertheless, the generals fought on. Keitel and Jodl in the High Command of the Wehrmacht and the Commander-in-Chief West, Field-Marshal Kesselring, had believed, so they later claimed, to the end of March that they could prevent the total collapse of the front on the Rhine and stabilize for a while the position in the west.7 The only faint rationality was presumably the old one of buying time for the western Allies to recognize that their true enemy lay in the east, bringing the collapse of the ‘unholy’ coalition with the Soviet Union and allowing the remnants of the Wehrmacht to find new purpose by joining with the western powers against the Red Army. If that did represent the thinking at the time, it was by now e
ven more obviously the mere pipe dream it had always been. With victory so close, the last thing on the minds of Roosevelt and Churchill was breaking with the Soviet allies who continued to bear the brunt of the human losses in the fight to crush Hitler’s regime.
The total collapse in the west was unstoppable. The swift American advance, once US troops had consolidated positions over the Rhine, had driven wedges between Model’s Army Group B in the Ruhr and the Army Groups H to its north and G to the south. By 2 April, Model’s forces, still numerically strong but with weak heavy weaponry, were cut off in the Ruhr and could be supplied only from the air. Two days later, the American 9th Army began its attack to destroy the surrounded German forces. They had to surmount initial fierce resistance, but the outcome was never in doubt. Mayors of some major cities, encouraged by leading industrialists and backed by Social Democrats, Communists and other anti-Nazi groups, emerging from years of suppression, surrendered without a fight. Duisburg, Essen, Solingen, Bochum and Mülheim fell without inflicting further unnecessary suffering on populations deprived of the most basic amenities and forced to dwell in cellars, bunkers and bombed-out buildings. In contrast, fighting continued for four days before Hamm was taken and Dortmund eventually fell only after being encircled then stormed by powerful American forces on 13 April.8 By this time, Model had reported that about two-thirds of his army lacked weapons. Troops were now deserting in droves, simply disappearing into the woods or the ruined cities, and a number of commanders surrendered their units.
American forces had in the meantime advanced deep into central Germany. By the middle of April they had pushed into Thuringia, taking Erfurt, Weimar and Jena, from where they pressed south towards Coburg and Bayreuth, as well as advancing into Saxony to the outskirts of Halle, Chemnitz and Leipzig and to the north-west, capturing Hanover and Braunschweig. By 11 April they had reached the Elbe. There was no longer a German front to speak of. Continued fighting was, nevertheless, sporadically fierce and the Americans still encountered pockets of tenacious resistance. As in the Ruhr, the civic officials of numerous towns and cities preferred surrender to senseless destruction. Gotha, Göttingen and Weimar were among those that capitulated without a fight. In Magdeburg, by contrast, the refusal of the city’s military commandant to surrender on 17 April prompted a devastating attack by 350 planes the same afternoon before the last resistance faded the following day.
To the north, the British and Canadians made slower progress against the still relatively strong forces of Blaskowitz’s Army Group H. But by 10 April the British had reached Celle, north-east of Hanover, and, further north, reached the Weser, south of Bremen, while the Canadians had forced their way northwards through the Netherlands almost to the coast. The major North Sea ports and links to Denmark and Norway remained, however, in German hands and the Wehrmacht in the north-west constituted one of the last relatively intact bases of power for the Nazi regime.
In southern Germany, the situation was more ominous. Hitler dismissed Colonel-General of the Waffen-SS Paul Hausser, Commander-in-
Chief of Army Group G, on 2 April, after he had wanted to retreat to the south and south-east. His replacement, General Friedrich Schulz, tried to implement Hitler’s orders to hold out for two to three weeks to gain vital time, so it was claimed, to introduce jet-planes which would transform the military situation, and pressed all available forces into a display of fanatical resistance in the area of Aschaffenburg, on the Main. Until the middle of the month, he succeeded in blocking the American advance until he was outflanked by the 3rd US Army heading south from Thuringia, at which the retreat of Army Group G turned into flight. American and French troops had meanwhile advanced towards Stuttgart. Heilbronn, an important railway junction on the eastern bank of the river Neckar, was taken only after intense fighting. The town was defended by a relatively heavy concentration of Wehrmacht troops supported by Volkssturm contingents. Its citizens, terrorized by a fanatical Nazi leadership, had been unable, as in many other places, to instigate moves to capitulate without a struggle. The result was that Heilbronn suffered a week’s bitter but futile fighting before the inevitable surrender. That was the exception. Most places were able to engineer a surrender and avoid being blown to smithereens in a senseless attempt to hold out.
The French had easily taken Karlsruhe and other towns in Baden without a struggle, though for reasons still unclear they almost completely destroyed Freudenstadt in the Black Forest. By the middle of the month they were set to attack Freiburg, which fell to them with little fighting on 21 April. Stuttgart, the capital city of Württemberg, was surrendered the next day without a struggle, despite the insistence of the Gauleiter on a fight to the last, after the Nazi leaders had fled. Prominent anti-Nazis had managed to persuade the mayor, a long-standing Nazi himself, to spare the city pointless destruction. The French swiftly took control of Stuttgart and the surrounding areas. For local inhabitants, fear of the Nazis – who in most cases skedaddled – turned into anxiety about the French conquerors. Unlike the Americans, whose occupying forces were largely disciplined, the French troops, especially it seems a minority of the feared colonial troops from North Africa, looted extensively and perpetrated numerous rapes on entering German villages and townships, as reports by the local clergy and others made plain. In Freudenstadt, the worst instance, the raping, looting and pillaging went on for three days.9
In the meantime, driving south through Franconia, American troops encountered resistance, sometimes heavy, but took town after town – most surrendered without a fight – before on 16 April reaching Nuremberg, the very shrine of Nazism. Hitler ordered the ‘city of the Reich Party Rallies’ to be defended to the last. The fanatical Party leadership, with nothing to lose and Götterdämmerung mentality intact, refused to capitulate. It simply delayed the inevitable. After four days of fierce fighting and further unnecessary bloodshed and destruction the former Party stronghold and symbol of Nazi power eventually fell. It was 20 April, Hitler’s birthday.10
On 15 April the western Allies had laid down their immediate future objectives: in the north, press on to Lübeck, consolidate positions on the Elbe in central Germany, and in the south, advance to the Danube and into Austria. That same day Hitler stipulated that, should the Reich be split into two by enemy advance through central Germany, Grand-Admiral Dönitz in the north and Field-Marshal Kesselring in the south should take command of the defence as his delegates in whichever part of the country he himself was not situated.11
The Wehrmacht in the west was by now in a truly desolate situation. And in the east, the awaited big Soviet offensive, directed at Berlin, was set to begin before dawn of the very next day, 16 April.
In East Prussia the Soviets had finally broken the siege of the once beautiful, now devastated city of Königsberg. On 9 April, with his forces on the verge of complete destruction and the city an inferno, its commandant, General Otto Lasch, finally surrendered – though only when Red Army soldiers stood outside his bunker. The defence of Königsberg had cost the lives of 42,000 German soldiers and 25,000 civilians. Some 27,000 soldiers left in the garrison at the end entered Soviet captivity.12 In a towering rage, Hitler had Lasch sentenced in his absence to death by hanging – a sentence impossible to have been carried out – and his family imprisoned.13 He also dismissed General Friedrich-Wilhelm Müller, last commander of the 4th Army, which, apart from remnants still holding out in the Samland, was by now effectively defunct. By the time the harbour at Pillau eventually fell, on 25 April, only 3,100 of an army once comprising half a million soldiers were left, barricaded on the Frische Nehrung until the end of the war.14
To the south-east, there had been a further great disaster: after a siege lasting nearly two weeks the Austrian capital, Vienna, fell, a ruined shell, to the Red Army on 13 April, after days of intense street-fighting that continued into the heart of the city with heavy losses on both sides. The Soviets could now push further westwards into Austria on both sides of the Danube. Few German soldiers forced to
retreat further into a shrinking Reich could have placed much faith in Hitler’s empty words two days later: ‘Berlin stays German, Vienna will be German again, and Europe will never be Russian.’15
By then Zhukov’s troops, massed on the Oder only some 70 kilometres from Berlin, awaited the signal to launch the attack which, they were confident, would destroy Hitler’s regime and bring them victory. A mighty army had been assembled for the battle of Berlin. Zhukov’s 1st Belorussian Front and, further north, preparing to attack westwards from Pomerania, the 2nd Belorussian Front under Rokossovsky together comprised 1.4 million men, with more than 4,000 tanks and 23,000 pieces of heavy artillery. To the south, Konev’s 1st Ukrainian Front, ready to be launched from bases on the Neiße, had a further 1.1 million men and 2,150 tanks. Each of the fronts was backed by massive air support, amounting in all to 7,500 planes. Facing them were Heinrici’s Army Group Vistula (an outdated name, since they were now preparing to fight west of the Oder), consisting of the 3rd Panzer Army under Manteuffel to the north and the 9th Army under General Theodor Busse, directly guarding the approaches to Berlin, together with, defending the attack from the Neiße and protecting the southern outreaches of the city, part of Schörner’s Army Group Centre (the 4th Panzer Army under General Fritz-Hubert Gräser). The German forces amounted in total to a million men, 1,500 tanks and armoured vehicles, and 10,400 artillery pieces, backed by 3,300 fighter planes. The imbalance in forces was compounded by the fact that many of the Germans were young, ill-trained recruits, while the air-strength was purely nominal since so many planes were grounded through lack of fuel. Only the three concentric rings of deep-echeloned fortifications barring the path to the capital gave an advantage to the defenders.