Five Days That Shocked the World: Eyewitness Accounts from Europe at the End of World War II

by Nicholas Best

  Through the springtime foliage of the Tiergarten the shells burst without interruption, destroying everything in their path. Small-arms fire was everywhere. Blinding sunshine lay over a gruesome scene. On the lawns of the Tiergarten, under mutilated age-old trees, I could recognise artillery pieces, all put out of action by direct hits. The gunners who had not made it were lying around, so mutilated that they were hardly recognisable as human beings. Everywhere in the streets, the dead could be seen amid piles of dust-covered debris. Abandoned shoes lay here and there. I remembered the first combat dead I had seen in France so long ago, and how shocked I had been at the sight. Now my sensibilities were so numb that a corpse was little more than an obstacle to step over. When I stopped to catch my breath or wait for a salvo to pass, I could see in gruesome detail the outlines of a human torso, or part of one, between pieces of brick, rock or concrete.1

  The firing was so intense that the sun quickly disappeared, blotted out by a rising cloud of smoke and dust. The Russians took the Kroll Opera House by the end of the morning and turned toward the Reichstag in the early afternoon. As with the Ministry of the Interior, every room on every floor was held by a mix of sailors, SS, and Hitler Youth, all determined not to give an inch, if Russian accounts were to be believed. The Germans were supported by Frenchmen, traitors to their country, who had volunteered for the SS’s Charlemagne Legion and had nothing to lose by fighting on. For some at least, it was Bolshevism they were fighting, not just the Russians. They fought for their beliefs, and because they were desperate, and because they would have no future if they surrendered. They also had nowhere left to retreat to, with the Russians already in the Wilhelmstrasse behind them. The defenders of the Reichstag really did have their backs to the wall.

  In the noise and confusion, it was difficult to know when exactly the Russians finally reached the Reichstag. Some thought it was about three o’clock; others in a renewed attack, just after dark. The doors and windows had been blocked, which meant that they had to blast their way in with artillery and horizontally aimed mortars and then throw in grenades before storming the building. Casualties on both sides were high as the defenders fought back. Some Russian sergeants apparently pestered their officers for the honor of carrying the red banner into the Reichstag and raising it on the roof. Most knew better than to volunteer. Honor and glory were for the generals and political commissars, not the ordinary soldiers. They just wanted to come out of it alive.

  There were propaganda considerations, too, because whoever raised the banner was sure to be made a hero of the Soviet Union. That meant no Chechens, Kalmyks, Crimean Tartars, or anyone else in exile from his homeland. But it could mean a Georgian, if one was available, because Stalin was from Georgia, so the publicity value would be high. The Russians’ political officers had already nominated suitable soldiers for the banner parties. All the chosen ones had to do, as darkness fell, was storm up the stairs and plant their flag on the dome.

  But the Germans still stood in the way. According to Russian accounts, perhaps exaggerated for propaganda purposes, the Germans responded with grenades and Panzerfausts as the Russians burst in. The grand stone columns of the Reichstag’s entrance hall were quickly spattered with blood as the casualties mounted. Fire and smoke filled the building. The Russians advanced over the bodies of their own men, lobbing grenades up the stairs and spraying the Germans with submachine-gun fire in the dark. Hundreds of Germans retreated to the basement. The rest withdrew slowly up the broad stairs, firing along the corridors and defending themselves room by room, refusing to give ground as they settled in for a long, hard fight. As with the Ministry of the Interior, it would take all night to winkle them out. Perhaps the following day as well.

  But the Russians couldn’t wait that long. Men of the 756th Regiment, carrying Banner of Victory No. 5, forced their way up the stairs and got as far as the second floor before being pinned down by German fire. They managed to unfurl the banner and wave it from a window, though not from the cupola itself. The fighting continued for hours before the Russians tried again. At some point they did reach the roof, although exactly when is open to dispute. It was reported to Moscow that the Soviet flag was flying proudly over the Reichstag in time for May Day, exactly as planned. By some accounts, though, the report was written while the building was still being stormed and then wrongly flashed to headquarters. The only certainty was that the Reichstag was still full of Germans as the night wore on, and they were very far from surrender. On every floor, and in the cellars of the basement, they were still fighting to the death.

  * * *

  IN HIS BUNKER at the Chancellery, just over half a mile away, Adolf Hitler had been woken by the guns at 5:00 a.m. as the Russian barrage began. Even in his personal quarters, under thirty feet of concrete, the sound was inescapable. The Chancellery was being pounded by artillery so close that the Russians were often firing over open sights. In his dressing gown and slippers, weary and bleary-eyed, Hitler knew that the end could not long be delayed, either for him or for Germany.

  He was still in his dressing gown when SS general Wilhelm Mohnke came to his anteroom at six. Mohnke did not mince words when Hitler asked how much longer the bunker could hold out:

  I spoke of one or two days. The Russians were at Potsdamer Platz, less than four hundred metres from the Chancellery, they had reached Wilhelmstrasse and the greater part of the Tiergarten and they had penetrated the subway tunnels under Friedrichstrasse. Hitler listened to me without interrupting, then gave me his hand in parting and said: “All the best. I thank you. It wasn’t only for Germany.” The meeting was over towards 6:30 a.m. and I returned to my command post.2

  Half an hour later, Eva Hitler went upstairs and took a turn in the Chancellery garden. It was a lovely spring morning. She told the guard that she wanted to see the sun once more. Hitler joined her after a while, but the shelling intensified just as he appeared. Turning round at once, he hurried inside again and disappeared back down his burrow.

  His wife followed. The bunker staff were unsure how to address her now that she was married, especially the ones who had always thought her rather silly. Most couldn’t bring themselves to call her Frau Hitler, and settled for the unmarried gnädiges Fräulein instead. She told them not to be embarrassed. “You may safely call me Frau Hitler,” she insisted cheerfully. 3

  Back in her own room, afraid of being alone, she summoned Traudl Junge for a chat. They sat talking about whatever came into their heads, desperately spinning out the conversation rather than sitting glumly with their own thoughts. After a while, Eva Hitler opened her wardrobe and took out her favorite silver fox fur, one that she had always loved to wear. “I’d like to give you this coat as a goodbye present,” she told Junge. “I always liked to have well-dressed ladies around me. I want you to have it now and enjoy wearing it.”4

  Junge was touched. She had no idea what she was going to do with a fur coat at a time like this, but she appreciated the thought. She thanked Eva profusely, and meant it. She had always liked Hitler’s wife.

  Time hung heavily as the morning wore on. While the battle raged outside, they were trapped and waiting—but for what, they didn’t know. At noon the daily situation report was given in the conference room. It was a bleak experience for those present. General Helmuth Weidling, commanding the Berlin garrison, told Hitler that the Russians were attacking the Reichstag and had penetrated the tunnel in the Vossstrasse, alongside the Chancellery. Weidling was as blunt as Mohnke in his assessment:

  I spoke about the vicious fighting that had taken place during the preceding twenty-four hours, about the compression into a narrow space, the lack of ammunition, the lack of anti-tank rockets—an indispensable weapon in street fighting—about the declining supply by air and the sinking morale of the troops. In my summary, I clearly stressed that in all probability the battle for Berlin would be over by the evening of 30 April.5

  Weidling’s assessment was followed by a long silence, after which Hitler asked Mo
hnke if he agreed. Mohnke did. There was no chance of relief from Wenck’s army or anyone else, no chance of a breakout, either. They didn’t even know where their troops were anymore, since they had stopped radioing in to headquarters.

  Hitler looked like a man resigned to his fate as he accepted that the situation was hopeless. He had trouble getting out of his armchair as Weidling prepared to leave. Weidling asked him what the defenders of Berlin should do if they ran out of ammunition, which they soon would. Hitler replied that he would never surrender Berlin, but the troops might be allowed to escape in small groups after their ammunition had been exhausted.

  The meeting broke up in gloom. It was obvious to everyone that Hitler didn’t have much longer to live. He had already told Martin Bormann that he and his wife intended to kill themselves that day. Now he summoned Otto Günsche, his personal adjutant, to discuss the details.

  The details were crucial to Hitler. Badly shaken by the death of Mussolini, he did not want the same thing to happen to him. If Hitler hadn’t underlined the words hanged upside down on the transcript of the radio broadcast announcing Il Duce’s death, he had certainly read them. It didn’t need much imagination to see a horde of Mongolian soldiers lashing out and mutilating his body as they dragged it in triumph through the streets, or doing even worse to Eva. Hitler was determined not to let that happen, as he made clear to Günsche:

  I met Adolf Hitler in the antechamber to his office. He told me that he would now shoot himself and that Fräulein Braun would also depart this life. He did not want to fall into the hands of the Russians either alive or dead and then be put on display in a freak show, meaning in Moscow. The bodies were to be burnt. He was charging me with the necessary preparations. The way he expressed it, I was to be personally responsible to him for this! I then assured Adolf Hitler that I would carry out his orders.6

  Günsche meant what he said. He was a loyal man who could always be relied upon to do what he was told. He gave Hitler his word and promised that Hitler’s body would be in safe hands after his death. There was no time to waste. Günsche went off at once to organize gasoline for the funeral pyre. Hitler spoke to some other people and then went in to lunch.

  * * *

  AT RUHLEBEN, there appeared to be a lull in the fighting. The Russians had already recaptured the Reichssportfeld at the Olympic stadium, but were evidently too exhausted to go any further that day. All seemed quiet as Helmut Altner sheltered in a cellar, glancing idly at a tattered copy of Dr. Göbbels’s newspaper, the Panzerbär, written for the defenders of Berlin. “We are holding on,” it announced. “The hours of freedom are coming. Berlin fights for the Reich and Europe.” Göbbels added that Wenck’s army was on its way to relieve them, hurrying to save the city. “Reserves are marching in from all sides,”7 he claimed. The paper was four days old, but the reserves promised by Göbbels still hadn’t arrived.

  What came instead was a gaggle of teenage girls, recently recruited into the Waffen-SS. Some had been antiaircraft personnel, but most had been called up a few days earlier to build barricades across the city. As civilians, they had not qualified for military rations, so they had volunteered for the SS in order to eat. But they weren’t the kind of people normally associated with the SS. Even in the uniform, they just looked like girls to Altner, few of them older than fifteen or sixteen. They seemed every bit as out of place as he was himself.

  There was half a liter of soup for lunch, but only for those fighting men whose names were on a list. Altner ate his in the sunshine outside his cellar. Afterward, he was summoned to battalion headquarters to witness the commanding officer being awarded the Oak Leaves of the Knight’s Cross for the defense of Ruhleben. Others were being given medals, too, by order of General Weidling. Scarcely believing his eyes, Altner watched in wonder as his comrades stepped forward one by one to receive their awards. He himself had been upgraded to Obergrenadier. It was possible that he was to receive the Iron Cross as well, although the commanding officer wanted to check first to see if he was allowed to award promotions and decorations simultaneously.

  Altner could hardly credit it. With Russians all over Berlin and the capital about to fall, the army was worrying about medals. Whom did they think they were trying to kid?

  For me and just about everyone else of my age, a medal used to seem the greatest thing that one could achieve, but I’ve come so far now that I can only think about how many dead this fuss has cost. I’m not going to be psyched up into holding on just for a piece of tin.

  The battalion commander’s Oak Leaves have been very dearly bought. Piles of dead—soldiers, Hitler Youth, Volkssturm—have paid for his award, while he sat in his bombproof cellar and chased the runners out into a hail of steel with his orders. And now he’s trying to whip up the fighting spirit of the troops with a shower of medals and promotions.8

  It was all just an “unending, senseless demand for more sacrifices” to Altner. Like everyone else in his unit, he just hoped that he would still be alive when it stopped.

  * * *

  IN THE CEMETERY at Hohenzollerndamm, Hildegard Knef and Ewald von Demandowsky had been digging in since dawn, crouched over their machine gun as they waited for the Russians to attack again. They had been joined by two tearful Hitler Youth, one of whom had promptly been killed by a sniper. His body lay in front of them, the eyes still wide open in death. Knef was huddled in her trench when a chicken came over to investigate:

  It flaps, gargles, runs back and forth, head out, head back, ruffles its feathers and stalks haughtily over to the dead boy—oh God, the eyes, if that sod goes for the eyes—I pick up a stone and hit it on the tail, it squeals, sheds a few feathers, and stomps off squawking. Where there’s a chicken there’s an egg, I say, and am on my way.9

  Demandowsky yelled at her to come back, but Knef was too hungry to listen. Crawling past the gravestones, she followed the hedge along until she came to three more chickens, beside a shed. They had laid two eggs. Scooping them up, Knef slithered triumphantly back to her trench. She and Demandowsky pierced the shells and drank the fluid at once.

  They were joined later by an old man from the Volkssturm, wounded in the back. Knef cut his jacket open and tried to staunch the flow of blood with strips from his shirt. But he collapsed into their trench just as the Russians launched their attack:

  There they are, for the first time I can see them, running towards us, machine guns at their hips, bayonets glinting in the sun; gun and bayonet coming towards me, coming closer, arm’s length. Earth spurts up into my eyes, ratatat, it’s the gun beside me. I remember the hand grenade —pull, throw, duck—ahhvooom, splinters clatter on my helmet, I fall across the old man. Where’s the bayonet? I wait for it, my back tenses, here it comes, must come—the bayonet …

  Complete silence. We look at each other over the old man’s bleeding back and wait, don’t dare to look up … There’s a whinnying noise and then a bark, the dry bark of a tank gun. An arm floats past us, an arm without its hand, cemetery arm; we follow its flight, the old man moans, straightens up, splutters, rattles, is dead, can’t fall down, leans against us with his head on my shoulder.10

  The roadway was heaped with dead Russians. The Germans ran over to grab their weapons and then retreated before their attackers could regroup. Clutching at Knef’s jacket, the Hitler Youth begged to come, too. They set off through the cemetery and came almost at once to a ruined house that seemed vaguely familiar to Demandowsky. He realized, as if in a dream, that it belonged to his friend Bobby Lüdtke.

  They took shelter inside, but were spotted by a Russian tank. It opened up from the corner of the road, blasting everything that moved. The Hitler Youth got lost in the confusion as walls collapsed and beams came tumbling down. Lungs full of dust, Knef begged Demandowsky not to leave her behind if she was wounded. He promised to shoot her instead and made her swear to do the same for him.

  They wondered if they could hold on until dark. With her throat clogged, Knef was desperate for water. There was
none in the taps, but the Kurfürstendamm wasn’t far away, and Demandowsky thought he knew someone there who might have some. He and Knef decided to risk it. They set off at once and were overtaken almost immediately by a couple of soldiers with machine guns who called them “Kamerad” as they passed. Knef couldn’t help noticing, as the men continued on their way, that both of them were Russian.

  * * *

  WHILE THE SOVIETS were advancing on the Reichstag from north of the Tiergarten, others were approaching the Chancellery from the south. They had gotten to within a few hundred yards of Hitler’s bunker and were making good progress as they pushed forward, probing the German defenses around Potsdamer Platz. Resistance was stiff, but the Russians’ firepower was overwhelming. Marshal Vasili Chuikov had watched earlier as his men pulverized the Germans beside the Tiergarten:

  From my observation post I saw solid clouds of smoke and reddish brick dust rising up above the government buildings. The wind brought one of these clouds right down on me. Then the dimly visible disc of the sun disappeared completely, a twilight set in, and visibility was cut almost to nothing. I had only the shell bursts to tell me that the artillerymen, their guns out and firing direct, were striking at a very limited number of targets. They were firing across the canal and down the length of the streets opposite, blasting a way through the approaches to the squares on the far side of the canal, which had been blocked with barricades.11

  The Germans were responding with flanking fire, concealing their machine guns in side streets untouched by the bombardment and then opening up from the flank as soon as the Russians appeared. It was a tough, hard, merciless business, but it was not a fight the Germans could hope to win. Every passing moment was bringing the Russians closer to Hitler’s lair. The only real question was how much longer the Germans could continue to hold out.