Berlin Finale (Penguin Modern Classics)

by Heinz Rein

  ‘It’s lucky the majority of people don’t understand that,’ Lucie Wiegand says.

  Dr Böttcher laughs briefly. ‘Lucie, have you ever experienced a situation in which the Nazis did not thoroughly explain and constantly repeat their goals and intentions so that even the stupidest person can understand? If their method of “drumming”, as they call it, fails on this occasion, it is only because they no longer have propaganda methods fully at their disposal and – last but not least – because the people have sunk into a torpor, they have been sitting in cellars for days, tired, empty and defeated, and in no condition to do anything at all.’

  Lassehn leans against the kitchen cupboard with his arms folded. ‘Until now I have accepted as law everything that was proclaimed as such, I have obeyed not the political but the juridical terminology of the National Socialists. Just as the lives of German soldiers fall under the categorical imperative of “orders are orders”, the lives of citizens are ruled by the motto “the law is the law”. And just as orders must be carried out in military life, in the lives of ordinary citizens it has been the case that law is right and right is law.’

  ‘Right always implies justice,’ says Dr Böttcher. ‘There is no other yardstick. Admittedly justice is a relative concept, but it cannot be reduced to a pragmatic goal, as the Nazis are doing by proclaiming that “right is what is useful to the people”. We have experienced with horror where this vision leads, not only through the passing of laws that scorn any feeling of rightness, but by the fact that unwritten laws and the despotism of the Gestapo exist alongside this so-called common law, and that the only law that exists for them is the law of oppression, there is a widespread legal insecurity. Any law can be broken, sidestepped and thus effectively cancelled by the Gestapo. Often enough we have seen the Gestapo taking defendants who have been acquitted by a regular court into so-called protective custody, and thus simply abolishing the legal verdict. Ancient legal principles such as in dubio pro reo or the principle that no one can be sentenced twice for a single crime were dismissed as sentimental humanitarianism. The chief of the black hordes once stated this quite clearly when he announced: “We Nationalist Socialists have set to work without law. I have always assumed the position that I don’t care if a paragraph is opposed to our actions. If others complained about the breaking of laws, I couldn’t have cared less.” The elimination of any sense of right by the openly proclaimed lawlessness of the superior and racial perspectives has contributed significantly to the bestialization of the German people. No defeat can be total and annihilating enough to halt this development, which has already advanced far too far.’

  Dr Böttcher had begun speaking in his calm and academic way and then talked himself into a state of excitement, but now he smooths out the agitation in his voice and turns to Lassehn. ‘You are holding something in your hand, Lassehn. Won’t you show it to us?’ he asks.

  Lassehn nods and waves a newspaper in the air like a trophy. ‘It’s today’s 12-Uhr-Blatt!’

  Klose pounces on him and grabs the paper.

  ‘There are some wonderful things in it,’ Lassehn says as Klose’s eyes run over the newspaper.

  ‘Read it out, Oskar,’ Wiegand demands.

  Klose looks up. ‘Monstrous,’ he says. ‘If I didn’t have it in black and white … Well, listen:

  ‘The city will be defended until the end.

  Fight with fanatical doggedness for your wives, children and mothers! We will prevail.

  12-Uhr-Blatt Berlin, 23 April

  Our home city of Berlin has become a front-line state. The Reich Defence Commissar and Gauleiter Dr Goebbels has therefore issued the following demands to all the people of Berlin:

  All soldiers and Volkssturm men deployed to defend the Reich capital are to occupy the positions assigned to them, and begin fighting as soon as Soviet troops or tanks appear.

  The civilian population is unconditionally to obey all orders issued by civilian and military authorities.

  Arms factories, public utilities and the authorities responsible for the leadership of the Reich capital will continue to work.

  Works security will ensure the internal and external security of factories. Provocateurs or insubordinate foreigners are to be arrested immediately, or, even better, rendered harmless.

  Should provocateurs or criminal elements attempt, by hoisting white flags or any other cowardly behaviour, to stir unease in the population that is resolved to defend the city, and paralyse its resistance, all possible measures are to be taken against them. Every Berliner is responsible for his own house or flat. Houses and flats hoisting white flags have no right to the protection of community welfare services, and will be treated accordingly. The residents of such houses are therefore to be held responsible. The local Party authorities must guard staunchly against such behaviour and act accordingly. Such houses would be plague bacilli on the body of our city, and ruthlessly combating them is therefore the command of the moment. Traitors are to be shot down or hanged immediately. The only valid slogan is: the hardest and most fanatical resistance in all points.

  Everyone knows his task at this moment.

  Your mothers, your children and your wives are watching you, defenders of Berlin! They have entrusted you with their lives. Everyone knows his duty. The hour of truth has sounded for you. Let the men of Breslau be your model! They have not hesitated for a moment to deploy all of their courage and bravery and their faith in the Reich and the Führer. The city will be defended to the last. Form a solid community! Stamp out rumours! They only serve to poison the atmosphere and to undermine your fighting spirit. Let everyone act as if the welfare of our Reich capital depended solely on his actions! The whole nation has its eye on you, you defenders of Berlin, and trusts in you and the unconditional fulfilment of your duty.

  Everyone knows that this hour is difficult. Thunder rolls and shells whistle over the houses of the workers. The Bolsheviks are storming the suburbs with men and materiel. If we have endured the bombs of the Anglo-Americans, we will not shy from shells. You Berliners are known for your quick-wittedness and your toughness. There is no doubt that these will now be on display.

  So fight for your city! Fight doggedly for your wives and your children, your mothers and your parents! You are laying down your lives for a good cause.

  The military defence of the Reich capital has been entrusted to a soldier who has proved himself time and again in this war in the leadership of troops and Volkssturm. He is the bearer of the oak leaf, Lieutenant-General Heymann. Your Gauleiter is with you. He declares that he will of course remain in your midst with his comrades. His wife and children are here as well. He, who conquered this city with two hundred men, will now activate the defence of the Reich capital with all means.

  A great goal can only be achieved by great daring. Character is revealed, man proves himself, precisely in the time of danger and need. So do not stint in aiming your weapons against the enemy! Stand and fight! In that way we will finally prevail in the eyes of our wives and children and our home town of Berlin.”’

  When Klose has finished reading, he sets the newspaper down on the table. ‘Every word a lie, a vulgar lie,’ Wiegand says and picks up the newspaper. ‘Every order is a crime, and between orders, threats, vulgarity, lies and cynicism there is always the usual sentimental stuff about wives and children, mothers and the land of home. They threaten and plead simultaneously. How else are we to understand this appeal from Goebbels:

  “Appeal from Gauleiter Dr Goebbels

  Everyone is to Join the Defence Front Forthwith

  The Gauleiter of Berlin, Reich Minister Dr Goebbels, has issued the following appeal to the soldiers and men of Berlin.

  In this fatal hour of the battle for the Reich capital, I turn to all the soldiers and men of Berlin who are not currently deployed to join the defence front of the Reich capital straight away. Soldiers and wounded men who can still carry weapons are immediately to report voluntarily to the commandant’s office of Berl
in, Johannisstrasse, near Friedrichstrasse Station.

  I issue the same appeal to all the men of Berlin who have not been recruited to the Volkssturm or deployed for the defence of the city. I am convinced that every man who has a courageous heart and is determined to defend our Reich capital to the death against the cruel Bolshevik global enemy will respond to my appeal and also report immediately to the commandant’s office on Johannisstrasse.

  We will do our duty in an honourable and manly fashion, and serve as a model of brave resistance to the entire nation. Anyone who prefers contemptible cowardice to manly struggle is a scoundrel.

  Soldiers, wounded, men of Berlin! To arms!

  Signed: Dr Goebbels,

  Gauleiter of Berlin.”

  ‘Why does he address the soldiers and men with an appeal and not an order? Because he knows very well that the reins have already slipped from their hands. But the whole thing is the most convincing proof that the authorities are taking their last breath.’

  ‘Or their second-last,’ Dr Böttcher says ironically. ‘In spite of the general dissolution they are still convulsively trying to simulate something like order. Please, gentlemen, there are also official reports in the newspaper: “What groceries are there?” and “Directive concerning the consumption of electricity and gas” and – I must read this out to you, it’s too good to pass over. Listen and be amazed:

  “Extension of the dog-tax stamps for the year 1942 in tax year 1945. New dog stamps will not be issued for tax year 1945. The stamps for 1942, which were still valid for tax years 1943 and 1944, remain valid for tax year 1945. For new applications in the course of tax year 1945 dog owners will accordingly receive tax stamps bearing the year 1942.

  Berlin, 13 April 1945

  The Senior Burgomaster of Reich capital Berlin

  Main Tax Office.”’

  ‘People think of everything!’ Klose says. ‘The only thing missing is the supplement that dog slaughter is compulsorily registrable, and that such and such a percentage should be factored in during the next distribution of meat. At any rate, order always prevails here, even in the middle of the greatest chaos.’

  XI

  23 April

  The day is an endless chain of minutes, it proceeds fatally slowly and nothing changes. Russian artillery fire mounts and fades, the Soviet fighter bombers come down almost incessantly, firing their salvoes as they plunge, barrage balloons stand undisturbed in the eastern and northern suburbs of the city. In between there are endless minutes of complete stillness. Decimated and severely battered units crowd into the streets, the columns of vehicles and soldiers flooding back into the city, they cannot congregate at collection points or internal defences because there are none, and they end up joining the new recently and hastily constituted units marching towards some main battle line that doesn’t exist either.

  The battle is based on some nests of resistance, and the combat groups, rarely any bigger than a battalion, are also acting on their own initiative. Their commanders receive orders without knowing who has issued them, indicating attack objectives and then abandoning them again after a few hours. They defend unimportant strongholds until they are encircled, and battered gun emplacements are directed from one part of the city to another, without the chance to fire even a shot. The soldiers are weary and resigned and put up with everything, artillery fire and gunfire from on-board weapons, vermin and hunger, orders to advance and orders to retreat, they take the complaints of the civilian population with dull indifference, even though this time they are not insignificant Russian, French or Yugoslavian females, but women of their own people walking the ruined, burning streets with crazed eyes and desperate gestures and queuing outside shops to buy the last available foodstuffs while a few streets along the Russian armoured cars are already advancing and the low-flying planes dash away above their heads. Soldiers do what they are ordered to do, without thinking beyond the next minute, worry and apprehension about shelter, food and sleep is more important and more significant in the duration of the current minute than the thought of the great and inevitable fall that awaits them only a few steps away. Basically they have been falling for years, their bodies and their souls have already adapted to that fall so much that they will only reacquire a sensibility when they reach absolute bottom.

  Among the defenders of the city there are many who have fought in the winter battle at the gates of Moscow, and who besieged Leningrad for years, who saw dozens of cities collapse and hundreds of villages going up in flames, and millions of people wandering about homelessly or vegetating in ruins, in the end it only awakened fleeting reflexes in them, as destruction and misery have been reflected too often and for too long in the retinas of their eyes. The receptiveness of their brains and the reaction of their emotions was exhausted long ago, the sensibility of their hearts is cut off so completely that they can no longer be horrified now that the war has returned to its starting point. They see one house after another sinking into rubble, women fetching water while under fire and chasing from shop to shop looking for groceries, they witness the enemy playfully overcoming one obstacle after another, they have precise knowledge of the suffering of a city under artillery fire, where the deadly wave of street battles is rolling towards them, but they endure it all as the disaster of an inevitable fate.

  SS, military police and the recently instituted drumhead courts martial still hold together the remains of the collapsing and divided enemy with brutal terror. Within minutes death sentences are delivered and executed on the nearest lamp post or tram-stop pole, in the central military court on Rüsternallee in Charlottenburg a whole horde of officials are at work, military judges, staff lawyers, army justice inspectors and ‘reliable’ assessors, they do not deliver justice, they only carry out orders and every day, ‘in the name of the German people’, they deliver dozens of death sentences which are then executed as soon as the sentence has been passed. It isn’t only external pressure that repeatedly kneads together the formless mass of companies and units, it is also the compulsion of orders that has been inculcated into them and conditions them, not making them fight resolutely to the last (but rather dodge fighting if possible), but making them obey to the last.

  The situation is clear. The strategic plan of Russian army command is becoming obvious, it will succeed in a matter of only one or two days: the complete encirclement of Berlin. From Tegel via Reinickendorf, Weissensee, Lichtenberg, Köpenick, the Teltow Canal, Stahnsdorf to the Havel lakes, the circle around the city centre is already three-quarters closed, the arteries to the south and south-west have been cut off, the military corps still relatively capable of fighting in the south and south-east of the city have been cut off from their defence area, the Reich capital, and driven together in two large pockets near Halbe and Luckenwalde, where they are slowly being further constricted and confined. The only road still open is the military road, the big artery from the north-west via Spandau and Staaken, but it too is already under occasional fire from the Russian artillery.

  In this situation the Gauleiter of Berlin, Reich Defence Commissar and Reich Minister for National Enlightenment and Propaganda, Dr Joseph Goebbels, stages his last bravura coup from the absolutely bomb-proof underground bunker in the Reich Chancellery: he invents the Wenck reserve army. After the planned dissemination of rumours concerning the advance of strong, fresh forces, the desperate mood of the population was to be brightened by a shimmer of hope, and strangely enough a flyer, which to judge by its textual composition must be intended only for the soldiers of that reserve army, has fallen into the hands of the civilian population. This flyer, a vaccination of last hope, reads as follows:

  Soldiers of the Wenck Army!

  An order of great import has summoned you from your marshalling area against our western enemies, and set you marching towards the east.

  Your mission is clear: Berlin remains German! The goals set for you must be accomplished under all circumstances, because on the other side operations are under way with t
he goal of bringing about the crucial defeat of the Bolsheviks in the battle for the Reich capital and thus fundamentally to change the situation of Germany.

  Berlin will never capitulate to Bolshevism! The defenders of the Reich capital have been inspired and are fighting with dogged obstinacy in the belief that they will soon hear the thunder of your guns.

  The Führer has summoned you!

  As in olden times of victory, you have joined the attack. Berlin is waiting for you, Berlin longs for you from the depths of its heart!

  Schröter paces uneasily back and forth, his hands clasped behind his back, his forehead crumpled in a frown.

  ‘I can’t stand this inactivity any longer,’ he says. ‘Sitting here, having conversations and waiting while outside fire devours the city, street after street, house after house, flat after flat, and people sit in cellars as if in mousetraps …’ He waves his hands wildly through the air. ‘We need to do something!’

  ‘Nothing imprudent!’ Dr Böttcher warns, looking up from the chessboard between him and Lassehn. ‘A few men like us can’t represent a whole city, we have to restrict ourselves to this house or this street.’

  ‘To hell with your prudence!’ Schröter explodes. ‘We can’t just sit here and wait until … But what do you want?’

  ‘What I want will depend on the situation,’ Dr Böttcher says calmly. ‘Every situation has its own natural logic, my dear Schröter. I’ve been outside for a few hours and I’ve seen the mood the soldiers are in.’

  ‘And the mood is good?’ Schröter asks menacingly.

  ‘The mood is bad,’ Dr Böttcher says quietly. ‘But what does that mean? Soldiers are often in a bad mood, they curse and complain, but a sharp word or an order immediately brings them back into line. A soldier is like a devout Christian.’