by John Keegan
TWENTY-EIGHT
City Battle: The Siege of Berlin
The siege of cities seems an operation that belongs to an earlier age than that of the Second World War, whose campaigns appear to have been exclusively decided by the thrust of armoured columns, the descent of amphibious landing forces or the flight of bomber armadas. Cities, however, are as integral to the geography of war as great rivers or mountain ranges. An army – however well mechanised, indeed precisely because it is mechanised – can no more ignore a city than it can the Pripet Marshes or the defile of the Meuse. On the Eastern Front the three ‘cities of Bolshevism’ – Leningrad, Moscow and Stalingrad – which Hitler had marked out as the targets of the Ostheer’s advance had each brought one of his decisive campaigns to grief. His own designation of cities as fortresses – Calais, Dunkirk and the Ruhr complex in the west, Königsberg, Posen, Memel and Breslau in the east – had severely hindered the progress of his enemies’ armies towards the heartland of the Reich. Capital cities, with their maze of streets, dense complexes of stoutly constructed public buildings, labyrinths of sewers, tunnels and underground communications, storehouses of fuel and food, are military positions as strong as any an army can construct for the defence of frontiers, perhaps stronger indeed than the Maginot Line or the West Wall, which merely tried to replicate in artificial form the features that capital cities intrinsically embody. Hitler’s return to Berlin on 16 January 1945, and his decision by default not to leave it thereafter, ensured that the last great siege of the war, shorter than Leningrad’s but even more intense than Stalingrad’s, would be Berlin’s. The final moment at which he might have left Berlin, and over which he deliberately prevaricated, was his birthday, 20 April. ‘I must force the decision here’, he told his two remaining secretaries on his birthday evening, ‘or go down fighting.’
Berlin was a stout place for a last stand. It was unique among German cities in being large, modern and planned. Hamburg, densely packed around its port on the Elbe, had burned as if by spontaneous combustion in July 1943; the fragile and historic streets of Dresden had gone up like tinder in February 1945. Berlin, though heavily and consistently bombed throughout the war, was a tougher target. A complex of nineteenth- and twentieth-century apartment blocks standing on strong and deep cellars, and disposed at regular intervals along wide boulevards and avenues which served as effective fire-breaks, the city had lost about 25 per cent of its built-up area to Bomber Command during the Battle of Berlin between August 1943 and February 1944. Yet it had never suffered a firestorm, as Hamburg and Dresden had done, nor had its essential services been overwhelmed, and new roads had since been constructed. While the destruction of their dwellings had driven many Berliners into temporary accommodation or out of the city, the ruins left behind were as formidable military obstacles as the buildings left standing.
At the heart of the city, moreover, beat the pulse of Nazi resistance. Hitler’s bunker had been constructed under the Reich Chancellery at the end of 1944. The bunker was a larger and deeper extension of an air-raid shelter dug in 1936. It contained eighteen tiny rooms, lay 55 feet under the Chancellery garden, had independent water, electricity and air-conditioning supplies and communicated with the outside world through a telephone switchboard and its own radio link. It also had its own kitchen, living quarters and copiously stocked storerooms. For anyone who liked living underground, it was competely self-sufficient. Although Hitler had spent extended periods of the war in spartan and semi-subterranean surroundings, at Rastenburg and Vinnitsa, he felt the need for fresh air; his after-dinner walks had been favourite occasions for his monologues. On 16 January, however, he descended from the Chancellery into the bunker and, apart from two excursions, on 25 February and 15 March, and occasional prowls about his old accommodation upstairs, he did not leave it for the next 105 days. The last battles of the Reich were conducted from the bunker conference room; so too was the Battle of Berlin.
Berlin did not have its own garrison. Throughout the war, except for the brief period of uneasy peace between the French armistice and Barbarossa, the German army had been at the front; the units of the Home Army which remained within the Reich performed recruitment or training functions. Inside the capital, the only unit of operational value was the Berlin Guard Battalion, out of which had grown the Grossdeutschland Division. It had figured largely in the suppression of the July Plot and was to fight in the siege of Berlin. However, the bulk of Berlin’s defenders was to be supplied by Army Group Vistula as it fell back from the Oder on the capital. Its strength at the beginning of the siege was about 320,000, to oppose nearly 3 million men in Zhukov’s, Konev’s and Rokossovsky’s fronts, and it comprised the Third Panzer and Ninth Armies. The most substantial force within Army Group Vistula was LVI Panzer Corps, containing the 18th Panzergrenadier and SS Nordland divisions, as well as fragments of the 20th Panzergrenadier and 9th Parachute Divisions and the recently raised Müncheberg Division; Müncheberg belonged to a collection of ‘shadow’ formations, based on military schools and reinforcement units, without military experience. To them could be added a motley of Volkssturm, Hitler Youth, police, anti-aircraft and SS units; among the latter was the Charlemagne Assault Battalion of French SS men and a detachment of the SS Walloon Division, formed from pro-Nazi French Belgians commanded by the fanatically fascist Léon Degrelle, the man Hitler is alleged to have said he would have liked for a son, and who would lead it in a fight to the end over the ruins of the Reich Chancellery.
During the last weeks of March and the first of April Zhukov’s and Konev’s fronts assembled the force and supplies they would need for the assault on the city. Zhukov accumulated 7 million shells to supply his artillery, which was to be massed at a density of 295 guns to each attack kilometre; Konev, who needed to capture assault positions across the river Neisse from which to launch his offensive, had concentrated 120 engineer and thirteen bridging battalions to seize footholds, and 2150 aircraft to cover the operation.
While Zhukov and Konev were preparing for the great assault, Tolbukhin and Malinovsky opened the drive out of central Hungary on Vienna. On 1 April their tank columns began their race northward across the wide Danubian plain, brushing aside German armoured brigades which could put no more than seven to ten tanks in the field. By 6 April Tolbukhin’s spearheads had entered the western and southern suburbs of Vienna and on 8 April there was intense fighting for the city centre. Local SS units fought fanatically, with total disregard for the safety of the monuments they made their strongpoints. Point-blank artillery duels broke out around the buildings of the Ring, there was fierce fighting in the Graben and the Körtnerstrasse in the heart of the old city which had resisted the Turkish siege of 1683, and the Burgtheater and the Opera House were totally burnt out. Miraculously the Hofburg, the Albertina and the Kunsthistorischemuseum survived; but when the survivors of the German garrison eventually dragged themselves northward over the Danube across the Reichsbrücke on 13 April one of the great treasure-houses of European civilisation lay burning and devastated in acres behind them.
Crossing the Rhine
In the west too the great cities of the Reich were now falling to Allied attack. Eight armies were aligned along the west bank of the Rhine at the beginning of March, from north to south the Canadian First, Allied First Airborne, British Second, American Ninth, First, Third and Seventh and French First, the last facing the Black Forest on the far bank of the river. Patton’s Third and Patch’s Seventh Armies were still separated from the Rhine by the difficult terrain of the Eifel, but both succeeded in driving deep corridors to the river by 10 March. Eisenhower’s plan for the Rhine crossing consisted of a deliberate assault on a wide front, with the heaviest effort to be made in the north by the Canadian, British and American Ninth and First Armies, aimed at encircling the great industrial region of the Ruhr. The British Second and American Ninth Armies’ operations, codenamed respectively Plunder and Grenade, were vast and spectacular offensives involving large numbers of amphibio
us craft, massive air and artillery preparations and the dropping of two divisions of the Allied Airborne Army behind the German defences on the east bank of the river. They began on 23 March and were lightly opposed; the Allied Liberation Army now contained eighty-five divisions and numbered 4 million men, while the real strength of the Westheer was only twenty-six divisions.
The evolution of Eisenhower’s plan, however, had already been altered by a chance event. On 7 March spearheads of the US 9th Armoured Division, belonging to the First Army, had found an unguarded railway bridge across the Rhine at Remagen below Cologne and had rushed it to establish a bridgehead on the far side. It could not at first be exploited, but on 22 March Patton’s Third Army established another bridgehead by surprise assault near Oppenheim. The German defences of the Rhine were therefore broken at two widely separated places, in the Ruhr and at its confluence with the river Main at Mainz, thus threatening the whole Wehrmacht position in the west with envelopment on a large scale. On 10 March Hitler had relieved Rundstedt of supreme command in the theatre (it was the old warrior’s third and last dismissal) and replaced him with Kesselring, brought from Italy where he had so successfully contained the Anglo-American drive up the peninsula; but a change of commanders could not now deflect the inevitable penetration of Germany’s western provinces by the seven Allied armies. While the British and Canadian armies pressed on into northern Germany, aiming towards Hamburg, the US Ninth and First Armies proceeded with the encirclement of the Ruhr and completed it on 1 April, forcing the surrender of 325,000 German soldiers and driving their commander, Model, to suicide. At the same time Patton’s Third Army was embarking on a headlong thrust into southern Germany which at the beginning of May would have carried it to within thirty miles of both Prague and Vienna.
On the evening of 11 April the US Ninth Army reached the river Elbe, designated the previous year as the demarcation line between the Soviet and Western occupation zones in Germany. At Magdeburg the 2nd Armoured Division seized a bridgehead across the Elbe and next day the 83rd Division established another at Barby; their soldiers believed they were going to Berlin, since the 83rd Division was only fifty miles away after enlarging its bridgehead on 14 April. Word swiftly came down the line, however, that they were misled. Eisenhower was bound by the inter-Allied agreement, according to which his American forces in the central sector would stay where they were, while the British and Canadians continued to clear northern Germany and the southernmost American and French armies overran Bavaria and occupied the territory in which Allied intelligence suggested the Germans might be organising a ‘national redoubt’. The capture of Berlin was to be left exclusively to the Red Army.
It was not, however, to be a simple operation of war, but a race between military rivals. In November 1944 Stalin had promised Zhukov – who as his personal military adviser, senior army staff officer and operational commander was the principal architect of the Red Army’s victories – that he should have the privilege of taking Berlin. Then on 1 April, at a Stavka meeting in Moscow devoted to ensuring that the Soviets and not the Western powers would be the first into the Reich capital, General A.I. Antonov of the General Staff posed the question how the demarcation line between Zhukov’s and Konev’s fronts should be drawn. To exclude Konev from the drive on Berlin would be to make the final operation more difficult than it need be. Stalin listened to the argument and then, drawing a pencil line on the situation map, designated their approach routes to within forty miles of the city. Thereafter, he said, ‘Whoever breaks in first, let him take Berlin.’
The fall of Berlin
The two fronts jumped off across the Oder on 16 April. On Zhukov’s front the honour of leading the assault went to Chuikov’s Eighth Guards Army (formerly the Sixty-Second Army, which had defended Stalingrad), whose soldiers had sworn an oath to fight without thought of retreat in the coming battle. German resistance was particularly strong in their sector, however, and at the end of the day it was Konev’s front which had made greater progress. On 17 April Konev continued to make the faster advance, closing on the Spree, Berlin’s river, and persuaded Stalin by telephone that he was now better placed to open the assault on the city from the south, rather from the direct eastern route on which Zhukov’s armoured columns were labouring against fierce opposition by German anti-tank teams. Zhukov now lost patience with his subordinate commanders and demanded that they lead their formations against the German defences in person; officers who showed themselves ‘incapable of carrying out assignments’ or ‘lack of resolution’ were threatened with instant dismissal. This warning produced a sudden and notable increase in the pace of advance through the Seelow heights. By the evening of 19 April Zhukov’s men had cracked all three lines of defences between the Oder and Berlin and stood ready to assault the city.
Rokossovsky’s Second White Russian Front was now aiding Zhukov’s advance by pressing the German defenders of the lower Oder, where their defences still held, from the north. Zhukov was more concerned by the urgent advance of Konev’s front through Cottbus, on the Spree, to Zossen, the headquarters of OKH, since it threatened to take the capital’s fashionable suburbs from the south. On the evening of 20 April, when Konev ordered his leading army ‘categorically to break into Berlin tonight’, Zhukov brought up the guns of the 6th Breakthrough Artillery Division and began the bombardment of the streets of the capital of the Third Reich.
On 20 April Hitler celebrated his fifty-sixth birthday with bizarre solemnity in the bunker, leaving it briefly to inspect an SS unit of the Frundsberg Division and to decorate a squad of Hitler Youth boys, orphans of the Allied bombing raid on Dresden, who were defending the capital. This was to be his last public appearance. His power over the Germans nevertheless remained intact. On 28 March he had dismissed Guderian as chief of staff of the German army and replaced him with General Hans Krebs, once military attaché in Moscow and now installed in the bunker at his side; soon the Führer would dismiss others who had managed to make their way to the bunker to offer their congratulations on his birthday, including Goering, as head of the Luftwaffe, and Himmler, as head of the SS. There would be no lack of Germans willing to carry out these orders; more impressively, there was no lack of Germans, whether or not intimidated by the ‘flying courts martial’ which had begun to hang deserters from lampposts, ready to continue the fight for the Nazi regime. Keitel and Jodl, intimates of every one of his command conferences throughout the war, left the bunker on 22 April to take refuge at Fürstenberg, thirty miles north of Berlin and conveniently close to Ravensbruck concentration camp, where a group of so-called Prominenten, well-connected foreign prisoners, were held as hostages. Dönitz, the Grand Admiral, went to Plön, near Kiel on the Baltic, immediately after his last interview with the Führer on 21 April; he had transferred naval headquarters there during March. Speer, chief of war industry, came and went on 23 April; other visitors included Ribbentrop, still his Foreign Minister, his adjutant Julius Schaub, his naval representative Admiral Karl-Jesko von Puttkamer, and his personal physician Dr Theodor Morell, whom many in the inner circle believed had secured his privileged place by dosing Hitler with addictive drugs.
A few others actually overcame great danger to make their way to the bunker, including Goering’s successor as commander of the Luftwaffe, General Robert Ritter von Greim, and the celebrated test pilot, Hanna Reitsch, who succeeded in landing on the East-West Axis in a training aircraft, while outside the bunker the garrison of Berlin kept up a ferocious struggle against the encroaching Russian formations throughout the week beween 22 April, the day on which Hitler definitively announced his refusal to leave – ‘Any man who wants may go! I stay here’ – and his suicide on 30 April.
On the morning of 21 April, Zhukov’s tanks entered the northern suburbs, and the units following them were regrouped for siege warfare: Chuikov, who had fought the Battle of Stalingrad, knew what was necessary. Assault groups were formed from a company of infantry, supported by half a dozen anti-tank guns, a troop o
f tank or assault guns, a couple of engineer platoons and a flamethrower platoon. According to the theory of siege warfare, assault weapons were used to blast or burn down resistance in the city blocks, into which the infantry then attacked. Overhead the heavy artillery and rocket-launchers threw crushing salvoes to prepare the way for the next stage, house-to-house fighting. Medical teams stood close in the rear; street fighting produces exceptionally heavy casualties, not only from gunshot at short range but also from falls between storeys and the collapse of debris.
On 21 April, Zossen fell into the hands of Konev’s front, its elaborate telephone and teleprinter centre still receiving messages from army units all over what remained of unconquered Germany. The next day Stalin finally delineated the thrust lines for the advance into central Berlin. Konev’s sector was aligned on the Anhalter railway station, a position which ensured that his vanguard would be 150 yards away from the Reichstag and Hitler’s bunker. Zhukov, whose troops were already dug deep into the city’s streets, was to be the ‘conqueror of Berlin’ after all, as Stalin had promised the previous November.
However, German resistance was still stiffening. From his bunker Hitler constantly demanded the whereabouts of the two surviving military formations nearest the city, General Walther Wenck’s Twelfth and General Theodor Busse’s Ninth Armies. Although he railed at their failure to come to his rescue, both were fighting hard from the west and south-east to check or throw back the Soviet advance. Nevertheless by 25 April Konev and Zhukov had succeeded in encircling the city from south and north and were assembling unprecedented force to reduce resistance within it. For the final stage of the assault on the centre, Konev massed artillery at a density of 650 guns to the kilometre, literally almost wheel to wheel, and the Soviet 16th and 18th Air Armies had also been brought up to drive away the remnants of the Luftwaffe still trying to fly munitions into the perimeter, either via Tempelhof, the inner Berlin airport, or on to the great avenue of the East-West Axis (by which Greim and Reitsch made their spectacular arrival and eventual departure) in the city centre.