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

by Cornelius Ryan

  Hitler rose at 11 A.M. and from noon on he received the tributes of his inner clique—among them Joseph Goebbels, Martin Bormann, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Albert Speer, and his military leaders Karl Doenitz, Wilhelm Keitel, Alfred Jodl, Hans Krebs and Heinrich Himmler. After them came Berlin area Gauleiters, staff members and secretaries. Then, as the guns rumbled in the distance, Hitler, followed by his entourage, emerged from the bunker. There in the bombed wilderness of the Reichskanzlei gardens he inspected men from two units—the SS “Frundsberg” Division, a recently arrived unit from the Courland Army,* and a proud little group from Axmann’s Hitler Youth. “Everyone,” Axmann said long afterward, “was shocked at the Führer’s appearance. He walked with a stoop. His hands trembled. But it was surprising how much will power and determination still radiated from this man.” Hitler shook hands with the boys and decorated some whom Axmann introduced as having “recently distinguished themselves at the front.”

  Then Hitler walked down the line of SS men. He shook hands with each one, and confidently predicted that the enemy would be defeated before the approaches to Berlin. Looking on was Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS. Since April 6 he had been meeting secretly from time to time with Count Folke Bernadotte, head of the Swedish Red Cross. In a vague way, Himmler had sounded out Bernadotte about the possibility of negotiating peace terms with the Allies, but now he stepped forward and reaffirmed his loyalty and that of the SS to Hitler. In a few hours he was scheduled to meet once more with Bernadotte.

  Immediately after the inspection ceremonies, Hitler’s military conference began. By this time Goering had arrived. General Krebs conducted the briefing, although everyone was familiar with the situation. Berlin would be encircled within a matter of days, if not hours. Even before that happened, Busse’s Ninth Army would be surrounded and trapped, unless orders for its withdrawal were given. To Hitler’s military advisors one point was clear: the Führer and vital government ministries and departments still in Berlin must leave the capital for the south. Keitel and Jodl particularly urged the move, but Hitler refused to acknowledge that things were that serious. According to Colonel Nicolaus von Below, the Führer’s Luftwaffe adjutant, “Hitler stated that the battle for Berlin presented the only chance to prevent total defeat.” He did make one concession: in the event that the Americans and Russians linked up on the Elbe, the Reich would be commanded in the north by Admiral Doenitz and in the south possibly by Field Marshal Albert Kesselring. Meanwhile, various government agencies were given authorization to leave immediately.

  Hitler did not reveal his own plans. But at least three people in the bunker were convinced he would never leave Berlin. Fräulein Johanna Wolf, one of Hitler’s secretaries, had heard him remark only a few days earlier that “he would take his own life, if he felt the situation was beyond saving.” Von Below, too, believed that “Hitler had made up his mind to stay in Berlin and die there.” Jodl, when he returned home, told his wife that Hitler, in a private talk, had said, “Jodl, I shall fight as long as the faithful fight next to me and then I shall shoot myself.”*

  Most of the government had already left Berlin, but the remaining Reich administrative agencies almost seemed to have been preparing for this moment for days, like runners awaiting a starter’s pistol. The real exodus now began; it was to continue until the city was finally surrounded. The Luftwaffe’s Chief of Staff, General Karl Koller, noted in his diary that Goering had departed. “Naturally,” Koller wrote, “he leaves me here to let all Hitler’s anger pass over me.” Bureaucrats big and small made their get-away. Philippe Hambert, a young French forced laborer who worked as a draftsman in the offices of Dr. Karl Dustmann, one of the Todt Labor Organization architects, was dumbfounded when his boss suddenly gave him a present of a thousand marks (about $250) and then left town. Margarete Schwarz, in the garden of her apartment house in Charlottenburg, glanced down the street and saw a large chauffeur-driven blue car pull up outside a nearby house. Her neighbor, Otto Solimann, joined her, and together they watched as “an orderly in a neat white jacket along with a naval officer with lots of gold on his uniform” left the house. Quickly the car was packed with baggage. Then the men jumped in “and drove off at top speed.” Solimann said to Margarete: “The rats are leaving the sinking ship. That was Admiral Raeder.”

  In all, the Berlin Commandant’s office issued over two thousand permits to leave the capital. “There was something almost comic about the reasons with which state and party functionaries backed up their requests to leave the city,” the Chief of Staff, Colonel Hans Refior, later recalled. “Even though Goebbels had ordered that ‘No man capable of carrying arms is to leave Berlin,’ we put no difficulties in the way of these ‘home fighters’ who wanted passes. Why should we hold up these contemptible characters? They all believed that flight would save their precious lives. The majority of the population remained behind. Flight for them was beyond their means anyway because of the transport shortage.”

  In the dental offices at 213 Kurfürstendamm, blond Käthe Heusermann got a phone call from her employer. The Nazis’ top dentist, Professor Hugo J. Blaschke, was leaving immediately. A few days earlier, Blaschke had instructed Käthe to pack all dental records, X-rays, molds and other equipment in boxes so they could be collected and sent south. Blaschke said that he expected “the Chancellery group to leave any day and we are going with them.” Käthe had told him she was staying in Berlin. Blaschke was furious. “Do you realize what it’s going to be like when the Russians get here?” he asked. “First you’ll be raped. Then you’ll be strung up. Have you any idea what the Russians are like?” But Käthe just “could not believe it was going to be that bad.” Later she was to recall, “I didn’t understand the seriousness of the situation. Maybe it was foolishness, but I was so busy that I didn’t realize how desperate everything had become.” Now Blaschke was insistent. “Pack up and get out,” he urged. “The Chancellery group and their families are leaving.” But Käthe was adamant. She intended to stay in the city. “Well,” Blaschke said, “remember what I told you.” Then he hung up.

  Suddenly Käthe remembered something Blaschke had asked her to do some days before. If he left the city and she remained, she was to warn a certain friend of his—using a code sentence because, said Blaschke, “the phones might be tapped”—that the top Nazis were fleeing. If the entire entourage had gone she was to say, “The bridge was removed last night.” If only some had departed the sentence was to be, “Only a tooth was extracted last night.” She had no idea who Blaschke’s friend was except that “his name was Professor Gallwitz or Grawitz and I think he mentioned that he was a senior dentist for the SS.” Blaschke had given her only a telephone number. Now, under the impression that the entire “Chancellery group” had left, she called the number. When a man spoke, Käthe said, “The bridge was removed last night.”

  A few hours later that evening, Professor Ernst Grawitz, head of the German Red Cross and friend of Heinrich Himmler, sat down to dinner with his family. When everyone was seated Grawitz reached down, pulled the pins on two hand grenades, and blew himself and his family to oblivion.*

  The great exodus would always be remembered by the Berliners as “the flight of the Golden Pheasants.” But most people that day were more aware of advancing Russians than of fleeing Nazis. Helena Boese, wife of film director Karl Boese, recalled that the only concern now “was to somehow stay alive.” Soviet troops were already at Müncheberg and Strausberg, about fifteen miles to the east; and now the news was filtering through the city that another Russian drive was heading toward the capital from the south, toward Zossen. Georg Schröter, a screenwriter living in Tempelhof, learned of this Russian advance firsthand. Worried about a girl friend of his, a cabaret artist named Trude Berliner who lived in one of the outlying districts south of Berlin, Schröter phoned her home. She answered and then said, “Wait a minute.” There was a pause. “I have someone here who would like to speak to you,” she said. Schröter found himself conversing w
ith a Soviet colonel who spoke perfect German. “You can count on us,” he told the astonished Schröter, “to be there in two or three days.”

  Everywhere—north, south and east—the fronts were shrinking. And now almost all the machinery of the shattered, ruined metropolis was either slowing down or coming to a halt. Factories were closing; streetcars had ceased to run; the subway had stopped except for the transport of essential workers. Ilse König, a laboratory technician in the city health department, remembers the Roter Ausweis (red pass) she received in order to continue riding to her job. Garbage was no longer being collected; mail could not be delivered. Gertrud Evers, working in the main post office on Oranienburgerstrasse, remembered the “terrific stench of spoiled, undelivered food packages that hung over the building.” Because most of the police were now either in fighting units or the Volkssturm, the streets were no longer patrolled.

  For many people on this twentieth of April the seriousness of the situation was really brought home by a single occurrence: the zoo closed its gates. Electricity there stopped at exactly 10:50 A.M., making it impossible to pump in water. The current would come on again four days later, but for only nineteen minutes. Thereafter it would remain off until the battle was over. But from this day onward the keepers knew that many of the animals must surely die—particularly the hippos in the pools and the inhabitants of the aquarium that had been saved earlier. Heinrich Schwarz, the bird keeper, already worried about the condition of the rare Abu Markub stork, which was slowly but surely starving to death in the Schwarz bedroom, now wondered how the bird could possibly survive without water. He would carry pails of water until he collapsed, the 63-year-old Schwarz decided—and not only for Abu, but for Rosa, the big hippo, and her two-year-old baby, Knautschke.

  Zoo director Lutz Heck was in a quandary. He knew that eventually the dangerous animals must be destroyed, in particular the zoo’s prize baboon, but he kept putting off the moment. Distraught and in need of a moment’s peace, Heck did something he had never before done in his life: he went fishing in the Landwehr Canal along with one of the keepers. There, while “thinking things out,” the men caught two pike.

  That day Fritz Kraft, the municipal subway director, met with Berlin’s Mayor, Julius Lippert. The Mayor gave Kraft and the assembled subway managers some realistic instructions. “If the Western Allies get here first,” Lippert told the group, “hand over the subway installations intact. If the Russians get here before them …” He paused, shrugged, and said, “Destroy as much as possible.” Small automatic telephone exchanges got similar instructions. Mechanics at the Buckow exchange were told to destroy the installations rather than let the Russians capture them. But maintenance man Herbert Magder suddenly realized that nobody had been given any instructions about how to do it. To the best of Magder’s knowledge not a single exchange was destroyed. Nearly all of them continued to work throughout the battle.

  Factories also were ordered leveled, in keeping with Hitler’s scorched-earth policy. Professor Georg Henneberg, head of the Schering chemical department in Charlottenburg, remembers the plant director calling in all the chemists and reading an order he had just received. As the enemy got closer, the edict said, water, gas, electrical and boiler installations were to be destroyed. Henneberg’s boss finished reading the order, paused a moment, then said, “Now, gentlemen, you know what you are not supposed to do.” He bid them all good-bye and closed down the plant, intact. As Henneberg remembers, “We all bid farewell to one another until life after death.”

  For years, Berliners would remember that April 20 for still another reason. Whether in celebration of the Führer’s birthday or in anticipation of the climax to come no one knew, but that day the government gave the hungry populace extra allocations of food called “crisis rations.” As Jurgen-Erich Klotz, a 25-year-old one-armed veteran, remembered the extra food allocation, it consisted of one pound of bacon or sausage, one half pound of rice or oatmeal, 250 dried lentils, peas or beans, one can of vegetables, two pounds of sugar, about one ounce of coffee, a small package of a coffee substitute and some fats. Although there were almost five hours of air raids on Berlin this day, housewives braved the bombs to pick up the extra rations. They were to last eight days, and, as Anne-Lise Bayer said to her husband, “With these rations we shall now ascend into heaven.” The same thought apparently occurred to Berliners everywhere; the extra food came to be known as Himmelfahrtsrationen—Ascension Day rations.

  At Gresse, north of the Elbe, the Red Cross packages had arrived for Warrant Officer Dixie Deans’s twelve thousand POWs. Deans had made all the arrangements. He had even persuaded the Commandant, Colonel Ostmann, to let R.A.F. men go to the International Red Cross center in Lübeck and drive trucks back, to get delivery faster. Now, columns of men covered the roads all around the town where the distribution of parcels was taking place. “Two parcels to a man,” Deans had announced. “The effect on the morale of the men,” Flight Sergeant Calton Younger remembered, “was electric. The arrival of the parcels was a plain miracle and we promptly invested Deans with the qualities of a saint.”

  Deans cycled from column to column on his frail bicycle with the distorted tire, seeing that every man got his quota, and warning the half-starved POWs, who had been subsisting for the most part on raw vegetables, not to eat too much but to “save as much as you can because we don’t know what Jerry still has up his sleeve for us.” Nevertheless, most men, Deans saw, “were eating as though it was their last meal.” Flight Sergeant Geoffrey Wilson wolfed his way through the parcel: corned beef, biscuits, chocolate—and, above all, 120 cigarettes. He was “eating like mad, and smoking like mad because I intended to die full and not hungry.”

  The British planes found them as they sat there eating: nine R.A.F Typhoon fighters. They circled overhead, and then, in what Wilson was to remember as a “kind of a dreamlike, fascinating way,” they peeled off and dived. Someone said, “My God! They’re coming for us!” Men scattered wildly in all directions. Some tried to put out colored identifying cloth strips which they were carrying for just such an emergency. Others threw themselves into ditches, lay behind walls, ran for cover in barns or took shelter in the town itself. But many were too late. One after another, the Typhoons swooped in, firing rockets and dropping anti-personnel bombs among the columns. Men yelled: “We’re your mates! We’re your mates!” Eight planes made individual attacks; the ninth, perhaps realizing the mistake, pulled up. It was all over in minutes. Sixty POWs were dead. A score of others were injured, and some would die of their wounds in German hospitals.

  Deans was sick with despair as he walked along the roads and saw the carnage. He immediately ordered identification of the dead. Some bodies were riddled almost beyond recognition—“just bits and pieces that had to be shoveled into the graves,” Deans was later to recall.

  After the dead had been buried and the wounded moved into German hospitals, a cold and determined Deans cycled over to Colonel Ostmann at his temporary headquarters. There was no military courtesy this time from Deans. “Ostmann,” he said, “I want you to write me out a pass that will carry me through to the British lines. This sort of thing must never happen again.”

  Ostmann looked at Deans in amazement. “Mr. Deans,” he said, “I couldn’t do that.”

  Deans stared back at him. “We don’t know who is going to overrun our group,” he warned. “It could be the British—or it could be the Russians. We don’t give a damn who liberates us. But which do you want to surrender to?” Deans looked squarely at the German. “Somehow I don’t think you’ll have much of a future with the Russians.” He paused to let his last statement sink in. Then he said quietly, “Colonel, write out the pass.”

  Ostmann sat down at a table and on Wehrmacht paper wrote out a note which would carry Deans through enemy territory. “I don’t know how you’ll get through the front lines,” he told Deans, “but at least this will get you up to them.” Deans said: “I would like to take the guard Charlie Gumbach with
me.” Ostmann thought about that for a moment and said, “Agreed.” He wrote out a pass for Gumbach. “And I could do with a bicycle that isn’t falling apart,” said Dixie. Ostmann looked at him and then, shrugging, said that he would arrange that, too. As he left the office, Deans had one final remark. “I will be back with Charlie to bring my men out, I promise you that.” Then with a crisp salute, Deans said, “Thank you, Colonel.” The Colonel saluted too. “Thank you, Mr. Deans,” he said.

  That night, accompanied by German Corporal Charlie Gumbach, the indomitable Dixie Deans set out for the long ride to the British lines.

  By nightfall Koniev, watching the map anxiously as Zhukov’s tanks streaked toward Berlin, was urging his men on to even greater speed. “Don’t worry about your flanks, Pavel Semenovich,” he told General Rybalko, Commander of the Third Guards Tank Army. “Don’t worry about being detached from the infantry. Keep going.” Years afterward, Koniev remarked, “At that moment I knew what my tank commanders must be thinking: ‘Here you are throwing us into this manhole, forcing us to move without strength on our flanks—won’t the Germans cut our communications, hit us from the rear?’” The tall Koniev, clapping his Marshal’s epaulettes with his hands, told the tank commanders, “I will be present. You need not worry. My observation post will be traveling with you in the very middle of the drive.” Rybalko and General D. D. Lelyushenko, Commander of the Fourth Guards Tank Army, responded brilliantly. In a dash resembling that of the U.S. 2nd and 5th Armored divisions to the Elbe, the Soviet tankers sliced through the enemy—even though, as Rybalko noted, “German divisions that had not been wiped out still remained behind us.” In twenty-four hours, fighting all the way, Rybalko made a blazing run of thirty-eight miles. Lelyushenko’s tanks drove twenty-eight miles. Now Rybalko exultantly phoned Koniev. “Comrade Marshal,” he said, “we are fighting on the outskirts of Zossen.” Elements of the First Ukrainians were now only twenty-five miles from Berlin.