Hitler's Girls: Doves Amongst Eagles

by Heath, Tim

  The Dann family had to leave everything behind but they had made their escape, ditched the lorry, and continued their journey to safety on foot. A short while later, the family surrendered to the first American forces that they encountered to the west. The Americans treated them well, and no doubt, after being interrogated, gained much-needed intelligence on the situation in Berlin from the family.

  At 5.30am on 25 April, central Berlin came under extremely heavy bombardment from Russian heavy artillery, and for the first time, the Reich Chancellery received direct hits from Russian 175mm shells.

  Hitler, languishing deep below ground in the bunker beneath the Reich Chancellery, was still trying to convince himself that the German 12th Army under General Wenck could soon arrive and relieve Berlin. However, the awful truth was that the 12th Army no longer existed, at least not in its original form. Although Wenck and the considerably weakened forces under his command made some determined advances, the general just did not have the resources and numbers required to come to the rescue.

  In other rooms of the bunker, Hitler’s staff, including Martin Bormann, bickered amongst themselves, accusing each other of treachery and poor conduct, while SS soldiers sat in the passages, resigned to their fate. SS officer Gerhard Boldt recalls how two women orderlies in the bunker shouted at the SS soldiers:

  These two female orderlies shouted at the SS soldiers, ‘There are boys and girls of the Hitler Youth up there fighting and dying, while you lot hide down here, maybe you should have our aprons and do our job while we go up there and help fight the Russians.’

  As the fighting raged, German soldiers, Volkssturm recruits and Hitler Youth boys and girls fought in the city, which had by now become the ultimate environment in which to wage their guerrilla war. The remains of the 11th SS Panzer Division had positioned their latest, deadly Panzer VI Ausf.B Königstiger ‘King’ Tiger tanks in the vicinity of the government buildings in central Berlin. The inner city was now little more than a ten-square-mile zone where nothing remained but broken buildings and piles of rubble. In almost every street, flames from ruptured gas pipes poured out from broken roads and pedestrian walkways, as did water contaminated by raw sewerage.

  Dora Brunninghausen:

  The scene near to the central area of Berlin, particularly in the vicinity of the Dorotheenstrasse, was unbelievable. Open sewers strewn with dead bodies that had been blown into pieces by the shells, and had started to rot in the April sun. Flames poured out from buildings and the holes in the ground, and I could see bodies of dead people crawling with maggots, partially covered by fallen masonry and the stench was overpowering. Many buildings were burning furiously and it was like Dante’s Inferno, the heat generated by these fires, coupled with the increasingly warm April sunshine, made it so it was the nearest that one could come to hell on earth.

  We could not find any food and the soldiers who were with us taught us how to skin and gut dead cats and dogs so as we could eat the meat to survive. It utterly revolted me to have to resort to such actions, and I have to admit that after eating the meat I vomited and cried.

  The sewer system was a terrible place to have to hide and fight from, but it offered a greater degree of safety. We moved through the sewers that were crawling with vermin and insects and came up through manhole covers in the streets, where we fired our Panzerfausts at Russian T-34 tanks before fleeing back to safety. On one occasion, the Russians sent dogs down the tunnel after us, the dogs were quickly shot by one of the Volkssturm men with us. The Russians threw down grenades into the tunnel, but by the time they had exploded, we were long gone, though the explosion seemed to rattle all the way through the tunnel system.

  We often came out at night as it was not healthy to stay down in the tunnels continuously, but we never strayed far from the safety of those tunnels. They were hellholes, but we were desperate to remain free and safe from the Russians, and it is strange what you can be prepared to suffer to remain free and safe under such circumstances. Anything was better than being captured by Russians.

  Sophia Koertge, who had joined other Hitler Youths, soldiers and Volkssturm fighters, remembers killing a Russian soldier with a Luger pistol:

  We fought together often in groups of twenty to thirty individuals, and there were kids who did not have any weapons, and they picked up bricks and things and threw them at the enemy, not that that was a very good idea. I am not proud that I had killed somebody, and it is with some reluctance that I am telling you now.

  It happened on 26 April, sometime around noon, when our group had become scattered by quite heavy fire from Russian small arms up a narrow walkway in the area close to the Wilhelmstrasse area of the city. It didn’t look how I remembered it from the days when we had paraded here, much of it was now destroyed and on fire. Firefights with the Red Army were breaking out almost continually. We instantly scattered and ran into buildings to try and find cover to fire from; some of us ran upstairs while others hid downstairs. I ran and sat down in a corner by a window and could hear excited Russian voices coming down the walkway outside, they were firing their weapons continually. I could also hear a whooshing and crackling noise, but did not know what this was until I could hear the sounds of something burning outside in the walkway, it was the noise made by a flame-throwing gun. It happened so quickly, this Russian soldier leaned in through the blown out window that had no glass or frame, I raised the pistol towards this man’s head and recall the expression on his face just before I pulled the trigger. I saw his head and shoulders thrown back as I fired and the blood spatter the walls near to the broken window.

  I immediately got up and ran like hell out of the back, as I ran I stumbled over and cut my knee open badly on some glass that was on the floor, at the same time I dropped the pistol, but did not go back to retrieve it. I felt no pain, only panic, as I got up and continued to run. My lungs felt like they were going to burst I ran so hard. More shots were being fired and many came very close to my head, and made a zup, zup, zup kind of sound as they hit the ground near to me. Some Hitler Youths across the street were shouting frantically across to me. I could see that they had Panzerfausts and I ran over to them. We greeted one another like old friends and one of the boys told me that his name was Willi Meyer and one of the others then quipped, ‘Meyer, isn’t that a Jewish name?’

  Willi turned to them smiling and said, ‘I assure you, my friends, that I am a perfect fucking German, now shut up.’

  One of the others, who introduced himself just as Kurt, commented that I had blood on my face, and he asked me if it was my own or that of the enemy. I told him that I thought it was from the enemy as I had just killed one of them in a house.

  He then said, ‘Here, let us wash away that filthy stuff.’

  Kurt then pulled out a piece of white silk from his jacket pocket spat into it and then preceded to wipe the blood off my face with it. The nausea and shock had by now welled up inside me and I sank down to my knees and was sick several times before we were forced to get up and run again for our lives. We were being slowly pushed further and further back into central Berlin and we knew that soon there would be nowhere to hide.

  One of the boys said, ‘These bastard Bolsheviks will kill us for sure, where do we go to escape these devils?’

  Theresa Moelle and her comrades of the flak battery had also engaged a strong Russian force in the northern sector of the city.

  We used our gun, a flak Type-38 anti-aircraft weapon with four barrels against the approaching Russian infantry. It was an amazing and awe-inspiring sight to see such a weapon being fired at zero elevation towards soldiers on the ground. The tracer bullets streaked out like rain and we could clearly see the bright yellow flashes of the exploding 20mm rounds hundreds of metres ahead. I had to load the right-hand ammunition magazines onto the gun, and as they ran out, I slotted a fresh one in its place.

  One of our other girls, an 18-year-old named Anneliese, had the job of filling the empty magazines up with fresh 20mm ammunition. Annel
iese had only been with us for three weeks, and was one of many girls drafted into the fighting under Hitler’s emergency plans. We fired at the Russians until we had used up all of our ammunition, in fact by the time we could fire no more, the empty shell cases were piled up high on the ground. After we had run out of ammunition, we had to reluctantly abandon our gun, but before we left it we made sure it was totally useless, so as the Russians could not use it. We had only managed to hold the Russians off for what seemed a short while. We then picked up our Panzerfausts and rifles from their collection point.

  A while later, a Russian T-34 tank came over a piled-up embankment of rubble some 180 metres to our front, the noise it made as it came towards us was terrifying. Some soldiers to our right flank fired at it with an MG42 [ Maschinengewehr Modell 42 machine gun], and I remember seeing the bullets hitting the tank, including tracers that bounced off into the air. A second later and the tank fired its cannon at the machine gunners and scored a direct hit. We dived to the ground and began to panic a little as rubble, dirt and steel splinters came raining down on our backs.

  Anneliese was shaking and began to babble, ‘Someone is going to have to stop it or it will kill us all.’

  I am sure she was on the brink of becoming hysterical; as the tank was coming closer we could feel its vibrations through the ground, and the grinding and creaking noises as it moved along on its metal tracks. None of the men would do anything, they just seemed to freeze.

  I then said, ‘Anneliese, give me the Panzerfaust,’ whereupon she just stared at me wide-eyed with tears running down her face and began to tremble even more.

  I was forced to shout at her and I said, ‘Anneliese, we cannot afford to lie here and do nothing, now give me that thing before we all get bloody killed!’

  She quickly grabbed the Panzerfaust and chucked it at me. I picked it up and the instructions on how to use the thing began to go through my mind, and I whispered them to myself. My hands trembled as I removed the safety device from the trigger unit and the sight flipped up, it was now ready to fire. I crawled around to the left and had to crawl over the quivering Anneliese and several soldiers and Volkssturm men. As I crawled over the men I muttered ‘Bastards!’

  There was a brief rattle of machine-gun fire but I do not recall where it came from, maybe from the tank, I am not sure. I got up, sprinted a few feet and knelt down before this huge metal monster, which was coming directly towards me. It was less than one hundred metres now and well within range, I framed it in the sight as best as I could and fired. Surprisingly, there was little to no recoil from the Panzerfaust, and in slow motion I watched the little rocket projectile streak towards the tank and impact it between the turret part and the body with a loud clank. There was a flash followed by a puff of smoke and small explosion and the tank veered to the left and looked as if it were out of control. It ran into the side of the remains of a building and stopped in a shower of bricks and rubble, and for a few seconds there was nothing. Suddenly the lid of the tank blew off into the air followed by a rush of bright red and yellow flame and sparks, it looked and sounded like a roman candle firework going off. I felt a momentary sense of total elation, as it was the first tank that I had ever killed. I stood up and then jumped up and down and shouted with my arms raised in the air. There were popping noises, and by this time the others had got up and started running away.

  The next thing, there are these Russian voices coming from out of the smoke and haze, and one of our soldiers fires a couple of shots at them and hits one of them. Anneliese has recovered her composure enough to throw a stick grenade before we all run like hell as the Russians start firing in all directions. In the ensuing confusion we separate, we become like rabbits caught in headlights not knowing where to run. Rubble and fires obscure our escape, I hear a girl screaming, I recognize the screams, its Anneliese, I run a little way back to see what is happening to her, through the haze of smoke I see that the Russians have got her. What happens next is horrific, they are all over her like ants, pinning her to the ground, ripping at her clothing, hitting her face, they remove everything and then one of the brutes squeezes himself between her legs and starts raping her.

  I run at them screaming, ‘Leave her alone you bastards, get off her!’

  I collide with the two of them who are holding her down and manage to kick one of them in the face hard and he falls back holding his nose that is streaming with blood and possibly broken, as I recall the crunching noise as I kicked him. I struggle with the other one, and I instinctively try to grab hold of his hair but he has no hair to grab hold of. My only recollection after that is of being hit very hard from behind. I knew some time afterwards that I had been hit with a rifle butt.

  I came around some time later and found that I had been bound and gagged. I had been caught and just wondered what was going to happen to me next. As I came to, everything was a blur and I found that I was surrounded by objects on the floor. I focused hard to try and make out what they were, and as my vision slowly began to clear, I could see that they were the severed heads of German soldiers neatly arranged in a circle. Five Russian-speaking figures stood a few yards away urinating over a poster of the Führer. My head hurt so bad that I shut my eyes and probably lapsed into unconsciousness again through shock and my head injury.

  I remember thinking that everything our leaders had said about these Bolshevik scums was true, so very true. Escape crossed my mind, but I was in too much pain to rationalize at that point. I wondered what they had done with Anneliese, and learned a while later that after I had been hit and knocked unconscious, they had finished raping her and afterwards they had shot her. One of the bastards took great pleasure in telling me what a good fuck the ‘bitch’ had been, and maybe I would be next.

  By 27 April, the mixture of German soldiers and civilians trying to defend Berlin from the Russian onslaught had been pushed back into a corridor area running from east to west, ten miles long by three miles wide. With every passing hour, the area was being systematically reduced by heavy fire. German soldiers and civilians within this zone nicknamed it ‘The Meat Grinder’.

  It was also at this stage that Hitler issued his vilest order. Hitler was concerned that the Russians were able to suddenly appear behind the German defensive pockets around Berlin by means of the underground tunnels and tube networks around the city. To counter this danger, Hitler insisted that a special group of soldiers be organized and assigned with the task of flooding these tunnel and tube networks by opening the locks of the River Spree. The fact that thousands of wounded German soldiers were seeking refuge in these underground structures with civilians, including young children and elderly people who were also sick or wounded, mattered not to Hitler. This order even sickened hardened SS soldiers such as SS Leutnant Gerhard Boldt, who described this order as completely insane. As the order was executed and the locks of the Spree opened, an unknown number of people died a horrible death by drowning in the darkened caverns below the city. There was absolutely no means of escaping the torrent. A German soldier reported that the entrance to one of the many tunnels was awash with the bloated corpses of dead children, babies and adults. This was one of the most tragic episodes of the battle for Berlin, clearly illustrating the depths of madness that Hitler himself had stooped to. Hitler had earlier retorted that, ‘Any Berliner worth his or her salt would be dead anyway by now, and that only the dregs and the useless of German society were still living, and they were the unfit of German society.’

  On 27 April, ten-year-old Elsa Lantz lost both of her parents. It was an event that still haunts her to this day. She remembers that terrible day:

  I was with my mother and father and we were hiding in the cellar room of one of the many partly destroyed buildings in the city, when a shell came in and hit one of the upper floors. There was a tremendous explosion and pieces of concrete, plaster and brickwork came crashing down. We were forced to flee the safety of the cellar and we ran outside into the street. Outside there was thick black
smoke billowing out, which filled the street and there was the sound of automatic gunfire. In the confusion, I became separated from my mother and father.

  A short distance away, the Russians were going from house to house firing their guns into each building and killing the people hiding inside. I could hear the screams of children also. I began to panic and began to shout for my mother and father, ‘Mutter! Vati!’ but I could not see them or hear them anywhere. I ran down the street and kept stumbling over lumps of debris. I came across the body of an old man lying out in the middle of the road. As I approached the body I could see that the old man was still moving. When I got to him and looked down, blood and red foam were oozing from his wide-open mouth as he gasped for air. There was a wide gash in his throat that went from one ear to the other, and he was surrounded by a pool of his own blood. It appeared that the Russians had slit his throat, and the reason was probably because he was wearing a Volkssturm reservist’s armband on his long black coat.

  A nearby building was on fire, and flames were billowing out from the windows and I could feel the heat on my face. As more shells came in, I found a small gap in one of the walls of one of the buildings and I crawled through into the space to try to seek safety from the shrapnel. Inside, a man and his family, a wife and three small kids, were all huddled together in a corner. As I crawled in the man jumped to his feet and started to shout at me, ‘You cannot come in here, now get out, get out!’

  He pushed me out and I fell backwards onto my backside and began to sob, and I again shouted, ‘Mutter! Vati!’ My legs were covered in gashes and I picked pieces of glass out from one of the wounds. I had also lost two fingernails from my right hand and these wounds were very sore. As I got to my feet, a group of figures appeared at the end of the street, and after only a few seconds I knew they were Russians. The Russian soldiers had four large dogs with them, and it was the dogs that spotted me first and began barking and snarling and straining at their leashes to get at me. The soldiers began to run down towards me, and in fear I shut my eyes tightly then raised my hands into the air and called out, ‘Aufgeben! Aufgeben! [I give up].