by Heinz Rein
‘And I hear the Lieder of Schubert and the poems of Eichendorff, I see the forests of Thuringia and the valley of the Weser,’ Dr Böttcher replies. ‘My dear Schröter, many of you – and you seem to be among them – are like the Jews. Just as the Jews scent anti-Semitism whenever anyone so much as utters the word “Jew”, you always hear nationalism when the word Germany is spoken.’
‘Words like “homeland” and “patriotism” are not the sole preserve of nationalists,’ Wiegand adds. ‘Or has it escaped you that the Soviet Union calls your struggle the Great Patriotic War?’
Schröter stares at Wiegand. ‘You’re not the same person you used to be, Wiegand,’ he says.
‘That’s true,’ Wiegand says, ‘I’ve shaken off some of my dogmatism and gained in understanding. I can’t see why those who proved their loyalty in the concentration camps should no longer be comrades all of a sudden, comrades in the broadest sense of the word.’
Schröter shrugs. ‘You may be right, Wiegand, in fact you probably are right,’ he says slowly, ‘but that doesn’t matter so much now. Let’s …’
‘… listen to the Wehrmacht report,’ Dr Böttcher says. ‘It didn’t come through at two or at three, and at four o’clock a girl insisted on cutting her finger.’ He gets up and turns on the radio.
‘If the Russians would only get a move on,’ Schröter says and gestures impatiently. ‘The Americans have been remarkably slow lately.’
‘Time to be quiet,’ Wiegand says.
‘… at the sound of the gong it was eight p.m.,’ comes the voice from the radio. ‘This is the repeat of the Wehrmacht report.’
From the Führer’s headquarters, sixteenth of April.
This is an announcement by Wehrmacht High Command. In the border territory on the eastern Marches the enemy continued their attacks south-east of Mürzzuschlag and in Sankt Pölten …
Dr Böttcher, Wiegand and Schröter sit there, leaning forward. The words drip from the speaker with infinite slowness, like an oily fluid. Everything that is being said is important, certainly, but it isn’t what they are waiting for, the words only brush past them like a fleeting breath.
… Sankt Pölten has been lost …
… In Vienna the Soviets have taken our bridgehead south of the Danube …
… road between Göding and Austerlitz pushed through our front line with superior forces …
… south-east of Ratibor the enemy breakthrough forced us to …
‘Now it’s time for the front on the Oder,’ exclaims Schröter, and gets uneasily to his feet.
… After making futile advances yesterday, in the early hours of today the Bolsheviks launched a large-scale attack between the mouth of the Neisse and the Oderbruch after a violent barrage with heavy infantry, tank and air-force fighters. Bitter struggles are under way along the whole of the front …
‘There we are,’ Dr Böttcher says seriously, ‘the battle for Berlin is beginning.’
Part II
* * *
UNTIL FIVE MINUTES PAST TWELVE
‘If the war is lost, the people will also perish. This fate is inevitable. There is no need to take into consideration the basis which the people will need to continue even a primitive existence. On the contrary, it will be better to destroy these things ourselves, because this people will have proved to be the weaker one and the future will belong solely to the stronger eastern people. Besides, those who will remain after the battle are only the inferior ones, for the good ones have all been killed.’
Adolf Hitler
Führer and Reich Chancellor of the Great German Reich (From the statement of Reich Minister Speer before the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal)
I
Führer’s order of the day, 17 April
To the soldiers at the eastern front –
Asia’s last charge will collapse.
Führer’s headquarters, 16 April.
The Führer has issued the following order to the soldiers on the eastern front.
Soldiers of the German eastern front!
For the last time our deadly enemies, the Jewish Bolsheviks, have launched their massive forces to the attack. Their aim is to reduce Germany to ruins and to exterminate our people. Many of you soldiers in the east already know the fate which threatens, above all, German women, girls, and children. While the old men and children will be murdered, the women and girls will be reduced to barrack-room whores. The rest will be marched off to Siberia.
We have foreseen this thrust, and since last January have done everything possible to construct a strong front. The enemy will be greeted by massive artillery fire. Gaps in our infantry have been made good by countless new units. Our front is being strengthened by emergency units, newly raised units, and by the Volkssturm.
This time the Bolshevik will meet the ancient fate of Asia – he must and shall bleed to death before the capital of the German Reich.
Whoever fails in his duty at this point in time behaves as a traitor to our people. The regiment or division which abandons its position acts so disgracefully that it must be ashamed before the women and children who are withstanding the terror of bombing in our cities.
Above all, be on your guard against the few treacherous officers and soldiers who, in order to preserve their pitiful lives, fight against us in Russian pay, perhaps even wearing German uniform. Anyone ordering you to retreat will, unless you know him well personally, be immediately arrested and, if necessary, killed on the spot, no matter what rank he may hold.
If every soldier on the eastern front does his duty in the days and weeks which lie ahead, the last assault of Asia will crumple, just as the invasion by our enemies in the West will finally fail, in spite of everything.
Berlin remains German, Vienna will be German again, and Europe will never be Russian.
Form yourselves into a sworn brotherhood, to defend not the empty conception of a fatherland, but your homes, your wives, your children, and with them our future.
In this hour, the whole German people looks to you, my fighters in the east, and only hopes that, thanks to your resolution and fanaticism, thanks to your weapons, and under your leadership, the Bolshevik assault will be choked in a bath of blood.
At this moment, when fate has removed from the earth the greatest war criminal of all time, the turning point of this war will be decided.
Signed: Adolf Hitler
Lassehn folds up the 12-Uhr-Blatt. The time has come at last, the final battle is beginning, now things will have to be resolved. There is nothing left between the Oder and Berlin, no significant river, no mountain, no eastern wall, only the sandy plain of the Marches with a few lakes and some low ranges of hills, pine forests and heathlands, small towns and quiet villages, harbingers of Berlin, whose huge body stretches far into the landscape of the Marches and, with the ends of its transport network, reaches almost to the Oder.
The images of war rise up in front of him, tanks rolling over fields of wheat and sunflowers, artillery setting villages ablaze, platoons carrying out mass shootings, country roads with distraught people drifting along them carrying their pitiful belongings, and forests. More terrible than a disfigured human body, than a ruined house or an exploded bridge is a scorched and splintered forest, it is like a field of graves whose corpses are not covered by hills, but stretch their naked stumps from the earth in accusation, not decorated by a single leaf, flower or blade of grass, without the smell of resin and moss and blood, without the song of the birds and the rustling of beetles, without colour, nothing but gangrenous, charred, dead earth.
He shivers as if suffering from a violent fever, iron and blood have been sown in a strange soil, and now the crop is coming up here, tanks roll, planes roar over the soil of home, the artillery strikes, the villages and towns collapse into ash, the people travel along the country road as if whipped along by the Furies.
Lassehn sits in the S-Bahn, travelling to Charlottenburg again. He has a number of flyers on him, new ones, still slightly damp with
printer’s ink, they give off a strong stench. He feels as if everyone must be able to smell this odour that rises so insistently from the inside pocket of his coat, but no one pays any attention. Miracles could have occurred, and no one would have been aware of them, today people’s thoughts have slipped beyond their own important selves and the trivial existences of their neighbours and out into the distance, they are turning to the east, where a wide stream is flowing through the Brandenburg March, the last barrier that the great force of a resolute and superior opponent is due to crash through. Just as a moving neon sign along the high façade of a building repeats the words of an advertisement uninterruptedly, so a thought keeps rising into people’s consciousness. The Soviets have reached the Oder for a major attack.
This thought is indissolubly linked to a question whose answer will decide whether it’s better or worse, life or death. Is Berlin being defended, or has it been declared an open city?
Admittedly the city has been put in a defensive state, anti-tank ditches have been cut deep into the surrounding land, communication trenches run diagonally across fields and allotments, one-man trenches have been cut into railway embankments, hills and stretches of woodland, machine-gun positions and anti-tank barriers block all access roads, anti-aircraft artillery has zeroed in on ground-level targets – that is all clearly visible, it cannot be ignored, and nor is it supposed to be. The inhabitants have witnessed the construction of the positions and obstacles from the outset, and smiled at them at first, the way one smiles at a pointless game, but soon their faces turned serious, when the game turned into system and method, barricade lined up against barricade, trench lined up behind trench. Still all the measures taken so far can only be seen as precautionary measures to feign determination to the enemy, and therefore to frighten him off; they have been like a gun that you carry to be on the safe side, without ever using it. But now it seems that one is forced to familiarize oneself with this gun, one must load it and keep it ready to be fired, because it could be that the city will really be defended.
Everyone is clear what it means to defend a city like Berlin. Almost three million people live in the crushed, shattered city, hundreds of thousands of women, hundreds of thousands of children, hundreds of thousands of old people, well over half a million foreign forced labourers waiting for the moment of their liberation, their long-suppressed feelings of revenge cranked up more and more as the Allied armies appear at the gates of the city.
It seems impossible that any of those responsible for the city will allow themselves to be involved in the combat. Had Rome, Paris, Florence and Brussels not been spared in order to preserve the irreplaceable cultures of those cities for the world (as they were told with vain and boastful gestures)? Was it not possible that Berlin, the heart of the German Reich, would be declared an open city to keep it from falling victim to complete destruction? Admittedly, in the history of the campaigns of this war there has as yet been not a single example of the National Socialist leadership failing to defend a city, to spare the city and its inhabitants, Aachen and Cologne, Breslau and Posen, Vienna and Königsberg were all furiously defended, even though the enemy was not seriously halted. But Berlin cannot be compared to other cities, which had at the time of their siege a hinterland to which the civilian population could be evacuated. The capital of the Reich no longer has access to a hinterland because the enemy army is inexorably approaching the city from east and west, and its aerial weapons are uninterruptedly flying their deadly circles above it.
There are no means of transport any more, there are in fact no streets either, because the railways have been exposed to the constant attacks of the bomber planes, and the streets are under surveillance from the low-flying aircraft.
The Soviets are now moving up towards the east of the city like a dark bank of menacing clouds. It is a distant storm, there is as yet no sound of thunder, but a whirling wind announces the approaching tempest, the lightning still lurks beneath the cloud cover, but an oppressive, sulphurous brightness is spreading over the city.
A stormy sultriness lies over the city. A quivering sense of expectation has taken hold of people, an oscillation between hope of some kind of miracle that has been repeatedly promised and presented as an immediate prospect by the people in charge, and paralysing horror at the prospect of a horrific end. In people’s eyes, still apathetic and obtusely resigned only yesterday, all of a sudden there is a weary expression of anxious concern. The continuing air raids have become a daily habit, and as such they are endured almost like a natural necessity. People have become apathetic, lethargy has tangled the volutes of their brains far too much for them to be in a state of despair, because despair always assumes thought, a recognition of circumstances and an ability to assess the situation. But what is currently being prepared in the east, only eighty kilometres from the heart of the city, is something quite different, something new, it is breaking like a hurricane, it is rousing even the most indolent. There is not a single man or woman in this city who does not know what it means to defend an urban centre, street skirmishes, artillery fire, attack from low-flying planes. Some know of it from their own experience in two world wars, when French and Russian cities sank into rubble and ashes house by house, street by street, and the surface of the ground was churned up as if by an enormous bulldozer, the women and the others know it from the weekly newsreels, in which battle and its devastations are shown with a certain gratification, since the cities on the screen are foreign.
The danger that only rains down intermittently on people, and in between always leaves them time to take a breath, to repair the damage as best they can and to conduct a modicum of civilian life, has now become a constant threat, as the flood from the east has begun to rise. People think they can see the many thousands of black cannon muzzles raised in threat, roaring fire and slinging their shells at German positions, they imagine they can hear the roar and rattle of the tracks of the tank squadrons, which are now moving towards the bridgeheads like a crushing steel roller, they imagine they can see the quietly swinging propellers of the Soviet aircraft become whirring silver discs, opening their bomb bays and dropping their payloads on German supply columns, finally they imagine they can see the endless hordes of earth-brown Soviet soldiers, protected by the advancing tanks and sheltered beneath the wings of their aircraft, pouring across the land churned up and torn by their own artillery, and impetuously overwhelming it with loud hurrahs. And what do the German military leaders have to set against this enemy, which is still full of energy and very well armed? In October 1941 Hitler said: ‘The enemy lies defeated on the ground, he will never rise up again.’
The divisions entrenched along the Oder and the Neisse have for three years staggered from one defeat to another, they have known nothing but retreats and lost battles, encirclements and envelopments, and they see the many gaps in their ranks being filled by weary and exhausted substitutes, sullen and malnourished, under-equipped and under-trained, and they also know that there is no field hospital behind them and no room to form a new line of resistance.
Lassehn’s eye wanders over the ruined city. He had imagined his return to Berlin very differently, but perhaps it’s good that it happens like this, that it had to happen like this. Curiously, he has always remained the same, the adolescent slightly wrapped up in himself, unaffected by the life going on around him, which didn’t alter him even during his time in the army. But in the few days since he has been back in Berlin a change has taken place in him, he is tougher and more confident, his eyes and ears are more alert. He has met so many people during those few days! It started with Klose, then came Wiegand and Dr Böttcher, then came Mrs Buschkamp and Elisabeth Mattner, the red-faced man and the man with the horn-rimmed glasses, the little man on the S-Bahn, the SS officer and last of all Lucie Wiegand.
Immediately his thoughts leap to the outcome of the previous evening. Everything went well, after everything seemed lost. Even now his heart chills when he lives through that evening once again,
the horror when he suddenly sees himself faced with the SS officer, and the paralysing second when all at once two people appear in the darkness of the property and yell a threatening ‘Stop!’ when he and Lucie Wiegand are about to entrust themselves to the protecting arms of the dark forest. Of course they hadn’t stopped, they had run deeper into the forest, they had stumbled over tree roots and got entangled in overhanging branches, their feet had sunk into soft, slippery moss, the two heavy suitcases practically dragged Lassehn to the ground, then they climbed over a garden fence and crouched close together under a rabbit hutch. The two men had probably hesitated for a few seconds before following them, and that had given Lassehn and Lucie their crucial advantage. He had heard footsteps rustling in the undergrowth, and shouts, but then all was quiet. Apparently they had given up the search or carried it on in another direction, perhaps the policeman had broken out in the meantime and had hidden the corpse of the SS man for them, at any rate it had been quiet again for a few minutes.
For a while Lassehn and Lucie Wiegand had squatted under the rabbit hutch, it was very quiet, in the silence and the loneliness of approaching night the only sounds had been the panting of his lungs and the woman’s quick breathing. Those few minutes, while their pursuers were close by and looking for them, were filled with more exciting tension for Lassehn than his first meeting with Klose, his encounter with the air-raid warden in Charlottenburg or the red-faced man in the ‘Bayernhof’, the clashes with the Nazi block warden in Klose’s back room or the Untersturmführer in Wiegand’s house. On all those occasions he had always felt a degree of equanimity, because it had just been about him, but here he also had the woman to worry about, who was in some sense under his protection and he had to look after her. So they had crouched there, pressed tightly against one another. Lassehn had set the suitcase in front of him like a parapet, rested one arm tightly around the woman and held the revolver in the other hand.