The Gods of Atlantis

by David Gibbons

  He pushed past crouched helmeted figures to the only officer present, a Luftwaffe Hauptmann with aviator wings on his tunic like his own, another pilot in an air force that no longer had aircraft. The man wore a battered forage cap and radio headphones that were hooked into the fire control panel. Hoffman lifted one earphone, cupped his hand and bellowed into the man’s ear. ‘Where’s the battery commander?’

  The man looked up quickly, his face grey and unshaven, then gestured repeatedly with one arm. ‘The ammunition elevator,’ he shouted. ‘Trying to restart the backup generator.’

  Hoffman released the earphone and looked over at the massive iron cupola that protected the elevator shaft. He and the battery commander had banked on having the big guns in action to divert attention while they went below and carried out their plan to surrender the tower. He would give the man ten minutes. No more.

  He climbed up to the rim of the command post and gazed around. The concrete exterior was pockmarked from Soviet shrapnel and shell fragments. The roof was about half the size of a football pitch, with circular bastions at each corner containing the twin 128mm flak guns, and beyond that an outer curtain with 37mm and quadruple 20mm guns. Some five hundred metres beyond the Zoo tower to the north-west, he could see the top of the L-Tower, another concrete monstrosity containing the giant Würtzburg radar that directed the fire of the guns against Allied bombers. Month after month they had come, week after week, relentlessly, American by day, British by night. Many times during his posting in Berlin he had seen the flak guns do their work, and watched American B-17s split in half and flutter down like giant silvery leaves, and the burning parachutes of British aircrew plummeting like flares in the night. But the last raid had been ten days ago, and that already seemed like another war. The barrels of the big guns had been lowered to provide counter-battery fire against the Soviet howitzers, and then to fire point-blank into the advancing infantry and tanks. Now they were at their lowest possible elevation, eighteen degrees below horizontal, poised to fire their last salvos before the Red Army stormed into the Zoo grounds below.

  Hoffman shut his eyes for a moment and listened. It was the first time he had been up here and not been overwhelmed by the roar of Russian artillery and the shriek of Katyusha rockets, the ever-enclosing ring of fire that seemed to course round the city like a giant electrical current. He could hear voices on the gun platforms, hoarse with cordite, raised against their own deafness. He heard the rumble of falling masonry, like the sound of calving glaciers he had seen from his aircraft in the fjords of Norway. But he could tell that the ceasefire was beginning to unravel. He heard the harsh roar of tank engines in the distance, the sound of churning tracks. Somewhere the fighting had started up again; he heard the ragged rip of a German Spandau machine gun, a hollow echoing sound in a faraway street, then the rattle of Soviet sub-machine guns and the thud of grenades. The Russians had been using captured German Panzerfaust anti-tank weapons to blast their way through rooms, house by house, street by street. Beneath the storm of artillery and rocket fire this was still an infantryman’s war, a war of sniping, grenades, man-pack flamethrowers, desperate knife fights in the darkness, the incessant sub-machine guns. No quarter was being given by either side. He could hardly imagine what was happening to the civilians still in their homes, those who had not sought refuge in the suffocating hell of the bunkers and the flak towers like this one.

  He heard the drone of an aircraft, then opened his eyes and saw a solitary Soviet Il-2 Shturmovik dive-bomber bank and begin its dive directly towards him. He shaded his eyes, and watched with professional detachment. There would be no chance of the bombs damaging the concrete tower, but they could disable the guns and kill the crews. Already bombing and Soviet artillery had put most of the 37mm and 20mm guns on the outer gallery out of action. But it was a doomed attack. The pilot had needed to begin his dive from a higher altitude, yet that would have put him above the pall of smoke, unable to see his target. As it was, he would be unable to reach a steep enough angle to aim his bomb. Exactly on cue, the remaining 20mm quadruple gun on the platform erupted in a sharp crackle. The aircraft was shredded and then disintegrated, plummeting out of sight below the edge of the tower into the Tiergarten and exploding in a fireball, the metal fragments pattering harmlessly against the concrete walls below.

  Hoffman recalled his own glory days as a Stuka dive-bomber ace during the Blitzkrieg five years before, when the whole world seemed to be falling to German force of arms. Then, he had thought little about the Nazis; he had been driven by a young man’s exuberance and the small world of camaraderie and loyalty and honour. And now here he was, commander of the newly formed 9th Luftwaffe Parachute Division Lebelstar, the last-ditch defenders of the Reich. They were all here on the roof now, his division: the thirty-odd boys of the Hitler Youth and Luftwaffe auxiliary who still survived from the flak battery. As soon as the Soviets advanced beneath the minimum trajectory of the guns, his orders were to remuster these boys as elite paratroopers, somehow find weapons for them and lead them out to final glory in the scorched and blasted streets below. And he had been given no choice. The Feldgendarmerie would execute anyone who faltered, himself included. The Nazis did not even trust their own heroes.

  A boy detached himself from the group in front of one of the big guns and came running towards him. He could be no more than twelve, and was wearing lederhosen shorts and an outsized helmet that wobbled as he ran. His face was tense, wax-like beneath a shock of blond hair, and smeared with filth and tears. Dried blood caked his neck below his ears where they had been bleeding. Hoffman had taught the boy to leave the chin strap unfastened on his helmet, to open his mouth and grimace to equalize the pressure in his Eustachian tubes, to lean forward to avoid the blast of the guns ripping his lungs, but there was nothing he could do to save the boy’s hearing. The lad had latched on to him when Hoffman had arrived for the first time on the roof two days before. Maybe he reminded him of his father, probably dead like the fathers of most German children, remembered only by a photograph of a man in a uniform like his own. ‘Herr Oberstleutnant,’ the boy piped breathlessly, coming to a halt in front of him. ‘Wann kommt der Russ? Wann kommt der Iwan?’

  It was a child’s question of a father, asking the unanswerable. Hoffman knelt down in front of him. There were no Feldgendarmen up here on the gun platform; like most Nazi thugs they were frightened of it, of the reality of war. It was the one place where nobody was listening or watching. He tapped the boy’s helmet. ‘Can you hear me?’

  ‘Was?’ The boy screwed up his face. Hoffman raised his voice.

  ‘When you know Ivan is coming, take off this helmet, right? You don’t want to look like Hitler Youth.’ He reached into his trouser pocket and took out a half-finished packet of cigarettes. ‘These are American. Save them and offer them to Ivan, right? Then find an officer. You know how to recognize Russian officers? Show him the room where I’ve been working. Tell him there are important secrets there, in the order books. You understand me?’

  The boy clutched the cigarettes, put them carefully in his pocket and looked at Hoffman, nodding. Hoffman felt a knot of anguish in his stomach. He remembered Goebbels’ children, the girl with the sad eyes. He remembered the pilot in his squadron who had made a forced landing near a Ukrainian village, and had seen the SS-Einsatzgruppen at work. He had returned to the squadron shocked. ‘Their children cry just like our children,’ he had said. Hoffman put out his hand to touch the boy’s face, then remembered watching Hitler doing the same only a few days before in front of a ragged line of Hitler Youth, the Führer’s left arm shaking uncontrollably behind his back, his right hand stroking cheeks, tweaking ears. It had been repulsive. Hoffman let his hand drop to the boy’s shoulder, and squeezed it. He nodded towards the gun. ‘You’d better get back to your post. It won’t be long now.’

  He turned to look for the battery commander. Then he heard the boy yelling: ‘Alert! Alert!’ Hoffman spun back and saw the boy at the parapet, l
ooking out. Others rushed to join him, and Hoffman followed. For the first time since coming up here, he gazed down at the ruins of the city looming out of the smoke, at the gutted shells of buildings with their upper windows open to the sky. East over the Tiergarten he saw only a shifting miasma of smoke, and he followed the boy’s gaze down to the street to the south beyond the Zoo grounds, where they knew the Russians would come. About five hundred metres away he saw the lingering smoke of an explosion, and the dust of a collapsed building. They all watched, and waited. Then the man next to the boy jostled him and put a hand on his arm. ‘Ivan’s out there, you can count on it. But don’t tempt him. Let’s get back to the guns.’

  They left the parapet, but Hoffman remained, looking down at the smouldering wasteland between the base of the tower and the beginning of the city block. In the nearest buildings lay the first line of German defenders: the odd surviving machine gun, a sniper he had seen go out camouflaged in black like a wraith. Between the buildings and the tower lay the ruins of the Berlin Zoo, pocked by shell craters filled with black and yellow scorch marks. Down there was the last line of defenders, boys and old men of the Volkssturm militia armed with the final wonder-weapon the Reich had thought fit to issue them: the Volkshandgranate, made from a charge of explosive embedded in a piece of concrete, useless against tanks and barely effective against men. The Zoo animals were still there too, in broken cages and blasted compounds: dead gorillas and elephants, shell-shocked baby baboons clinging to their mothers. He stared, watching a monkey outside its shattered cage, limping round and round, half-crazed. He could hear songbirds, and wondered if they were deafened to the sound of their own music. He remembered the flowers that day he had come here with his son. It had been late spring then, as it was now, and the rhododendrons should be coming out. He smelt that farmyard smell again, the dung from thousands of Russian horses. It conjured up an image he had seen in the room below in the book by Heinrich Schliemann on ancient Troy, a woodcut of the ruins before the excavation: a pastoral scene of grazing animals and shepherds among the tumbled walls. He wondered whether Berlin could become like that, or whether this place would be too poisoned and blighted by history ever to nurture life again.

  Then he saw it. He whipped out his binoculars. The boy had been right. The ghostly shape of a Soviet T-34 tank poked through the rubble at the end of the street, probing forward. He saw flashes, exploding shells, lines of tracer bullets, the lick of a flamethrower. An engine screamed, and then he saw the tank dip and roll over the rubble, its turret traversing, seeking a target. He could see the padded black helmet of the tank commander. Behind it an American Studebaker truck lurched into view, disgorging troops. An American truck. His heart leapt, but then he remembered dive-bombing a merchant ship off Norway with lines of those trucks lashed down on its deck, destined for Russia. The soldiers fanned out on either side of the street, picking their way through the rubble. One appeared tottering along on a bicycle, with a Panzerfaust anti-tank rocket strapped to the front. Hoffman remembered the parade he had attended with the Führer a few days before, seeing off boys of the Hitler Youth as they rode into battle on those bicycles. It was hard to tell whether the Russian cyclist was deadened to the danger around him, or whether he was deliberately cycling to his nemesis like the German boy who had ridden the bicycle before him. Suddenly the cyclist flopped sideways, his head disintegrating in a spray of red from a sniper’s bullet. There was a burst of sub-machine-gun fire and the sniper’s rifle clattered down from an upstairs window into the street below. The falling bike set off the Panzerfaust, which screeched into the building opposite, exploding and bringing down the entire facade in a cascade of brick and dust. On the upper floor a bathroom was revealed, the porcelain bathtub hanging precariously from the open frontage with a shattered mirror behind, a jarring scene of domestic intimacy. The T-34 roared and squealed forward, the driver grinding the gears as he negotiated a route through the piles of masonry. He ran over the fallen cyclist, popping and squeezing the body like a toothpaste tube, leaving a bloody clot on one track that reappeared with each turn as the tank lunged forward. Another glorious death in battle, another wreathed photograph on a mother’s mantelpiece. Hoffman watched the infantry come up behind, picking their way through the rubble. He heard the distinctive echoing rip of a German Spandau machine gun, and three of them fell. Then the tank gun traversed and cracked and a tottering pile of masonry disintegrated, silencing the Spandau. In minutes the Soviets would be under the elevation of the flak guns, and the tanks would be firing point-blank at the steel covers over the windows of the Zoo tower, trying to punch a hole large enough for a flamethrower to spurt fire into the thousands of people crammed in the darkness below. Unless they surrendered it soon, the tower would become a giant crematorium.

  Then Hoffman heard another sound, nearby on the platform this time, a groan of machinery followed by a whirring and rattling noise. He looked over towards the ammunition elevator and saw the first 128mm shell emerge, then watched three boys struggle to carry it to the nearest gun. As a tactic against the Soviet advance, it was a futile gesture. The tanks would be under the guns’ minimum elevation by the time they were ready to fire. But he and the battery commander had devised the plan to keep the Feldgendarmen convinced that they would fight to the end, and to provide a distraction. The gunners would fire ten rounds a minute until the ammunition was expended. The noise and vibration inside the tower would be horrendous.

  He saw the battery commander crawl out from the shaft, streaked in oil, his head wreathed in a blood-stained bandage. The man immediately hunched down and set to with a wrench unscrewing the fuses as each new shell appeared, surrounded by crouched boys. Hoffman knew that the remaining ammunition for the big guns had been time-fused for high-altitude airburst, and the fuses would all need to be reset. It was of no consequence now, as it was the noise of the guns that would create the distraction. But Hoffman saw that the gun crew were in their own world, locked into their drill in this final act. The commander looked up for a moment, gazed around frantically, not seeing him, and then hunched over again. Hoffman had a sudden cold realization. He was going to have to do this alone.

  Then he felt it, a strange brushing sensation, barely perceptible, an unsettling feeling that seemed to come from all directions at once. The soldiers who had been in battle called it the devil’s breath, the wind caused by the blast and suck of thousands of exploding shells. He looked towards the Reichstag, but the Tiergarten had disappeared in an eruption of dust and smoke. Soon the creeping barrage would reach the flak tower. He looked south, and saw the ripple of flame from the Soviet howitzers on the horizon, then the multiple fire-streaks of Katyusha rockets. In moments the sound would reach them, the pulverizing roar of artillery, the shriek of the rockets, sowing terror just as the siren in his own Stuka dive-bomber had once done.

  What he had seen in the street outside was just a probing attack. Now all hell would be unleashed. He felt his chest tighten. The whole earth seemed to be shaking. He watched men and boys scurrying around him, seeking shelter from the onslaught to come, in a blur.

  Another smell assailed his nostrils.

  It was the smell of fear.

  Hoffman ran back towards the entrance to the spiral staircase that led into the bowels of the tower. A cluster of shells burst in the grounds of the Zoo, sending shrapnel clattering like hail against the concrete below. From their new positions the Russian gunners were finding the range, aided now by forward artillery spotters in the ruined buildings in sight of the tower. Hoffman glanced at the flak gunners loading the breech of the nearest twin 128mm gun, its barrels aimed towards the street below. He prayed that they would have enough time to fire their salvo and give him the distraction he needed to get out with a white flag. He saw the boy in the lederhosen, helping to heave another shell towards the breech. Let him survive. The din suddenly became horrendous: the roar of tank engines, the rattle of tracks, the crack of tank gunfire, the rippling boom of howitzers, the
screaming salvos of rockets, the noise echoing and rolling through the open doorway. He lurched inside and heaved the steel door shut, closing off the worst of it. The stench of seething humanity wafted up to him. He suddenly felt terribly claustrophobic. He had to get out of this place.

  As he turned to go down the spiral stairs, he heard the clatter of someone running up from below. A helmeted face appeared under the one bare bulb still lit on the upper stairway, and stopped, breathless. ‘Herr Oberstleutnant.’ It was his orderly, an elderly Volkssturm wearing a faded First World War tunic. The man leaned forward, panting, holding his stomach, looking half-dead. ‘You must come at once. To your room. Important visitors from the Reich Chancellery. A prisoner under escort.’

  The Reich Chancellery. Hoffman stopped on the stairs. What the hell did they want? He clenched his teeth. ‘Who is it?’

  The soldier’s skin was pasty, like porcelain, and there was a numbness in his eyes. ‘Herr Oberstleutnant, I don’t know. I really don’t know. One of the Feldgendarmen grabbed me and sent me up to find you.’

  ‘All right. How many?’

  ‘Five, I think. Two SS guards, two senior-looking officers and the prisoner, bound and hooded. They came through the cable tunnel from the L-Tower. That’s all I know.’ The soldier’s voice cracked, and he slumped against the wall.

  Hoffman took a deep breath, and swallowed hard. His throat was still burning from the acrid air outside. ‘All right. Go back to your duties. Don’t give the Feldgendarmen any reason to pick on you. There’s going to be a lot of killing soon. Get on.’

  The soldier gave a faltering salute and stumbled back down the stairs. Hoffman followed him, clattering down as fast as he could. The stench was indescribable. He passed the entrance to the hospital and glimpsed bloodstained operating tables inside. Part of the hospital was an emergency Sanitätsraum, a maternity ward. The vibration of the guns had pushed women into early labour, as if life were frantically regenerating in the face of extinction. He had heard the screams of women giving birth in the night and the wail of a baby, so at odds with this place of death.