Infantrymen of a guards regiment stowing their bicycles for shipment, May 1945
More practically, Taranichev also sent shoes for each of his children, choosing sizes that they might grow into within a year or so. He also sent the woollen cloth to make them winter coats, white flannel for their underwear and leather suitable for making extra shoes.102 Again, he packed the parcels up with pride. So did Kirill. The young officer was based in Poland through the last winter of the war. He remembers his task there as a version of peacekeeping; a combination of strong government, light engineering work, and crime prevention. Decent civilians, in his view, had reason to be grateful to him. When the time came to send something home, he folded up a quilt or two and packed a typewriter, but he also let it be known that he and his wife needed a pram for their daughter. The next morning, two dozen models had been left outside his quarters. ‘I chose the best,’ he smiled. The local people’s generosity seemed to confirm that he was a humane soldier, a communist officer of the best kind.
The parcels helped to boost morale, but postal services were swamped. The soldiers’ packages were deemed to be ‘of exclusive political importance’, which meant that pilfering, delays and poor storage would count as state crimes. But the great despatch began in January, in the depths of the Russian winter. In a few weeks, the railhead at Kursk – and anywhere where soldiers’ families lived – looked like a giant warehouse. Three hundred parcels arrived at Kursk in January 1945. By early May, that monthly figure had jumped to 50,000, and the total for the five-month period was 87,000 parcels. Twenty thousand wagons of plunder were waiting to be unloaded by mid-May. A special tent was built beside the station to keep the rain off packages of printed cotton, tinned meat and jam, typewriters, bicycles, bedding, hosiery and china cups. Storage, however, was only the start. Many of the recipients lived in remote villages, and there were no cars. Soldiers’ families had to rely instead on ‘German trophy horses’, the clapped-out nags that the Wehrmacht had abandoned, many of which were sick or injured. In the end, more staff (and more horses) had to be taken on. A special hostel was set up near Kursk station to accommodate a workforce specially brought in to sort and despatch soldiers’ loot.103
In Germany itself, the soldiers pilfered from each other. ‘I’m afraid to send things home at the moment,’ Ageev told his wife in May, ‘because there have been lots of cases of theft.’104 Some items, however, were never meant to reach the post. Guns and ammunition, strictly forbidden for private use, were selling well on the Polish black market by the late summer of 1944.105 Apart from alcohol and tobacco, the soldiers’ other favourite items included bicycles and wristwatches. Some men were photographed with several watches on each arm, proof of their war record as well as future money in the bank. ‘The German makes always ran down,’ one survivor explained. ‘That’s why we needed several at a time.’ It was the same with bicycles. The men had little grasp of riding, let alone repair. ‘They teach each other to ride,’ one witness wrote, ‘sit stiff on the saddle like chimpanzees bicycling in the zoo, crash into trees and giggle happily.’106 She could have added that the crashed bikes were left where they collapsed. There were always others to be had. A famous photograph from this moment shows a Russian soldier pulling a bicycle out of its outraged female owner’s hands. Others show the men stowing them away, preparing for the long journey back home.107 The idea of property had become as vague as privacy or peace. Amid the devastation, nothing seemed to belong to anyone much – unless, that is, the new owner was armed or wearing an official badge.
While the front line moved west towards Berlin, soldiers in the rear sections, and even the NKVD troops who were set to guard them, enjoyed a foretaste of the victory to come. There were orgies of looting, drunken binges, and chaotic relations with local women, including ‘marriages’ as well as rape. Four years of fear and tension unravelled in weeks. Few soldiers feared the international border now. It was time to discover the entire world, to taste it, drink it, grab it, triumph over it. Reports from the late winter and early spring tell a story of chaos behind the lines, of soldiers getting drunk (of course), of soldiers stealing clothes and jewellery, dressing in civilian disguise, billeting themselves on local women, driving army vehicles around at breakneck speeds. Relations with civilians in every ‘liberated’ zone reached breaking point.108 The very guardians of discipline, a detachment of NKVD troops, were discovered rolling around a Polish city singing their ‘uncensored songs’. They even turned up drunk at their own party meeting and ranted on about the army’s glory until someone could be found to take them out and make them sober up.109
The Germans knew they were defeated by the spring of 1945, but still the war was not over. Hitler refused to surrender, and the German army, the remains of it, fought on towards final collapse. This resistance mirrored the doggedness of which the Soviets had been so proud when they held out three years before, and it delayed the battle for Berlin, which Chuikov, the stoical defender of Stalingrad, had hoped to close in February 1945. Far from admiring it, however, Soviet troops regarded German stubbornness as yet another despicable trait. Ageev remained amazed at the sight of the Germans he was fighting. ‘Among the Fritzes that we took prisoner,’ he wrote to his wife, ‘was a fifty-nine-year-old German, and he didn’t have a tooth in his head, but this bastard was fighting like some kind of brainless automaton, even though he couldn’t have chewed a piece of dry bread if he’d wanted to.’110 Ageev’s outrage owed something to his apprehension that, for all its certainty, the coming victory against an enemy like this could not be cheap.
The battle for Berlin began in earnest in mid-April. By that stage, Koenigsberg had fallen at last, as had the Prussian city of Kustrin. These last campaigns – often described as ‘cleaning up’ – were bitter, and they cost the Red Army thousands of men. But the prospect of Berlin itself seemed yet more daunting. Red Army troops could not have guessed how botched and ramshackle the final preparations for the city’s defence had been.111 As far as they could tell, the place was likely to have been fortified in advance by a maze of minefields, booby traps, entanglements. The dangers were drummed into them, as if the myth of easy victory, the dream of 1938, could be reversed into a tale of desperate odds to glorify the final chapter of the European war. But though they faced a broken, hungry and demoralized enemy, Red Army soldiers knew that they had reached Hitler’s own citadel. Whatever their superior strength – and the Soviets outnumbered Berlin’s defenders by at least two to one112 – the coming battle was certain to be challenging. Men who remembered Stalingrad – including Chuikov himself – began to train another generation in the art of house-to-house combat.113
The final chapter opened on 16 April. ‘There has not been a day at the front yet like today,’ an engineer called Petr Sebelev, whose war experience had begun in 1941, wrote to his family that evening. ‘At four o’clock in the morning thousands of Katyushas and machine guns opened fire, and the sky was as bright as day from horizon to horizon. On the German side, everything was covered with smoke and thick fountains of earth flying up in columns. There were huge flocks of frightened birds flying around, a constant humming, thunder, explosions. Then came the tanks. In front of the whole column floodlights shone, which was to dazzle the Germans. And then people everywhere started shouting, “To Berlin! To Berlin!”’114 ‘Flares soared into the sky,’ wrote Chuikov of the same scene, ‘and Lenin’s face looked down as if alive from the scarlet banners on the soldier-liberators, as if summoning them to be resolute in the last fight with the hateful foe.’115 The thunder of the guns was so deafening that even experienced artillerists were awed. It was an effort to remember that they were supposed to keep their mouths open to equalize the pressure on their ears.116
The men’s excitement was the thrill of action after a long wait, the joy of thinking the war almost won. ‘Today no one is thinking about death,’ wrote Sebelev, ‘but everyone is only thinking about how quickly they can roll into Berlin.’ The Soviets seemed poised to st
orm the fascists’ lair at last, but for a final time, the optimism of Red Army soldiers played them false. Zhukov’s assault on the Seelow Heights, the last formidable natural barrier on the way to Berlin, was destined to falter as a consequence of his own miscalculation. The searchlight beams that he had ordered the advance guard to deploy – a novel method, he imagined, to dazzle and confuse the enemy – merely reflected back into his own men’s eyes, bouncing off the wall of smoke that their artillery had made.117 Their bombardment had also made the ground ahead impassable. Worse, the trenches that the Soviets had been shelling with such energy turned out to have been deserted. A captured Red Army soldier had warned the Germans of the coming storm the previous day, and most had withdrawn well behind this forward line.118 Far from moving triumphantly towards Berlin, the troops under Zhukov’s command slowed down, unable to get past the second line of German defenders.
The delay was good news, oddly, for Zhukov’s rival, Ivan Konev. The two commanders were supposed to work together in the campaign for Berlin, though it was Konev’s task, in theory, to sweep round from the south, through Leipzig and Dresden, and cut the German front in two. But Stalin had encouraged a professional rivalry between the two marshals, a competition to reach Berlin first, and Zhukov’s problems allowed Konev’s leadership, briefly, to shine. It was a bizarre kind of race, and to the end of their lives the two marshals contested the real order of events. The most that can be said is that the contest secured Soviet priority over the Allies in the capture of Berlin. But in strategic terms it was disastrous. Zhukov’s fury forced inexperienced men – some of whom were former prisoners of war, others forced labourers with no training – to battle on through deadly streets and mined emplacements so that Berlin would fall to them. Laggards, as ever, would be threatened with a bullet or the shtraf battalion. Even experienced troops were over-tense, their terror heightened by warnings and threats. Chuikov, who also felt the lash of Zhukov’s tongue,119 told all his men to remain on their guard, and he also advised them to use overwhelming force. ‘The enemy is hidden in basements, inside buildings,’ he explained. ‘A battle in a city is a battle of firepower, a battle at close quarters, in which close-range firing is carried out not by automatic weapons only, but by powerful artillery systems and tank armaments, all firing over a few score metres only.’120 Red Army soldiers had no time, as they took their aim, to bother with the fates of the civilians who still lived in their way.
Berlin itself was poised on the brink of death. There had been no deliveries of food for days, and many of the water pipes were wrecked. ‘Children are dying right and left,’ the Berlin diarist recalled. ‘Old people are eating grass, like animals.’ Berliners crept into their basements, huddling in candlelit darkness, while outside, in the street, the spring continued with uncanny, mocking clarity. The diarist crept out from her shelter one afternoon. Even the light was a surprise. ‘Through the fire-blackened ruins the scent of lilac comes in waves from ownerless gardens,’ she wrote. ‘Only the birds distrust this April; there are no sparrows on the gutter of our roof.’121 Before the storm, her thoughts were all of hunger, like the victim of a siege. Then came the bombardment, earthquakes of shelling and deafening noise, and in its wake, soldiers, ‘Ivans’, advancing slowly, house to house and room to room, lobbing grenades into doorways and stairwells, firing first and asking all the questions later. Soon, everything the diarist wrote would relate to these strangers, Red Army soldiers with their booze and boorish tastes, their bandaged limbs, scarred faces, and their endless, unquenchable need.
The Soviets in Berlin, May 1945
As the outskirts of Berlin collapsed, cleared at the careful pace of men advancing through a maze of traps, more troops came to secure the liberated zones. There was not much to take in Berlin any more, but they seized any food and other goods that they still fancied. Almost casually, and without the intense hate of three months before, they also wreaked their usual revenge on Berlin’s women. The intimacy was not good for discipline, nor was it good for the men’s sexual health (not that most of them were without some form of infection already).122 The looting and the drunkenness were disastrous for the army’s reputation with its allies and among German civilians. In April, Stalin and Zhukov intervened, issuing a series of new orders concerning property, the violation of civilian living quarters, and what were euphemistically described as relations with civilian women. Confusingly, the most famous order deplored what it called liberal behaviour towards the Germans in the same breath as it decried excessive brutality.123 But the message was unmistakable. ‘Stalin’s order’, as the men soon called it, demanded restraint. It was read out to the troops at their political meetings, and German women learned to invoke it like a kind of spell to deter their Ivans. It does not seem to have made very much difference in Berlin. When the men discussed it, the diarist claims, ‘their eyes twinkled slyly’.124 The only thing that was guaranteed to restrain them – apart from the barrel of an officer’s Nagan – was the absolute priority of combat.
Zhukov’s forces entered Berlin on 21 April. The following day, Konev’s men crossed the Teltow Canal. It would be Zhukov’s troops, too, including those under Chuikov’s direct command, who surrounded and stormed the Tiergarten, a district eight kilometres long and two across. Though it was also the site of the Berlin zoo, this was the Nazi citadel. The bunkers at its heart, surrounded by anti-aircraft guns, had walls two metres thick. One housed the Gestapo; another, on the edge of the zone, was Hitler’s own bunker, a building that combined the functions of command post, bastion, and grand imperial reception room. To the north of it, beyond the Brandenburg Gate, was the Reichstag building, the symbol that the Soviets selected to embody Hitler’s rule. The Tiergarten itself was bisected by the Landwehr canal, a pleasant landmark that would turn into a barrier and then a death trap when the SS blew up the underground tunnels deep beneath it. But that would be their last desperate throw. On 29 April, the whole area was a bomb site, the fires an ominous red glow that lit even the darkest sky above the rubble, dust and smoke. There was no doubt at all what the outcome would be, but the last throes of this empire would not be gentle.
It took three days of intense fighting for the Red Army to capture the totemic buildings. The storming of the Reichstag was the emblematic moment. Stalin had wanted to publish the news of this (and, ideally, of Berlin’s surrender) in time for the Soviet May Day holiday. In fact, the famous photograph of Sergeants Yegorov and Kantariya (the latter, like Stalin, a Georgian) waving their red flag from the Reichstag roof was posed, taken the next day when the real danger was past. At the time, the troops involved were inching forward through a hail of machine-gun fire, risking grenades and booby traps. Three hundred defenders, more than 200 of whom were killed, held them off for more than eight hours. The story was repeated at other sites, including the formidable Zoo flak tower in the Tiergarten. Each time one of these bastions was captured, scores, if not hundreds, of Nazi troops surrendered. Many more, the wounded and the dying, lay in the basements waiting for the end.125 Hitler himself was already dead. He and his closest aides committed suicide on 30 April. ‘The Wehrmacht fought on,’ runs one account, ‘like a chicken with its spinal cord severed.’126 It was not until six o’clock on 2 May that the commander of the Berlin garrison, General Weidling, surrendered to the Red Army.127
One witness to it all was Nikolai Belov. ‘I wanted to write to you so much on the first of May,’ he wrote to Lidiya on 3 May, ‘but the way it’s worked out is that we’ve been in battle the whole time, and what’s more they’ve been really hard and drawn-out battles, the kind where you don’t have time to talk, let alone to think about writing.’ Four of her letters had arrived on 1 May, but he had been in the thick of the shelling in the Tiergarten, and when it was over he was too tired to open them. Then came the city’s capitulation, a lull in the thunder of guns, and finally, a chance to rest. ‘I haven’t slept like I did just now for a long time – I was like a corpse,’ he wrote. But he knew the war was co
ming to an end. ‘I don’t know if there’ll be another lot of fighting like we’ve just seen, but I doubt it. It’s all finished in Berlin.’ When Weidling signed the capitulation papers, Belov had been asleep.
The lieutenant had not witnessed the end of Operation Bagration. He had been wounded just weeks after writing the last entry in his diary, in the late summer of 1944. His reward had been the first home leave of his entire war, a second honeymoon with Lidiya. It was of home that he was thinking as he wrote on 3 May. A fellow officer had invited him to celebrate the first of May – belatedly – in his ‘baronial’ quarters in Berlin, ‘where, as they say, you probably can relax a bit’, but the thought of luxury repelled the weary officer at that moment. ‘To hell with all this stuff,’ Belov declared. ‘I’d rather be in a hut somewhere – anywhere, as long as it’s in Russia, so that I could relax and forget the whole nightmare of this war, including the bloodstained German race.’ The luxuries reproached his conscience, too, for he had not had time to send a parcel home, although he longed to help his family. He was exhausted and sick of the war, but his letter also contained a germ of real hope.
The point was that Lidiya was expecting their baby, a child conceived during his leave. He called the pregnant woman ‘fatty’, affectionately telling her to eat well and get lots of rest. More seriously, he also contemplated the things his unborn children would think later on, when they asked what their father had done in the war. He had no reason to reproach himself, and the thought made him proud. They would, he thought, ‘not be ashamed, because we fulfilled our duty to the end’. But all that was still in the future. In those first days of May the war was not quite over, and nor was the stress, the sense of endless combat, in his brain. ‘No doubt you are celebrating,’ he wrote. ‘I can imagine how delighted our whole nation must be, but for us, soldiers, it’s difficult to grasp the true extent of our victory, our aim has been to take a city or to win a battle, and we’re used to weighing the effect of a given battle, and we’ll only start thinking about the victory when we have heard the last shot.’
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