by Mark Felton
Finally, there were 600 men from the Begleit-Bataillon Reichsführer-SS. This special unit had been formed in May 1941 as Himmler’s personal escort and most had remained in Berlin after Himmler left the capital. They were part of the larger 16th SS Panzergrenadier Division Reichsführer-SS then currently fighting in Austria.
Further troops within the Citadel sector included the remains of the 33rd Waffen Grenadier Division der SS Charlemagne, consisting of approximately sixty French SS under the command of SS-Brigadeführer Gustav Krukenberg, who would fall back on the sector and take command of the remnants of the 11th SS Volunteer Panzer Grenadier Division Nordland on 27 April.15 There were also stragglers and small units from various Wehrmacht, SS, Volkssturm (Home Guard), Hitler Youth and Kriegsmarine units that were also pushed or fell back into Defence Sector Z.
By 22 April the Germans defending Berlin were outnumbered virtually 10-1. German units had been severely degraded and worn down by almost continuous fighting since the start of the Soviet spring offensive. Some 100,000 Volkssturm, mostly consisting of older men above military age, plus some Hitler Youth and foreign SS volunteers, were backing up the regular troops in the hopeless defence. With virtually no tanks, limited artillery and no viable Luftwaffe over the capital, the defence of Berlin would not last for long.
Hitler grasped at anything that he thought might turn the tide. When he observed the vulnerability of one of the Soviet flanks he gave orders for SS-Obergruppenführer Felix Steiner’s Army Detachment to counterattack, refusing to accept that Steiner’s forces were severely depleted and simply not up to the task. When Hitler discovered at the afternoon situation conference on 22 April that Steiner had failed to attack he suffered a complete mental collapse,16 and once he stopped screaming declared to his shocked audience that the war was lost.17 Later that day Hitler consulted SS-Obersturmbannführer Prof. Dr Werner Haase on the best method to kill oneself. Haase suggested that he bite down on a cyanide capsule whilst simultaneously shooting himself in the head.
Hitler’s pilot, SS-Gruppenführer Baur, spent most of his days organising last-minute flights out of the doomed city for certain VIPs aboard the handful of serviceable transport aircraft.
This movement of key personnel was codenamed Operation ‘Seraglio’. Konteadmiral Hans von Puttkammer, Hitler’s naval aide, was ordered to destroy all of Hitler’s personal papers at the Berghof. Hitler’s personal Condor, CEzIB, carried the Puttkamer party south from Berlin’s Gatow Airport to Neubiberg near Munich.18 Among the passengers was Hitler’s personal doctor, Theodor Morell, who carried an army footlocker containing all of Hitler’s medical records.19
On 21 April Grossadmiral Karl Dönitz’s personal Condor, GCzSJ, was pressed into service on a secret mission. The aircraft had just returned from a hazardous sortie to evacuate Spanish diplomats and some important German passengers from Berlin to Munich. Hitler had decided to send more non-essential staff out of Berlin to Berchtesgaden. GCzSJ touched down at Tempelhof, which was by then under fire, and met three black cars. Leading the group was NSKK-Gruppenführer Albert Bormann, brother of Hitler’s much-feared secretary Martin Bormann. Accompanying him were his family, servants and twenty-five former occupants of the Berlin Führerbunker.
The plane was soon airborne and the pilot ducked into thick cloud cover to avoid Soviet fighters and flak. Near Dresden the Condor again came under Soviet anti-aircraft fire. Shell fragments struck the cockpit, shattering some of the instrument displays. One engine was knocked out but they made it intact to Neubiberg Airfield near Munich.
Albert Speer’s Condor, TAzMR, had been destroyed in a bombing raid and on 21 April his personal pilot, Major Erich Adam, had flown Heinkel He 111 transport TQzMU to Neubiberg. As the flak-damaged Condor GCzSJ carrying Albert Bormann and party came in to land at Neubiberg’s blacked out airfield the pilot, Hauptmann Husslein, suddenly saw Major Adam’s Heinkel 111 sitting on the runway directly ahead. The Condor’s brakes were engaged so hard that all four landing gear tires blew out, but a terrible ground collision was narrowly avoided.20
Throughout the war the British and Americans never seriously targeted Hitler’s numerous military headquarters for destruction; that was, somewhat ironically, until the final days of the war. The reason was not that they did not know where these complexes were located – on the contrary, the British, Americans and the Soviets had detailed information about the Obersalzberg, the Reich Chancellery in Berlin and the Wolf’s Lair in East Prussia. The reason was that such a strike was viewed to be counter-productive to the Allied cause. The same reason was given for cancelling Operation Foxley, the British plan to use a sniper to shoot Hitler during one of his daily walks at the Obersalzberg. The reasoning was that if the Allies had bombed Hitler out of his home, they would simply have bound him further to the German people, who were suffering greatly under the Allied aerial onslaught. If Hitler was killed in an air raid the Allies feared that they would have made him a martyr. The same outcome would have been likely from shooting him using a concealed sniper. ‘Hitler and his like can only be irrevocably discredited if he is at the helm when the final collapse comes,’21 read one American report on the subject. There was also the compelling argument put forward by many Allied assessments that Hitler’s bungling attempts at grand strategy were actually aiding the Allied cause and shortening the war. If Hitler was removed, the German General Staff may have run the war considerably more competently and managed to hold off the Allies long enough for a negotiated peace when Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin were determined upon nothing short of unconditional surrender.
The Allies finally decided to attack the Obersalzberg, though the purpose of the raid remains unclear. Hitler was in Berlin – and this information was known through Ultra signals decrypts – but there was a genuine fear among the Allies that he might yet fly south to the Berghof and direct the war from there. This is indeed what many of his inner circle and generals continued to urge him to do when it became clear that the Battle of Berlin was a lost cause.
The reason for the bombing may have had a lot to do with a clever German deception plan that managed to fool the Allies into believing in something called the Alpin Festung (Alpine Redoubt). It was believed that remaining fanatical SS units would retreat into the mountains on the Bavarian/Austrian border where they could have blocked any Allied advance for months or even years, dominating the high mountain passes into the region and churning out weapons from secret underground factories. Central to the Alpine Redoubt plan was Hitler’s house and its surrounding complex. Hitler had already used the Obersalzberg as a military headquarters and the entire site was littered with bunkers, air raid shelters and formidable anti-aircraft defences. Perhaps by targeting the Obersalzberg the Allies intended to destroy Hitler’s command facility, effectively forcing the Führer into inferior or ad hoc headquarters.
Whatever the true reason, and some historians have suspected that the motive for the attack was more symbolic than tactical, the assault necessitated a huge diversion of resources. On 25 April 1945, just twelve days before the German surrender, sixteen RAF Mosquito pathfinder planes guided in 359 Lancaster bombers. By way of comparison, this is the same number of planes that the RAF had used ten days previously to devastate the large German city of Kiel. They were now targeting what was effectively a small alpine village in a high mountain valley.
As the British aircraft approached the Obersalzberg the remaining anti-aircraft batteries opened fire. Two Lancasters were shot down, with four crewmen perishing and the rest taken prisoner. But hundreds of tons of bombs rained down over the Obersalzberg area, causing extensive damage to the site. German casualties were kept to a minimum because of the large number of air raid shelters and bunkers. Göring and Bormann’s villas were both hit and wrecked, as well as the SS Barracks, the Platterhof Hotel and the Ga¨sthaus zum Türken (RSD headquarters). Huge impact craters turned the Obersalzberg into a moonscape, with blasted and burned trees and smashed wooden buildings.
Hitler’s
house took two British bomb hits. One bomb made a direct hit on the central part of the north side of the west wing, collapsing the roof. Another bomb landed on the east side of the building, causing some blast damage.22 If Hitler had been in residence he would have taken shelter beneath his house in his personal bunker and survived the bombing, so the attack would not have succeeded in its aims. Only six Germans perished in the air raid, all of them civilians.
By the last week of April 1945, Hitler’s world had shrunk to a few grey concrete rooms deep beneath the Reich Chancellery Garden in Berlin. Up above, Soviet artillery shells and rockets blasted the once immaculate Chancellery buildings into ruins. Huge sections of roof and walls had collapsed, while the remaining structures were shell- and shrapnel-scarred, fire-scorched, or windowless. The Reich Chancellery Garden, its trees blasted and stripped of their foliage and the lawn churned up by shell craters, was only passable between bombardments and Hitler’s RSD and SS-Begleitkommando guards were largely withdrawn from exposed sentry posts on the Chancellery roof and outside the bunker entrances. Each time another Soviet barrage went up the guards fled inside the bunker entrances, slamming the thick steel doors closed behind them. Hitler forbade smoking in the Führerbunker, so smokers had to go up to the Vorbunker to enjoy a cigarette. With their nerves on edge, many of the bunker inhabitants were smoking and drinking heavily. Some hardier souls would emerge into the shattered gardens to smoke or catch a few minutes of fresh air before Soviet shelling forced them once more into the dank subterranean bunkers, while Hitler’s dog Blondi was still walked in the garden by his handler.
Senior officers and their staff continued to brave the maelstrom outside to get to the bunker for Hitler’s increasingly stressful and pointless military conferences. Hitler was becoming more and more unreasonable, refusing to believe that the units he ordered around on his maps were in reality only shadows of their former selves, completely worn out by constant combat and lack of replacements and equipment. He would not listen to reason and still appeared to believe that he could somehow save the situation.
Hitler had by now decided to stay in Berlin and die in the Führer-bunker, so the Führer’s personal squadron and its aircraft had essentially become surplus to requirements. The huge Junkers Ju 290 that was to have replaced the Condor as Hitler’s personal transport was never used by the Führer. On 24 March 1945 Hans Baur had flown the Ju 290 to Munich-Riem Airport. It was parked inside a large hanger while Baur visited his home nearby. He was informed that American bombers had destroyed the hanger and the plane, killing several of his men. Baur was flown back to Berlin in a smaller aircraft – an extremely dangerous flight as Soviet fighters had gained air superiority over the capital.
More F.d.F aircraft were destroyed during the final weeks of the war. Baur had stashed some aircraft and crews at the airfield at Schoenwalde outside Berlin. In late March Baur visited the base during a large scale American air raid on the capital. Two P-51 Mustang fighters, escorting the attacking B-17s, broke off and engaged ground targets at Schoenwalde. As the silver Mustangs screamed down onto the airfield for a strafing run Baur and his crews took cover in a bunker while Luftwaffe anti-aircraft guns opened up. American cannon shells set fire to a Condor and a Junkers 52, both aircraft blowing up in massive fireballs. Berlin was now virtually untenable, so Baur transferred the remaining F.d.F aircraft and spare engines to Pöcking in Bavaria and to Bad Reichenhall Airfield, also in southern Germany.
At this time, Baur turned over operational control of the F.d.F to a highly decorated Luftwaffe officer, 28-year-old Oberstleutnant Werner Baumbach. A holder of the Knight’s Cross with Oakleaves and Swords, Baumbach had previously commanded the Luftwaffe’s special operations squadron, the top secret Kampfgeschwader 200. Baur, it seems, had decided to stay with his Führer inside the bunker.
As Hitler continued to try and salvage the battle raging in the capital, and with Soviet forces smashing their way into eastern Berlin, Grossadmiral Karl Dönitz had been ordered to take command of what was left of the Reich in northern Europe, establishing a rump state and ad hoc government at Flensburg on the Danish border. This was where the F.d.F still had a job to perform. Baumbach ordered several F.d.F aircraft north to Flensburg to assist with the new government.
Once Hitler announced that he would definitely not fly south to Bavaria, but instead remain in Berlin and commit suicide when the government quarter was about to fall, the remaining F.d.F aircraft were no longer held on standby and instead could be sent away. Condor TKzCV, flown by Hitler’s co-pilot, Oberleutnant Hans Münsterer, left Gatow with twelve passengers and delivered them to Wittstock in northern Germany, then flew back into Berlin, landing safely at Schoenwalde Airfield.
As Soviet ground forces threatened Schoenwalde, most of the remaining F.d.F. aircraft there flew out in one group. It consisted of three aircraft: a Siebel Fh 104, Junkers Ju 52/3m SFzIF and Junkers Ju 352 KTzVJ. They powered away from the burning capital, managing successfully to dodge Soviet fighters. Hitler’s Condor, TKzCV, was flown to Staaken, outside Berlin. All aircraft moved again when Staaken, and also Tempelhof Airport, came under Soviet ground attack. The planes were now placed at the disposal of the OKW.
Hitler’s support aircraft, Condor CEzIC, piloted by Hauptmann Joachim Hübner, was shot down by Soviet flak as it attempted to bring a party of Kriegsmarine sailors into Gatow who had been sent by Dönitz to try and bolster Berlin’s defences. The Condor crash-landed in a forest killing eight of those aboard. But by now most people were trying to get out of Berlin rather than enter the maelstrom of a lost battle.
Like rats on a sinking ship, so the people around the Führer had a choice – go down with Hitler or escape. Many were starting to look to escaping, but in spite of the chaos and the ultimate futility of resistance, Hitler’s bodyguard units continued with a dogged defence of the increasingly threatened government quarter. In doing so, they bought precious time for the final act to be played out.
Chapter 11
The Eagles Have Flown
‘Adolf Hitler looked composed. Even I, who’d known him for 13 years, could not tell that he’d already decided to end his life. Dressed in his usual field-grey tunic with black trousers, he held a map of Berlin in his right hand. His left trembled. It was April 29, 1945 and Soviet troops were closing in on the city centre and the Führer-bunker.’
SS-Obersturmbannführer Erich Kempka
Hitler, standing in the elegant Old Reich Chancellery on 30 January 1933, the day he was appointed Chancellor, had declared to his guests: ‘No power on earth will get me out of here alive!’1 Twelve years later and Hitler and his intimates could hear the dull thump of heavy artillery shells impacting on the garden above them from their position deep inside the Führerbunker below the Reich Chancellery garden. It was a sobering reminder of how close the Soviets were getting. The occasional whiff of cordite or the dust from pummelled masonry drifted into the bunker from any open door or air vent. Hitler’s 1933 declaration now appeared on the verge of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.
By 27 April 1945 Berlin was completely surrounded. The bunker had lost secure radio communications with the main German units fighting desperately in the ruins and had to rely on the telephone network for news. To all intents and purposes the last Führer Headquarters was blind and incapable of really commanding anything. Soviet troops were on the Alexanderplatz and would soon reach the Potsdamer Platz, where the bunker was located. Efforts were still being made to affect a linkup between the remnants of the 9th Army defending the city and General Wenck’s 12th Army that was attempting to fight its way into Potsdam. As this last desperate attempt was being made SS-Brigadeführer Mohnke reported that enemy tanks had penetrated the nearby Wilhelmsplatz – they had been repulsed this time, but time was running out.2
The following day news of Heinrich Himmler’s entreaties to the Western Allies reached the bunker.3 Hitler was incensed and ordered Himmler’s arrest for treason. He demanded to see SS-Gruppenführer Hermann Fe
gelein, Himmler’s representative in the bunker, but he was nowhere to be found. An RSD snatch squad was dispatched that discovered Fegelein in his apartment with his mistress, drunk and with a suitcase of civilian clothes packed. He was escorted back to the bunker, summarily sentenced to death by a court martial and shot in the Reich Chancellery garden. By now, the Red Army was at the Potsdammer Platz and was evidently preparing to storm the Reich Chancellery.
Topside, the remaining men of Kampfgruppe Mohnke fought the Soviets around the Chancellery site from prepared positions and a multitude of other bunkers and cellars, as well as utilizing the remaining portions of the underground railway system that were still in German hands. The French SS of the Charlemagne Division in particular distinguished themselves as tank destroyers, knocking out dozens of Soviet T-34s with handheld Panzerfaust rocket launchers. Ironically, it was two Frenchmen who were the last soldiers to be decorated with Nazi Germany’s highest bravery award, the Knight’s Cross. Ammunition supplies were dwindling rapidly alongside the mounting casualties. The main Reich Chancellery bunker had been transformed into an emergency casualty clearing station and refuge.
In late April 1945 Hitler’s oldest ally Benito Mussolini had been captured and executed by Italian partisans in the foothills of the Alps. Mussolini had been trying to reach Germany with his mistress Clara Petacci and several of his ministers from the Italian Social Republic, the rump-state created for him after the German occupation of northern Italy following Italy’s capitulation in 1943. Disguised as a German soldier, Mussolini was easily recognised. Along with his mistress and several fascist followers, the Duce was shot. Then, in a final indignity, the partisans took the bodies to Milan where they were hung upside down on meat hooks from an Esso petrol station fore-court where a huge crowd spat at them and shot and beat the corpses. Hitler had no intention of suffering such a degrading end and he instructed his servants to make sure that after his death his body was destroyed to avoid its capture and public display by the Soviets.