The Last Battle: The Classic History of the Battle for Berlin

by Cornelius Ryan

  About twenty-five miles due north of Prieros, at Neuenhagen on the eastern fringes of Berlin, another Communist cell grimly waited. Its members, too, lived in constant fear of arrest and death, but they were more militant and better organized than their comrades in Prieros and they were luckier, too: they were barely thirty-five miles from the Oder and expected that theirs would be one of the first outlying districts captured.

  Members of this group had worked night after night under the very noses of the Gestapo preparing a master plan for the day of liberation. They knew the names and whereabouts of every local Nazi, SS and Gestapo official. They knew who would cooperate and who would not. Some were marked for immediate arrest, others for liquidation. So well organized was the group that it had even made detailed plans for the future administration of the township.

  All members of this cell waited anxiously for the Russians to come, sure that their recommendations would be accepted. But none waited more anxiously than Bruno Zarzycki. He suffered so badly from ulcers that he could hardly eat, but he kept saying that the day the Red Army arrived his ulcers would disappear; he knew it.

  Incredibly, all over Berlin, in tiny cubicles and closets, in damp cellars and airless attics, a few of the most hated and persecuted of all Nazi victims hung grimly to life and waited for the day when they could emerge from hiding. They did not care who arrived first, so long as somebody came, and quickly. Some lived in twos and threes, some as families, some even in small colonies. Most of their friends thought them dead—and in a sense they were. Some had not seen the sun in years, or walked in a Berlin street. They could not afford to be sick for that would mean getting a doctor, immediate questions and possible disclosure. Even during the worst bombings they stayed in their hiding places, for in air raid shelters they would have been spotted immediately. They preserved an iron calm, for they had learned long ago never to panic. They owed their very lives to their ability to quell nearly every emotion. They were resourceful and tenacious and, after six years of war and nearly thirteen years of fear and harassment in the very capital of Hitler’s Reich, almost three thousand of them still survived. That they did was a testimonial to the courage of a large segment of the city’s Christians, none of whom were ever to receive adequate recognition of the fact that they protected the despised scapegoats of the new order—the Jews.*

  Siegmund and Margarete Weltlinger, both in their late fifties, were hiding in a small, ground-floor apartment in Pankow. A family of Christian Scientists, the Möhrings, risking their own lives, had taken them in. It was crowded. The Möhrings, their two daughters and the Weltlingers all lived together in a two-room flat. But the Möhrings shared their rations and everything else with the Weltlingers and had never complained. Only once in many months had the Weltlingers dared venture out: an aching tooth prompted them to take the chance and the dentist who extracted it accepted Margarete’s explanation that she was “a visiting cousin.”

  They had been lucky up to 1943. Although Siegmund was expelled from the stock exchange in 1938, he was asked soon afterward to take over special tasks with the Jewish Community Bureau in Berlin. In those days the bureau, under the leadership of Heinrich Stahl, registered the wealth and properties of Jews; later it tried to negotiate with the Nazis to alleviate the sufferings of Jews in concentration camps. Stahl and Weltlinger knew that it was only a question of time before the bureau was closed—but they bravely continued their work. Then, on February 28, 1943, the Gestapo closed down the bureau. Stahl disappeared into the Theresienstadt concentration camp and the Weltlingers were ordered to move to a sixty-family “Jews’ house” in Reinickendorf. The Weltlingers stayed in the Reinickendorf house until dark. Then they removed the Star of David from their coats and slipped out into the night. Since then they had lived with the Möhrings.

  For two years the outside world for them had been only a patch of sky framed by buildings—plus a single tree which grew in the dismal courtyard facing the apartment’s kitchen window. The tree had become a kind of calendar of their imprisonment. “Twice we’ve seen our chestnut tree decked out with snow,” Margarete told her husband. “Twice the leaves have turned brown, and now it’s blooming again.” She was in despair. Would they have to spend yet another year in hiding? “Maybe,” Margarete told her husband, “God has forsaken us.”

  Siegmund comforted her. They had a lot to live for, he told her: their two children—a daughter, seventeen, and a son, fifteen—-were in England. The Weltlingers had not seen them since Siegmund had arranged to get them out of Germany in 1938. Opening a Bible he turned to the Ninety-first Psalm and slowly read: “A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand; but it shall not come nigh thee.” All they could do was to wait. “God is with us,” he told his wife. “Believe me, the day of liberation is at hand.”

  In the previous year, more than four thousand Jews had been arrested by the Gestapo in the streets of Berlin. Many of these Jews had risked detection because they were unable to stand confinement any longer.

  Hans Rosenthal, twenty, was still hiding in Lichtenberg, and was determined to hold out. He had spent twenty-six months in a cubicle barely six feet long and five feet wide. It was actually a kind of small tool shed attached to the back of a house owned by an old friend of Hans’s mother. Rosenthal’s existence up to now had been perilous. His parents were dead and at sixteen he was put into a labor camp. In March of 1943 he escaped and, without papers, took a train to Berlin and refuge with his mother’s friend. There was no water and no light in his cell-like hiding place and the only toilet facility available was an old-fashioned chamber pot. He emptied that at night during the air raids, the only time he dared leave his hiding place. Except for a narrow couch, the cubicle was bare. But Hans did have a Bible, a small radio and, on the wall, a carefully marked map. Much as he hoped for the Western Allies, it seemed to him that the Russians would capture Berlin. And that worried him, even though it would mean his release. But he reassured himself by saying over and over, “I am a Jew. I have survived the Nazis and I’ll survive Stalin, too.”

  In the same district, in a cellar in Karlshorst, Joachim Lipschitz lived under the protection of Otto Krüger. On the whole it was quiet in the Krüger cellar but sometimes Joachim thought he heard the distant boom of Russian guns. The sound was soft and muttering, like a bored audience applauding with gloved hands. He put it down to imagination—the Russians were much too far away. Still he was familiar with Russian cannonading. The son of a Jewish doctor and a Gentile mother, he had been inducted into the Wehrmacht. In 1941 on the eastern front, he had lost an arm on the battlefield. But service to Germany had not saved him from the crime of being a half-Jew. In April, 1944, he had been marked for internment in a concentration camp. From that moment on, he had been in hiding.

  The 27-year-old Joachim wondered what would happen now as the climax approached. Every night the Krügers’ eldest daughter, Eleanore, came down to the basement to discuss the outlook. They had been sweethearts since 1942 and Eleanore, making no secret of their friendship, had been disqualified from attending a university because of her association with an “unworthy” person. Now they longed for the day when they could marry. Eleanore was convinced that the Nazis were militarily bankrupt and that the collapse would come soon. Joachim believed otherwise: the Germans would fight to the bitter end and Berlin was sure to become a battlefield—perhaps another Verdun. They also disagreed about who would capture the city. Joachim expected the Russians, Eleanore the British and Americans. But Joachim thought they should be prepared for any eventuality. So Eleanore was studying English—and Joachim was mastering Russian.

  None waited in more anguish for Berlin to fall than Leo Sternfeld, his wife Agnes and their 23-year-old daughter Annemarie. The Sternfelds were not in hiding, for the family was Protestant. But Leo’s mother was Jewish, so he was categorized by the Nazis as a half-Jew. As a result, Leo and his family had lived in a torment of suspense all through the war; the Gestapo had toyed with
them as a cat with a mouse. They had been allowed to live where they wished, but hanging over them always was the threat of arrest.

  The danger had grown greater as the war had come nearer, and Leo had struggled to keep up the women’s spirits. The night before, a bomb had demolished the post office nearby, but Leo was still able to joke about it. “You won’t have to go far for the mail any more,” he told his wife. “The post office is lying on the steps.”

  As he left their home in Tempelhof on this March morning, Leo Sternfeld, the former businessman now drafted by the Gestapo to work as a garbage collector, knew that he had put off making his plans until too late. They could not leave Berlin, and there was no time to go into hiding. If Berlin was not captured within the next few weeks they were doomed. Leo had been tipped off that the Gestapo planned to round up all those with even a drop of Jewish blood on May 19.

  Far to the west, in the headquarters of the British Second Army at Walbeck, near the Dutch border, the senior medical officer, Brigadier Hugh Glyn Hughes, tried to anticipate some of the health problems he might encounter within the coming weeks—especially when they reached Berlin. Secretly he feared outbreaks of typhus.

  Already a few refugees were passing through the front lines, and his assistants had reported that they carried a variety of contagious diseases. Like every other doctor along the Allied front, Brigadier Hughes was watching developments very carefully; a serious epidemic could be disastrous. Tugging at his moustache, he wondered how he would cope with the refugees when the trickle became a flood. There would also be thousands of Allied prisoners of war. And God only knew what they would find when Berlin was reached.

  The Brigadier was also concerned about another related problem: the concentration and labor camps. There had been some information about them via neutral countries, but no one knew how they were run, how many people they contained or what conditions were like. Now it looked as if the British Second would be the first army to overrun a concentration camp. On his desk was a report that one lay directly in the path of their advance, in the area north of Hanover. There was almost no further information about it. Brigadier Hughes wondered what they would find. He hoped the Germans had shown their usual thoroughness in medical matters, and had the health situation under control. He had never heard of the place before. It was called Belsen.

  *The estimated figure of Jewish survivors comes from Berlin Senate statistics prepared by Dr. Wolfgang Scheffler of Berlin’s Free University. They are disputed by some Jewish experts—among them Siegmund Weltlinger, who was Chairman for Jewish Affairs in the post-war government. He places the number who survived at only 1,400. Besides those underground, Dr. Scheffler states that at least another 5,100 Jews who had married Christians were living in the city under so-called legal conditions. But at best that was a nightmarish limbo, for those Jews never knew when they would be arrested. Today 6,000 Jews live in Berlin—a mere fraction of the 160,564 Jewish population of 1933, the year Hitler came to power. Of that figure no one knows for certain how many Jewish Berliners left the city, emigrated out of Germany, or were deported and exterminated in concentration camps.

  5

  CAPTAIN HELMUTH CORDS, a 25-year-old veteran of the Russian front, was a holder of the Iron Cross for bravery. He was also a prisoner in Berlin—and he probably would not live to see the end of the war. Captain Cords was a member of an elite group—the small band of survivors of the seven thousand Germans who had been arrested in connection with the attempted assassination of Hitler eight months before, on July 20, 1944.

  Hitler had wreaked his vengeance in a barbaric orgy; almost five thousand alleged participants had been executed, the innocent and the guilty alike. Whole families had been wiped out. Anyone even remotely connected with the plotters had been arrested and, as often as not, summarily executed. They had been put to death in a manner prescribed by Hitler himself. “They must all be hanged like cattle,” he had ordered. The principals were hanged in exactly that fashion—from meat hooks. Instead of rope most of them were strung up with piano wire.

  Now, in Wing B of the star-shaped Lehrterstrasse Prison, the last group of the alleged plotters waited. They were both conservatives and Communists; they were army officers, doctors, clergymen, university professors, writers, former political figures, ordinary workingmen and peasants. Some had no idea why they were imprisoned; they had never been formally charged. A few had been tried, and were awaiting retrial. Some had actually been proved innocent, but were still being held. Others had been given sham trials, had been hurriedly sentenced, and were now awaiting execution. No one knew exactly how many prisoners there were in Wing B—some thought two hundred, others fewer than one hundred. There was no way of keeping count. Each day prisoners were taken out, never to be seen again. It all depended on the whims of one man: the Gestapo chief, SS Grüppenführer Heinrich Müller. The incarcerated expected little mercy from him. Even if the Allies were at the very prison gates, they believed Müller would continue the butchery.

  Cords was one of the innocent. In July, 1944, he had been stationed at Bendlerstrasse as a junior officer on the staff of the Chief of Staff of the Reserve Army, Colonel Claus Graf von Stauffenberg. There was, as it turned out, just one thing wrong with that assignment: the distinguished-looking, 36-year-old Von Stauffenberg—he had only one arm and wore a black patch over his left eye—was the key figure in the July 20 plot, the man who had volunteered to kill Hitler.

  At the Führer’s headquarters in Rastenburg, East Prussia, during one of Hitler’s lengthy military conferences, Von Stauffenberg had placed a briefcase containing a time bomb beneath the long map table near where Hitler stood. Minutes after Von Stauffenberg had slipped out of the room to start back to Berlin, the bomb exploded. Miraculously, Hitler had survived the blast. Hours later in Berlin, Von Stauffenberg, without benefit of a formal trial, was shot to death in the courtyard of the Bendlerstrasse headquarters along with three other key military figures in the plot. Everyone even remotely associated with him was arrested—including Helmuth Cords.

  Cords’s fiancée, Jutta Sorge, granddaughter of the former German Chancellor and Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann, had also been arrested and imprisoned. So had her mother and father. All of them, including Helmuth Cords, had been held without trial ever since.

  Corporal Herbert Kosney, imprisoned in the same building, knew even less about the July 20 plot than Cords. But Kosney had been implicated unwittingly. He was part of a Communist resistance group, and his participation in the assassination attempt had consisted of transporting an unknown man from Lichterfelde to Wannsee.

  Although not a Communist, Herbert had been on the fringes of various Red underground groups since 1940. In November, 1942, while he was on military leave in Berlin, his elder brother Kurt, a member of the Communist Party since 1931, had violently dissuaded Herbert from returning to the front: he broke Herbert’s arm with a rifle, took him to a military hospital and explained that he had found the injured soldier lying in a ditch.

  The trick worked. Herbert never returned to the front. He was stationed with a reserve battalion in Berlin and every three months got a new medical certificate from Dr. Albert Olbertz which kept him on “light duty.” Dr. Olbertz happened to be a member of a Communist resistance group, too.

  It was Olbertz who brought about Herbert’s imprisonment. A few days after the attempt on Hitler’s life, Olbertz told Herbert to come with him on an urgent transportation job. Taking a military ambulance, they picked up a man unknown to Herbert—a senior officer in the Gestapo, General Artur Nebe, Chief of the Criminal Police, who was wanted for questioning. Some time later Nebe was captured; so were Olbertz and Herbert. Olbertz committed suicide; Nebe was executed; Herbert was tried and condemned to death by a civilian court. But because he was still in the army a retrial by a military court was necessary. Herbert knew it was a mere formality—and formalities meant little to Gestapo Chief Müller. As he looked out his cell window, Herbert Kosney wondered how soon he wo
uld be executed.

  Not very far away another man sat wondering what the future had in store for him—Herbert’s brother, Kurt Kosney. He had been interrogated again and again by the Gestapo, but so far he had told them nothing about his Communist activities. Certainly he had not revealed anything to incriminate his younger brother. He worried about Herbert. What had happened to him? Where had he been taken? Only a few cells separated the two brothers. But neither Kurt nor Herbert knew that they were in the same prison.

  Although they were not in jail, another group of prisoners was living in Berlin. Uprooted from their families, forcibly removed from their homelands, they had but one desire—like so many others—and that was for speedy deliverance, by anybody. These were the slave laborers—the men and women from almost every country that the Nazis had overrun. There were Poles, Czechs, Norwegians, Danes, Dutch, Belgians, Luxembourgers, French, Yugoslavs and Russians.

  In all, the Nazis had forcibly imported nearly seven million people—the equivalent of almost the entire population of New York City—to work in German homes and businesses. Some countries were bled almost white: 500,000 people were shipped out of diminutive Holland (population 10,956,000) and 6,000 from tiny Luxembourg (population 296,000). More than 100,000 foreign workers—mostly French and Russian—worked in Berlin alone.

  The foreign laborers were engaged in every conceivable type of work. Many top Nazis acquired Russian girls as domestic servants. Architects engaged in war work staffed their offices with young foreign draftsmen. Heavy industry filled its quotas of electricians, steelworkers, diemakers, mechanics and unskilled laborers with these captive peoples. Gas, water and transportation utility companies “employed” extra thousands—with virtually no pay. Even German military headquarters on Bendlerstrasse had its allotment of foreign workers. One Frenchman, Raymond Legathière, was employed there full time replacing window panes as fast as the bomb blasts blew them out.