Hitler's Foreign Executioners (71 page)

As Stalin’s armies prepared to crush the last strongholds of the Reich, Gottlob Berger dispatched the last of the SS foreign legions to defend Hitler’s capital – Fortress Berlin. The city would now become the bonfire of the collaborators. As the act of the Reich unfolded, Hitler called a military conference in Berlin and denounced Himmler’s SS foreign legions. He demanded a meeting with the SS chief to explain why a ‘Ukrainian legion’ was fighting alongside German soldiers: ‘There’s still a Galician division wandering [about] out there. Is that the same as the Ukrainians? If it consists of Austrian Ruthenians [Ukrainians] we can’t do anything other than take their weapons away immediately. The Austrian Ruthenians were pacifists. They were lambs, not wolves … It’s all just self deception.’ The next day, an abject Himmler was forced to return to the Chancellery for another demented brow beating.

His master plan had at last been torn to shreds.

A week later, Soviet commander-in-chief, Georgi Zhukov, and his staff occupied a command bunker dug into the Reitwin spur, a fish hook of land on the eastern bank of the Oder near the town of Küstrin. From this vantage point, Zhukov contemplated the main axis of attack that led directly across the Oder then ascended, through a labyrinth of marshes, drainage ditches and streams, to the Seelow Heights. His plan was not especially subtle. The Soviet juggernaut, 11 armies and 8,000 artillery pieces, would simply batter the Oder strongholds, occupied by the 9th Army, to dust. Beyond lay the road to Berlin. More than a hundred miles to the south, in the Cottbus region, Zhukov’s rival Ivan Koniev would lead his tank army across the River Neisse, under cover of ‘night and fog’, to strike at the 4th Panzer Army. In Zhukov’s command bunker a scale model of Berlin had been specially constructed, and as he waited impatiently for Stalin’s orders to strike, Zhukov obsessively scrutinised every detail of Hitler’s fortress. Even now, the conquest of the Nazi citadel looked like a formidable challenge. On the other side of the Oder, Himmler’s successor General Gotthard Heinrici had no doubt that the Russians would open proceedings with a massive artillery barrage and he prepared his defences accordingly. On 14 April, as agreed at the Yalta Conference, American forces halted on the Elbe, leaving Berlin to Stalin. Two days later, on 16 April at 5 a.m., a radiant explosion of light signalled the start of the Soviet bombardment. The barrage commenced soon afterwards. But the millions of Russian
projectiles crashed and detonated in empty trenches. Heinrici had cunningly pulled back his front-line troops. As lethal fire rained down from the German positions on the Heights, tearing through Zhukov’s men struggling to cross the Oder marshes, Koniev’s engineers rushed to throw bridges and pontoons across the Neisse at 150 carefully chosen points, and his tank armies began rattling across, heading for the autobahn that led straight as an arrow towards the southern suburbs of Berlin.
³⁶

The German commander of the French SS division, Dr Gustav Krukenberg, had at his disposal two battalions that between them could muster just 700 men. On 21 March, the French SS volunteers mustered at Anklam railway station to wait for transportation to new billets in Mecklenburg. When no trains appeared, they set off on foot, singing. Three days later, the Frenchmen marched into Neustrelitz, about 50 miles north of Berlin, and found billets in surrounding villages. Krukenberg told the men: ‘You may abandon the armed fight … I only want to have combatants with me now.’ The majority of the French SS volunteers, including Pierre, now agreed to fight on. A hundred miles to the south-east, Zhukov’s armies finally smashed through the Seelow Heights fortresses on the 19 April. Two days later, Koniev’s forces captured the massive and abandoned concrete bunkers at Zossen that had been the headquarters of the German high command and the nerve centre of the German ‘war of annihilation’. At dawn three days later, the two Russian armies joyously met close to Schönefeld Airport.

One evening, as the Soviet armies rumbled ever closer to Fortress Berlin, SS General Felix Steiner escorted the Belgian collaborator and celebrated hero of Cherkassy, Léon Degrelle, on a tour of Berlin’s ringbahn. The light was fading, and Berlin’s concrete ramparts were intermittently illuminated by the unremitting Soviet artillery barrage. Steiner pointed out Soviet tanks already crawling through the eastern suburbs. For the histrionic Walloon, the vast panorama evoked the last days of the Roman Empire. At 9 p.m. Degrelle drove back into the centre of Berlin in a battered Volkswagen. In the Hotel Adlon’s still brightly lit restaurant, waiters in spotless tuxedoes bustled about, serving purple slices of
Kohlrabi
on silver platters. Soon, Degrelle imagined, the grand old hotel would be set aflame by some ‘large pawed barbarian’. Not far from the Adlon, deep underneath Voss Strasse, Hitler still reigned over his stifling underground empire. Degrelle and a small party of Belgian SS men drove on south towards Potsdam where the little party rested for a few hours.

For Degrelle, Germany still stood for civilisation, a bulwark against those Soviet barbarians he had watched gobble red worms and corpses on the Eastern Front. Here in Berlin, the capital of the Reich, noble, pale-faced young men of the Hitler Youth waited quietly for the enemy, clutching their Panzerfausts ‘as solemn as the Great Teutonic knights’. To the east, along the rapidly disintegrating German front
line, Degrelle’s SS ‘Walloonien’ comrades now fought alongside Flemish SS volunteers and a battalion of Latvians. But the former Chef de Rex who inspired them to fight Hitler’s war had had enough of heroics. On 30 April, at 8 a.m., he ordered one of his lackeys to pack some ‘very heavy suitcases’ and set off towards Lübeck in northern Germany, where he hoped to track Himmler down, leaving the Belgian volunteers to fend for themselves.
³⁷

The majority of Berliners, with the exception of a few diehard fanatics, had no doubt that to continue to defend the Reich was insanity. They waited stoically for the final cataclysm in stinking cellars and fragile shelters. For the foreign volunteers of the Waffen-SS like Pierre and his comrades realism was not an option. On 25 April, a French SS Sturmbataillon, armed with a few machine guns and Panzerfausts set off in the direction of the centre of Berlin, the citadel, in a ragged convoy of hastily commandeered private cars and trucks. Pierre recalls that ‘there were 450 enthusiastic singing men leaving for the battle’. According to French veteran Robert Soulat, their morale was high: ‘a strange flame burned in our eyes.’ As the French SS battalion assembled in the Marktplatz in Alt-Strelitz, Krukenberg caught sight of a gleaming black Mercedes approaching at high speed, Nazi hub pendants fluttering wildly. Krukenberg realised that the bespectacled gentleman gripping the wheel with manic determination was none other than his commander-in-chief, Heinrich Himmler. The French SS men leapt to attention, right arms erect; but, staring rigidly ahead, Himmler swept past, apparently oblivious to the little group of loyal SS recruits. Later, Krukenberg realised that Himmler was returning from a meeting in Lübeck with Count Bernadotte. Their discussions had ended in stalemate and Himmler had begun building a bolthole for himself at Schloss Ziethen on Wustrow Island in the Bay of Lübeck. Soon after this troubling encounter, the SS battalion, numbering about 500 men, began marching south in Himmler’s wake.
³⁸

As SS-Brigadeführer Krukenberg led the French SS Sturmbataillon into the outer suburbs of Berlin, they collided with a stream of refugees, flowing south through streets jammed with abandoned and burnt out trucks and carts. Soviet fighters roared back and forth a few hundred metres above roof tops, abruptly diving to strafe the terrified refugees. In the midst of this miserable human flood, men in black SS or green Order Police uniforms shuffled disconsolately, eyes cast down. As the French convoy reached the crossing on the Falkenrehde canal, the bridge exploded, wounding some of Krukenberg’s men and crippling his car. They still had 15 very perilous miles to march before they reached the citadel. After fording the canal on foot, the battalion edged their way under the ringbahn and arrived at the Olympic Stadium about 6 miles west of the Chancellery. They broke into a Luftwaffe supply depot and were delighted to find that it was still crammed with
hundreds of bars of Swiss chocolate. The next morning, Krukenberg requisitioned another motor vehicle and drove ahead of the battalion through Charlottenburg towards the Brandenburg Gate, where Speer’s East–West Axis, leading east from the Victory Monument, had been turned into an airstrip. The citadel was eerily quiet. Just after midnight, Krukenberg drove across Pariser Platz then turned right along Wilhelm Strasse towards the Reich Chancellery. The sky over Berlin glowed a lurid red, and the SS men could hear the steady rumble of heavy artillery. Krukenberg was astonished: the citadel appeared to be undefended.

Krukenberg and a few officers entered the Chancellery garden and were admitted to the Führerbunker; descending a long concrete staircase they entered a strange, malodorous realm that Goebbels compared to a ‘maze of trenches’. Krukenberg requested a meeting with Army Chief of Staff, General Hans Krebs, the last senior military figure left in Hitler’s bunker community. The recycled air was warm and foetid: a stinging cocktail of oil, urine and sweat. A diesel engine spluttered and hummed. Hitler’s SS ‘Leibstandarte’ guards sat drinking morosely in a dingy little room not far from his study. As the Russian guns ceaselessly pounded Berlin’s shattered buildings, the lights inside the bunker flickered. Hitler had been ruined by this subterranean life. His face had turned pale, puffy and sallow; he was barely able to make his way from his private quarters to the military conference room unaided. He had become slovenly, his clothes splattered with food stains. Hitler still relished wolfing down his favourite Viennese cream cakes.

Krebs, as Krukenberg discovered, had not given up hope. Both he and Hitler had become convinced that German units were being mustered somewhere to the south by General Walther Wenck, referred to reverentially as ‘Wenck’s Army’, that would soon march north, brushing aside allegedly weak Soviet spearheads, and ‘rescue Berlin’. Before Krukenberg left that night to return to his men, he requested a meeting with Fegelein, who was, in theory, his commanding officer. A search was ordered – but Fegelein was nowhere to be found. A puzzled Krukenberg drove back towards the Olympic Stadium, which they reached just before dawn.

A few hours later, Krukenberg met with General Helmuth Weidling at his headquarters in Hohenzollerndamm in Wilmersdorf. Now, he told Krukenberg, he faced 2.5 million Soviet troops with just 2,700 Hitler Youth, 42,500 geriatric Volkssturm units, armed with a few Czech and Polish rifles – and dilapidated foreign Waffen-SS units.
³⁹

Berlin was now completely encircled. For the desperate inhabitants of Hitler’s subterranean fortress, the single link to the outside was the East-West Axis airstrip. As Russian shells descended on the centre of Berlin; as American and Russian soldiers exchanged cigarettes at Torgau on the Elbe; and as RAF bombers pounded
the abandoned Berghof in the Bavarian Alps, Hitler and Goebbels talked long into the night about how they might still win ‘this decisive battle’ and not leave the stage of history in disgrace. Goebbels conjured up a rosy posterity: if Europe was ‘Bolshevised’, then National Socialism would swiftly attain
ein Mythos
(a mythic status). History would look kindly on their hard-fought crusade against Bolshevism.

Shortly after dawn on 28 April, Soviet T34 tanks clattered across pontoon bridges thrown across the Landwehr canal close to Hallesches Tor, the gateway to the broad avenues that led straight to the citadel government quarter and the Reich Chancellery. The canal was the last line of defence – the moat around Hitler’s citadel. The French SS Sturmbataillon, reduced to just sixty men but reinforced by Hungarian and Romanian SS troops, threw up a fragile defensive line across the broad avenues of the old Friedrichstadt. Ammunition was in desperately short supply and the Russian tanks just kept on rolling across the pontoon bridges. No word came from the longed for ‘relief army’ of General Wenck.

On 29 April, Hitler convened his final military conference. He ordered that all defenders of the ‘capital city of the Reich’ must break out of the Soviet encirclement, join up with other units still fighting and take to the forests. Not a whisper had been heard from Wenck. As it turned out, Wenck had never got any further than Potsdam and was withdrawing to the Elbe. The ‘relief of Berlin’ had been a chimera. In his ‘Testament’, dictated to his faithful secretary Traudl Junge, Hitler blamed the downfall of Germany on ‘international Jewry’. He insisted that ‘I do not wish to fall into the hands of enemies who … will need a spectacle arranged by Jews’. At about 3.30 a.m. on 30 April 1945, Hitler and Eva Braun, who he had married the same day, committed suicide. Hitler’s valet Heinz Linge hauled the corpses up to the Chancellery garden. The loyal paladins of Hitler’s court, led by Goebbels and Bormann, watched solemnly as Linge emptied jerry cans of fuel over the remains of the Führer and his wife. As acrid black smoke rose into the air, Soviet shells began falling into the garden.
⁴⁰

As this macabre rite unfolded in the Chancellery garden, some twenty-five survivors of the French SS Sturmbataillon had taken refuge in the basement of a library on Friedrichstrasse. One of more fanatical French SS officers, Hauptsturmführer Henri Josef Fenet, lamented that its beautiful collections would soon be ripped to shreds by a drunken ‘Mongols’.
⁴¹
It was a rather beautiful spring day. In the Tiergarten, sunlight dappled the shredded trees. Twisted ruins stood out against the blue, cloud-flecked sky. Smoke drifted across rubble filled streets. On Tuesday 1 May, SS-Brigadeführer Mohnke appeared at Krukenberg’s headquarters at Stadtmitte U-bahn station. A party of German officers led by Colonel General Krebs had crossed the front lines to begin surrender negotiations with the Soviet
commanders. He admitted that ‘Army Wenck’, the promised relief force, had been beaten back. But he chose not to reveal that Hitler was dead. It was a gross deception. Mohnke now ordered Krukenberg to take his men to Potsdamerplatz station and halt the Soviet advance. This was the last line of defence. The obedient Krukenberg fought his back way as far as Hermann Göring’s Air Ministry – a massive granite edifice within sight of the Chancellery. Terrified Luftwaffe men cowered in the bombproof basement. Before Krukenberg could get any further along Leipzigerstrasse, he was called back to the Air Ministry building. Krebs had rescinded his orders. The battle for Berlin was over.