Five Days That Shocked the World: Eyewitness Accounts from Europe at the End of World War II (20 page)

Time hung heavily as the morning wore on. While the battle raged outside, they were trapped and waiting—but for what, they didn’t know. At noon the daily situation report was given in the conference room. It was a bleak experience for those present. General Helmuth Weidling, commanding the Berlin garrison, told Hitler that the Russians were attacking the Reichstag and had penetrated the tunnel in the Vossstrasse, alongside the Chancellery. Weidling was as blunt as Mohnke in his assessment:

I spoke about the vicious fighting that had taken place during the preceding twenty-four hours, about the compression into a narrow space, the lack of ammunition, the lack of anti-tank rockets—an indispensable weapon in street fighting—about the declining supply by air and the sinking morale of the troops. In my summary, I clearly stressed that in all probability the battle for Berlin would be over by the evening of 30 April.
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Weidling’s assessment was followed by a long silence, after which Hitler asked Mohnke if he agreed. Mohnke did. There was no chance of relief from Wenck’s army or anyone else, no chance of a breakout, either. They didn’t even know where their troops were anymore, since they had stopped radioing in to headquarters.

Hitler looked like a man resigned to his fate as he accepted that the situation was hopeless. He had trouble getting out of his armchair as Weidling prepared to leave. Weidling asked him what the defenders of Berlin should do if they ran out of ammunition, which they soon would. Hitler replied that he would never surrender Berlin, but the troops might be allowed to escape in small groups after their ammunition had been exhausted.

The meeting broke up in gloom. It was obvious to everyone that Hitler didn’t have much longer to live. He had already told Martin Bormann that he and his wife intended to kill themselves that day. Now he summoned Otto Günsche, his personal adjutant, to discuss the details.

The details were crucial to Hitler. Badly shaken by the death of Mussolini, he did not want the same thing to happen to him. If Hitler hadn’t underlined the words
hanged upside down
on the transcript of the radio broadcast announcing Il Duce’s death, he had certainly read them. It didn’t need much imagination to see a horde of Mongolian soldiers lashing out and mutilating his body as they dragged it in triumph through the streets, or doing even worse to Eva. Hitler was determined not to let that happen, as he made clear to Günsche:

I met Adolf Hitler in the antechamber to his office. He told me that he would now shoot himself and that Fräulein Braun would also depart this life. He did not want to fall into the hands of the Russians either alive or dead and then be put on display in a freak show, meaning in Moscow. The bodies were to be burnt. He was charging me with the necessary preparations. The way he expressed it, I was to be personally responsible to him for this! I then assured Adolf Hitler that I would carry out his orders.
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Günsche meant what he said. He was a loyal man who could always be relied upon to do what he was told. He gave Hitler his word and promised that Hitler’s body would be in safe hands after his death. There was no time to waste. Günsche went off at once to organize gasoline for the funeral pyre. Hitler spoke to some other people and then went in to lunch.

*   *   *

AT RUHLEBEN,
there appeared to be a lull in the fighting. The Russians had already recaptured the Reichssportfeld at the Olympic stadium, but were evidently too exhausted to go any further that day. All seemed quiet as Helmut Altner sheltered in a cellar, glancing idly at a tattered copy of Dr. Göbbels’s newspaper, the
Panzerbär
, written for the defenders of Berlin. “We are holding on,” it announced. “The hours of freedom are coming. Berlin fights for the Reich and Europe.” Göbbels added that Wenck’s army was on its way to relieve them, hurrying to save the city. “Reserves are marching in from all sides,”
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he claimed. The paper was four days old, but the reserves promised by Göbbels still hadn’t arrived.

What came instead was a gaggle of teenage girls, recently recruited into the Waffen-SS. Some had been antiaircraft personnel, but most had been called up a few days earlier to build barricades across the city. As civilians, they had not qualified for military rations, so they had volunteered for the SS in order to eat. But they weren’t the kind of people normally associated with the SS. Even in the uniform, they just looked like girls to Altner, few of them older than fifteen or sixteen. They seemed every bit as out of place as he was himself.

There was half a liter of soup for lunch, but only for those fighting men whose names were on a list. Altner ate his in the sunshine outside his cellar. Afterward, he was summoned to battalion headquarters to witness the commanding officer being awarded the Oak Leaves of the Knight’s Cross for the defense of Ruhleben. Others were being given medals, too, by order of General Weidling. Scarcely believing his eyes, Altner watched in wonder as his comrades stepped forward one by one to receive their awards. He himself had been upgraded to
Obergrenadier
. It was possible that he was to receive the Iron Cross as well, although the commanding officer wanted to check first to see if he was allowed to award promotions and decorations simultaneously.

Altner could hardly credit it. With Russians all over Berlin and the capital about to fall, the army was worrying about medals. Whom did they think they were trying to kid?

For me and just about everyone else of my age, a medal used to seem the greatest thing that one could achieve, but I’ve come so far now that I can only think about how many dead this fuss has cost. I’m not going to be psyched up into holding on just for a piece of tin.

The battalion commander’s Oak Leaves have been very dearly bought. Piles of dead—soldiers, Hitler Youth, Volkssturm—have paid for his award, while he sat in his bombproof cellar and chased the runners out into a hail of steel with his orders. And now he’s trying to whip up the fighting spirit of the troops with a shower of medals and promotions.
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It was all just an “unending, senseless demand for more sacrifices” to Altner. Like everyone else in his unit, he just hoped that he would still be alive when it stopped.

*   *   *

IN THE CEMETERY
at Hohenzollerndamm, Hildegard Knef and Ewald von Demandowsky had been digging in since dawn, crouched over their machine gun as they waited for the Russians to attack again. They had been joined by two tearful Hitler Youth, one of whom had promptly been killed by a sniper. His body lay in front of them, the eyes still wide open in death. Knef was huddled in her trench when a chicken came over to investigate:

It flaps, gargles, runs back and forth, head out, head back, ruffles its feathers and stalks haughtily over to the dead boy—oh God, the eyes, if that sod goes for the eyes—I pick up a stone and hit it on the tail, it squeals, sheds a few feathers, and stomps off squawking. Where there’s a chicken there’s an egg, I say, and am on my way.
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Demandowsky yelled at her to come back, but Knef was too hungry to listen. Crawling past the gravestones, she followed the hedge along until she came to three more chickens, beside a shed. They had laid two eggs. Scooping them up, Knef slithered triumphantly back to her trench. She and Demandowsky pierced the shells and drank the fluid at once.

They were joined later by an old man from the Volkssturm, wounded in the back. Knef cut his jacket open and tried to staunch the flow of blood with strips from his shirt. But he collapsed into their trench just as the Russians launched their attack:

There they are, for the first time I can see them, running towards us, machine guns at their hips, bayonets glinting in the sun; gun and bayonet coming towards me, coming closer, arm’s length. Earth spurts up into my eyes, ratatat, it’s the gun beside me. I remember the hand grenade —pull, throw, duck—ahhvooom, splinters clatter on my helmet, I fall across the old man. Where’s the bayonet? I wait for it, my back tenses, here it comes, must come—the bayonet …

Complete silence. We look at each other over the old man’s bleeding back and wait, don’t dare to look up … There’s a whinnying noise and then a bark, the dry bark of a tank gun. An arm floats past us, an arm without its hand, cemetery arm; we follow its flight, the old man moans, straightens up, splutters, rattles, is dead, can’t fall down, leans against us with his head on my shoulder.
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The roadway was heaped with dead Russians. The Germans ran over to grab their weapons and then retreated before their attackers could regroup. Clutching at Knef’s jacket, the Hitler Youth begged to come, too. They set off through the cemetery and came almost at once to a ruined house that seemed vaguely familiar to Demandowsky. He realized, as if in a dream, that it belonged to his friend Bobby Lüdtke.

They took shelter inside, but were spotted by a Russian tank. It opened up from the corner of the road, blasting everything that moved. The Hitler Youth got lost in the confusion as walls collapsed and beams came tumbling down. Lungs full of dust, Knef begged Demandowsky not to leave her behind if she was wounded. He promised to shoot her instead and made her swear to do the same for him.

They wondered if they could hold on until dark. With her throat clogged, Knef was desperate for water. There was none in the taps, but the Kurfürstendamm wasn’t far away, and Demandowsky thought he knew someone there who might have some. He and Knef decided to risk it. They set off at once and were overtaken almost immediately by a couple of soldiers with machine guns who called them “Kamerad” as they passed. Knef couldn’t help noticing, as the men continued on their way, that both of them were Russian.

*   *   *

WHILE THE SOVIETS
were advancing on the Reichstag from north of the Tiergarten, others were approaching the Chancellery from the south. They had gotten to within a few hundred yards of Hitler’s bunker and were making good progress as they pushed forward, probing the German defenses around Potsdamer Platz. Resistance was stiff, but the Russians’ firepower was overwhelming. Marshal Vasili Chuikov had watched earlier as his men pulverized the Germans beside the Tiergarten:

From my observation post I saw solid clouds of smoke and reddish brick dust rising up above the government buildings. The wind brought one of these clouds right down on me. Then the dimly visible disc of the sun disappeared completely, a twilight set in, and visibility was cut almost to nothing. I had only the shell bursts to tell me that the artillerymen, their guns out and firing direct, were striking at a very limited number of targets. They were firing across the canal and down the length of the streets opposite, blasting a way through the approaches to the squares on the far side of the canal, which had been blocked with barricades.
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The Germans were responding with flanking fire, concealing their machine guns in side streets untouched by the bombardment and then opening up from the flank as soon as the Russians appeared. It was a tough, hard, merciless business, but it was not a fight the Germans could hope to win. Every passing moment was bringing the Russians closer to Hitler’s lair. The only real question was how much longer the Germans could continue to hold out.

The fighting was fiercest at the Landwehr Canal, several hundred yards from the bunker. The canal wasn’t wide, but the little humpbacked bridge over it was heavily exposed to German fire. While some Russians rushed the bridge, others were planning to swim across the canal or make rafts out of anything that came to hand. Among them, by some accounts, was Sergeant Nikolai Masalov, a decorated veteran from Siberia.

While his comrades moved up to the canal, Masarov apparently heard a child crying in the ruins on the other side. The Russians gave him covering fire as he zigzagged across. Ten minutes later, he returned with a three-year-old girl in his arms. Her mother had just been killed in the fighting.

It was a good story, perhaps even with an element of truth. Marshal Chuikov was certainly pleased when he heard it. Suitably embellished, the story would make excellent propaganda in due course, a useful counterweight to all the tales of rape and mayhem that the Soviet army was leaving in its wake. But that was for another day, after the fighting was over. First, the Russians had to get to the Chancellery and finish the business in hand.

*   *   *

A FEW HUNDRED YARDS AWAY,
lunch in the bunker was a muted affair as Hitler ate a last meal before his suicide. His wife apparently had no appetite and stayed alone in her room. Hitler ate with his two secretaries and his personal cook instead. Gerda Christian, the senior of the two secretaries, wasn’t hungry either as they joined him:

I suppose it was about 12:30 p.m. when my relief, Traudl Junge, arrived. This was the usual time—we were still working in shifts—and it was also, again as usual, the familiar signal for lunch. Hitler “for old times’ sake,” now invited both of us secretaries, along with Fräulein Manziarly [Hitler’s cook], to join him for lunch at 1 p.m. He came out into the corridor to announce this, and soon Fräulein Manziarly, a mousy but pleasant little Innsbruckerin arrived with the food.
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They ate at a little table in Hitler’s study, the so-called Map Room. If Gerda Christian’s memory was correct, the only other man present was Corporal Schwiedel, an SS orderly. It was an unhappy meal of spaghetti and tossed salad. Nobody felt like saying much as they contemplated a grim future. “We had often eaten alone with Hitler before, of course, but this was the very last lunch, and everybody knew it. It was a peculiar honour, qualified by the depressing knowledge that, with Hitler soon to be gone, the breakout would be our only hope. This was a harrowing thought for all three of us women. The lurid Berlin rape stories had given us the shudders, so the topic was avoided.”
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