The Road to Berlin (123 page)

Zhukov intended to strike as speedily as possible into the very centre of Berlin. Kuznetsov’s 3rd Shock Army was already following its changed orders, which directed it into the heart of the city rather than merely outflanking it from the north. All armies, in addition to adjusting their line of advance, were also reorganizing into battle groups and assault detachments ready for the street fighting which now faced them; assault groups formed up with their complement of riflemen, tanks, artillery and the ubiquitous combat engineers—such groups usually about company strength with two or three 76mm guns, a couple of 45mm guns, a handful of tanks or
SP
guns, two or three platoons of sappers, and a flame-thrower platoon. Those flame-throwers came in for extensive use when spraying bunkers and strong-points—turning men, women and children into blazing, writhing torches screaming their way to death. Everywhere Soviet gunners laid down their barrages or else fired off the
Katyusha
multiple rocket launchers; with undisguised glee, army and divisional artillery commanders fired salvo after salvo into Berlin, a sustained bombardment augmented by the short-range fire of tank guns blasting away at houses and prominent buildings. To support 3rd Shock’s assault General Ignatov commanding 4th Artillery Breakthrough Corps let loose with the heaviest-calibre guns, opening fire at 10 o’clock in the morning.

During the course of 21 April Berzarin’s 5th Shock Army, with 12th Guards Tank Corps in support, also broke into Berlin from the north, smashing its way towards Hohenschönhausen by the evening, with one corps—32nd Rifle—fighting in Mahrzahn; 9th Rifle Corps held the left flank and was engaged south of Altlandsberg. Though Zhukov’s right-flank armies—3rd Shock, 47th Army and 2nd Guards Army—made considerable progress, Chuikov’s 8th Guards and Katukov’s 1st Tank Army found their way barred in the area of Fürstenwalde, Erkner and Petershagen to the east of Berlin, fighting off infantry counter-attacks and steering carefully through minefields.

Zhukov’s plan using three armies (47th, 3rd Shock and 2nd Guards Tank Army) to attack from the north-east and three armies (5th Shock, 8th Guards and 1st Guards Tank Army) to strike from the east and south-east aimed to split the defence into two parts, with Chuikov aiming at Bohnsdorf. The dire threat, however, seemed to come from the direction of Koniev’s front, sweeping from the south towards Berlin with two tank armies, slashing its way through
Gräser’s Fourth
Panzer
Army—Hitler moaned desperately about ‘treachery’ here—and amputating Ninth Army’s right flank. Finally Zhadov’s 5th Guards eliminated the Spremberg threat, while the imperturbable Pukhov with 13th Army followed in the wake of the tank armies, slicing away the German Army Group ‘Vistula’ from Army Group Centre. Koniev pushed Luchinskii’s 28th Army forward as fast as possible, but the lead formation of 28th Army—128th Rifle Corps—still lagged a good sixty miles behind the fast-moving tanks of Rybalko’s 3rd Guards Tank Army. To the astonishment of the Germans, Soviet tanks halted inexplicably at Barut, giving them time to organize the evacuation of the massive headquarters at Zossen, though the column of
Wehrmacht
vehicles transporting files and staff to Berlin found itself under violent attack from Soviet fighter-bombers. Rybalko’s 6th Tank Corps did press the attack on Zossen, using three tank brigades—51st, 52nd and 53rd. Soviet tank troops had captured the German High Command headquarters on 21 April, stumbling into an underground world of bewildering complexity, the floors, offices and galleries strewn with papers, maps and discarded uniforms.

Here was a genuine lair of the Fascist beast, with teleprinters still clacking and telephones ringing. The consoles carried large printed notices in elementary Russian, reading ‘not to damage the installations’. A telephone rang, a voice peremptorily demanded some general or other and with huge delight a Russian reply was returned—‘Ivan is here, you can - - - - -’. Four fat and drunken German soldiers watched this scene with astonishment, taking care to raise their hands high in the air. The engineer in charge, Hans Beltow, obliged his captors with a short tour of the communications set-up, where phones continued to ring and teleprinters spewed tape: ‘What would be your attitude to our attempts to get in touch with the Allies’ (message from the north), with the reply, ‘Fools, don’t you know the real state of affairs? The Ivans are on top of us …’ The Soviet girl interpreters picked up more tapes, began to translate and left off, blushing. The capture of Zossen, the very brain of the fearsome and dreaded
Wehrmacht
, was finally consummated with one extremely intoxicated German soldier being carried off on a stretcher.

While the tanks raced on north-westwards to Berlin, Koniev once more urged the speediest possible reduction of the entire German ‘Cottbus group’. Gordov at 3rd Guards Army had used his available tanks too slowly and had not manoeuvred with sufficient dexterity, but Zhadov’s operation at Spremberg was proceeding more or less according to plan and in co-operation with 13th Army; the main body of 5th Guards now deployed for the drive towards the Elbe. While Koniev continued to reinforce 3rd Guards in order to complete the envelopment of Ninth Army’s right flank—the ‘Frankfurt-Guben group’—he also became increasingly concerned about the gap opening between 3rd and 4th Guards tank armies, a gap which now reached for almost twenty miles and was growing with each hour. The only solution was to rush part of Luchinskii’s 28th Army into the Barut area and seal the breach. Given every available lorry, on
21 April Luchinskii rushed Colonel Shatskov’s 61st Rifle Division ahead with all possible speed and by late evening the division had closed up with Rybalko’s tank army. Lelyushenko continued his own drive, taking Calau, Luckau and Babelsberg and sweeping up to the south-western suburbs of Berlin. At Babelsberg 63rd Guards Tank Brigade, acting as forward detachment for the entire tank army, stumbled on a concentration camp with its many nationalities and managed to free Monsieur Herriot, former French Prime Minister, and his wife. By the evening of 21 April both Lelyushenko and Rybalko were within striking distance of the outer defences of Berlin and had already cut the ring-road. Koniev now decided to reinforce Rybalko with one artillery breakthrough corps (the 10th), an artillery breakthrough division and an
AA
artillery division, plus the 2nd Fighter Corps which came under Rybalko’s own operational control. The scene was thus set for Koniev’s own assault on the capital; within a matter of hours the whole of Rybalko’s 3rd Guards Tank Army was drawn up before Berlin, about to break into the city.

During the course of 22 April, with five rifle and four tank armies now engaged, the Soviet noose tightened perceptibly round the city. Kuznetsov’s 3rd Shock and Bogdanov’s 2nd Guards Tank Army (minus 9th Guards Tank Corps) attacked from the north, Chuikov’s 8th Guards and Katukov’s 1st Guards Tank Army (minus 11th Tank Corps) struck from the east, together with Berzarin’s 5th Shock Army; Perkhorovich’s 47th Army swept northwards and then struck back into Berlin from the west, using 9th Guards Tank Corps. From the south came Koniev’s tanks and infantry: Rybalko’s 3rd Guards Tank Army with three rifle divisions from Luchinskii’s 28th striking straight from the south, and Lelyushenko’s 4th Guards Tank Army (minus 5th Guards Mechanized Corps) also sweeping round to the south-west. Any idea on the part of Kuznetsov and Bogdanov that they might take the city in a rush—straight off the march—vanished for the pipe-dream it was when both rifle and tank formations became involved with the complicated business of street fighting. Marshal Zhukov at once marked out an offensive zone for 2nd Guards, assigning 1st Mechanized Corps to an assault on Rosenthal–Wittenau and thence into the western part of Siemensstadt, while 12th Guards Tank Corps would attack towards Pankow-Reinickendorf, cut into the eastern sector of Siemensstadt and make for Charlottenburg; 9th Guards Tank Corps would drive north-westwards and cut the German escape route to the west.

The northerly sweep succeeded admirably. Towards 7 o’clock on the evening of 22 April, 9th Guards Tank Corps, after a day’s fighting, crossed the Havel and established a useful bridgehead to the east of Hennigsdorf. 125th Rifle Corps with the tanks of 9th Guards were now in a position to attack southwards on Potsdam in order to link up with Koniev’s units—thus providing a northerly encircling arm—while 129th Rifle Corps continued to fight for the Tegel area. Kuznetsov, commanding 3rd Shock, decided to regroup during the night of 21–22 April, having received orders to direct the axis of his attack from the
north towards the centre of Berlin; he proposed to advance towards a line running from Rosenthal, through Wilhelmsruh, Schönholz and into the southern sector of Weissensee, using three rifle corps to chop through the defences of northern Berlin and wipe out the remnants of the 11th
SS
Motorized Division, police units drafted to fight in the front line and some
Volkssturm
battalions, those elderly Home Guards facing battle-tested Soviet divisions with only an armband, a rifle or a
Panzerfaust
.

Deploying into assault squads and assault groups—with each corps holding at least one division in reserve—3rd Shock units proceeded to lay down massive artillery fire, blasting away yard by yard, siting guns in any open space and lining up the
Katyusha
rocket-launchers to fire phosphorus into strong-points and buildings, setting off chains of fires. Rather than fight for separate buildings the tanks would go forward and blow them to pieces section by section, eliminating snipers; the improvised barricades crumpled and splintered as more tanks heaved them aside, while anything more substantial was blasted away by guns firing over open sights and at close range. As buildings collapsed in a fiery rain of burning timber and blazing frontages, piling mounds of rubble in the streets, Soviet infantry took to tunnelling their way from cellar to cellar, blowing aside walls and doors with anti-tank rifles; the sappers laid the heavier charges to clear more passages. Sheltering civilians, huddled in basements and underground shelters, found themselves in the thick of this ferocious fighting, choked, blinded and maimed amidst the thunder of explosive charges or swept by the terrifying spurts of flame-throwers. Dragging the dead and dying out of the rubble at street level exposed the inhabitants to the sportive habits of Soviet airmen, diving down to rake streets, soldiers, fire-fighters and anything that moved. Soviet planes also cruised higher, spotting for the guns.

Striking towards Weissensee at 10 o’clock on the morning of 22 April, after a short and murderous artillery bombardment, 3rd Shock Army renewed its attack, skirmishing with small groups of
Volkssturm
, some
SS
squads and battling with the anti-aircraft guns firing with depressed barrels at Soviet tanks. Weissensee—once noted for its Communist loyalty—threw out surrender flags quickly enough, strips of red torn from Nazi banners. The officers and men of the forward fighting units, dressed for combat in several varieties of uniform but laden with automatic weapons and ammunition, seemed to have nothing on their minds but clearing the area under attack, bursting into cellars and buildings, searching for German soldiers and weapons, pocketing the odd watch but leaving the women alone. The majority of these first-echelon units were well turned out and even properly shaved, clearly under the control of their officers, some speaking excellent German or otherwise relying on their girl interpreters. Some rapid screening took place, men were rounded up—or released on a show of genuine anti-Nazi credentials—and the women set to cleaning up the shattered buildings. But the loutish, drunken, indisciplined murderous second echelon—much of it manned with brutalized men taken from German slave camps liberated on the Red Army’s
line of march, erstwhile captives given a machine-pistol and pressed immediately into the Soviet ranks—had yet to hit Berlin, an uncontrollable mob intent on pillage and rape, though not without those same contradictions of the maudlin and the bestial consuming them.

Berzarin’s 5th Shock, supported by 12th Guards and 11th Tank Corps, drove on into Kaulsdorf, Biesdorf and towards Karlshorst, cutting into the eastern defences. Chuikov’s 8th Guards, with Katukov’s tank army, ran into heavy opposition at Erkner and Petershagen, but in the afternoon of 22 April the infantry and tanks had reached the river Dahme, with the right flank fighting in the woods east of Mahlsdorf and Uhlenhorst. Ahead lay the Spree, with an assault crossing planned for 23 April under cover of a thirty-minute artillery barrage. Tank army commander Katukov during the course of the day received a bizarre and disconcerting call from one of his corps commanders, Babadzhanyan, who reported that he had some Japanese on his hands. An incredulous Katukov repeated ‘Japanese’ in dazed tones, only to be told that Soviet tank troops had run into a Japanese mission near Erkner; Katukov, who found himself burdened with a number of diplomatic incidents that day, instructed Babadzhanyan to bring the Japanese to his
HQ
at once. Then there was the affair of the mineral water: scorched and thirsty Soviet troops had ‘liberated’ several cases of mineral water from a neutral embassy, gulping it all down, only to have protests rain down on the head of the army commander. Katukov could only wonder what mean attitude prompted protests like this.

Meanwhile Berlin burned, raked by Soviet guns and torn into sprawling ruins by Soviet assault squads, blasting their own passage. Lelyushenko’s 4th Guards tanks, driving on relentlessly, swept along on their south-westerly path and on 22 April were only twenty miles from Perkhorovich’s 47th Army hammering down from the north, closing a giant outer encirclement round the city to the west. Crashing on its way to the west, 5th Guards Mechanized Corps suddenly came upon another German concentration camp at Treuenbrietzen holding large numbers of Allied prisoners of war; Red Army Lieutenant Zharchinskii leading a reconnaissance group opened fire on the
SS
guards and was himself mortally wounded in the exchange of fire, but in a final gallant last stand he cut down the camp commandant and could see German resistance collapsing. Among the liberated prisoners was Maj.-Gen. Otto Ruge, commander of the Norwegian Army. Picking up speed, 5th Mechanized raced on to Jüterborg and drove on to an aerodrome packed with aircraft (144 damaged machines, 362 aircraft engines and 3,000 bombs, all duly handed over to the 9th Guards Fighter Division), colliding with a German division in the process of forming up on the Jüterborg Parade Ground. The sudden appearance of Soviet tanks sent men and machines scattering in all directions, though the guns fell at once into the hands of the Russians. With the Beelitz–Treuenbrietzen line in their hands, Soviet tanks continued to drive forward and once in the area of Saarmund there was every prospect of closing on Potsdam and Brandenburg—and completing the encirclement
of the city, as well as sealing it off from any attempt to mount a relief attack from the west.