The Road to Berlin (131 page)

On 30 April 1945 the
Führer
took his own life and thus it is that we who remain—having sworn him an oath of loyalty—are left alone. According to the
Führer
’s order, you, German soldiers, were to fight on for Berlin, in spite of the fact that ammunition has run out and in spite of the general situation, which makes further resistance on our part senseless.

My orders are: to cease resistance forthwith. [Signed:] Weidling, General of Artillery, former Commandant of the Berlin defence zone.

Save for removing the word ‘former’ from Weidling’s designation of himself, Sokolovskii and Chuikov were content to let the order stand in its entirety.

The morning of 2 May brought with it a low fog and light, chilling rain. Columns of German prisoners formed up in the shattered streets and ruined squares. At about 5 am, after one more Soviet attack, the German garrison in the basement of the
Reichstag
began its surrender: a whole column of men moved out in the morning. To the west of the city a vast traffic of military vehicles, civilian trucks, horse-drawn carriages and pedestrians made its way to the bridges leading to Spandau, a huge throng which pushed and struggled forward amidst sporadic firing and random shelling. The buildings burned on in the city, the glare lighting up the jagged edges of ruined facades and shattered walls. The
Unter den Linden presented an unrelieved panoply of ruins, patrolled by Soviet tanks; the
Tiergarten
, wreathed in more smoke, presented a spectacle of shattered and uprooted trees, muddied and bloodied slit-trenches and pulverised masonry. The
Reichskanzlei
had been pounded into rubble, though here as elsewhere scores of red Soviet flags dotted the wreckage. Lt.-Col. Gumerov’s 150th Rifle Regiment from the 301st Rifle Division (5th Shock Army) reported the capture of the
Reichskanzlei
, stumbling upon a great array of Nazi symbols—the massive bronze eagle, the
Adolf Hitler
standard, Field-Marshal Rommel’s baton and more heraldic trophies. In the garden the Soviet officers finally came upon the
Führerbunker
itself, giving off an overpowering stench which discouraged a thorough inspection, but in the courtyard at the western entry Colonel Shevtsov showed Maj.-Gen. Antonov, 301st commander, the burned bodies of Goebbels and his wife. Antonov meanwhile placed the whole area under special guard, appointing Shevtsov commandant of the
Reichskanzlei
.

At 3 pm on the afternoon of 2 May Soviet guns ceased fire in Berlin. A great enveloping silence fell. Soviet troops cheered and shouted, breaking out the food and drink. Along what had once been Hitler’s own parade route, columns of Soviet tanks were drawn up as if for inspection, the crews jumping from their machines to embrace all and sundry at this new-found cease-fire. Something like the great clean-up had already begun in several sectors with the establishment of a
komendatura
, a town-major’s office under a Soviet officer, and the installation where possible of local German administrators and officials. Every item of value was to be catalogued, every file faithfully scrutinized and hoarded—except, ironically, a giant card-index compilation of the Nazi government’s suspects, flung about in gay abandon by gleeful Soviet soldiers.
SMERSH
, Soviet counter-intelligence, did not neglect its duties and its passion for uncovering sabotage and subversion. Lt.-Gen. Krivoshein, commanding 1st Mechanized Corps (2nd Guards Tank Army), experienced an uncomfortable moment: in a box of photographs
SMERSH
came across a picture of General Guderian, a
Panzer
commander much feared by the Red Army, in the company of a Soviet tank officer, none other than Krivoshein, seen smiling broadly. Called on to explain this highly suspicious photograph, Krivoshein swore that he had had no secret contacts with Guderian though he had promised him to come as a guest to Berlin—and he was doing exactly that, right now. The photograph dated back to 1939, to the Nazi-Soviet pact, when in the partition of Poland his own 29th Independent Tank Brigade made for Brest-Litovsk and linked up with German motorized troops under Guderian’s command. After a formal parade, both officers mounted a small reviewing stand and were duly photographed. Nothing serious came of Krivoshein’s encounter with
SMERSH;
others were not so lucky.

SMERSH
had other pressing duties, the most urgent being the search for Hitler and other Nazi leaders. The Red Army not only brought its tanks and guns to Berlin but also a great train of experts, all uniformed but all specialists, whether doctors, scientists, diplomats or historians: a political entourage moved
in complete as the ‘Ulbricht group’, while the ‘Mikoyan group’ attended immediately to the dismantling and transfer of German factories and industrial plant to the Soviet Union. Stalin had been informed at once about the Goebbels–Bormann letter announcing Hitler’s suicide—indeed, the express intention was to inform Stalin first as part of the strategy to gain Soviet acceptance of the ‘new’ German government. Lt.-Gen. Telegin, the political member of the military soviet of 1st Belorussian Front, had already asked Moscow for an expert in forensic medicine to be dispatched to the front to deal with ‘a highly important matter’. Medical Colonel Dr Faust Shkaravskii was immediately ordered to Berlin, towards Buch and 3rd Shock Army area. Lt.-Col. Ivan Klimenko, commander of the
SMERSH
unit with Perevertkin’s 79th Rifle Corps (3rd Shock Army), was much nearer—he was presently in the courtyard of the
Reichskanzlei
on the afternoon of 2 May. Klimenko had only travelled from his temporary headquarters in the Plötzensee Prison, where he had been interrogating German prisoners taken in the area of the
Reichskanzlei
, probing for information on the fate of Hitler and Goebbels—some mentioned the suicides and four prisoners were taken along with Klimenko to the actual site.

How Klimenko—an officer from 3rd Shock Army—managed to invade 5th Shock’s bailiwick, bring his party into the garden of the
Reichskanzlei
, have one of his German prisoners excitedly identify the corpses of Goebbels and his wife and then transport the remains to Plötzensee Prison, has never been explained. During the night Klimenko continued his several interrogations in an effort to locate Hitler’s body, a process interrupted by news that Hitler’s body had now been found. Vice–Admiral Voss, Dönitz’s representative on Hitler’s staff, had helped to identify the Goebbels family (the bodies of the children having been found in the bunker) and he, too, was questioned closely about Hitler: all the Admiral could say was that the corpse had been burned in the garden, but that was enough to send Klimenko racing back to the
Reichskanzlei
and resume the search. A body taken from an emergency watertank bore an astonishing resemblance to Hitler, an appearance so plausible that Admiral Voss readily took it for the
Führer
. Closer inspection revealed that the body—Hitler’s double, whether officially or unofficially so—was wearing darned socks and thus disqualified himself as the real
Führer
. Admiral Voss now voiced his own doubts.

Klimenko renewed his questioning, roping in any prisoner who could help. Ironically, one of Klimenko’s own men had already discovered the two corpses, that of Hitler and Eva Braun. Private Churakov tugged Hitler’s corpse partly out of a crater and also spotted Eva Braun’s legs, but in the excitement over the ‘double’ and in view of Klimenko’s conviction that the bodies must be in the
Reichskanzlei
these corpses were simply reburied. Belatedly (and after a senior Soviet diplomat brought to Berlin rejected the ‘double’ on the basis of his personal recollection of the
Führer)
Klimenko ruminated on Churakov’s discovery of those two bodies in the bomb crater—his concern increased by the fact that his original ‘Hitler corpse’, the discarded double as it now proved to be, had mysteriously
vanished. On the morning of 5 May, Klimenko returned with two soldiers from his detachment to the
Reichskanzlei
garden, located the crater and dug up the two bodies, at the same time coming upon the corpses of two dogs buried a little deeper. The four bodies, human and animal, were wrapped in blankets, placed in wooden boxes and lodged—under guard—in a room in the
Reichskanzlei
until nightfall, when a lorry transferred everything to 3rd Shock Army
HQ
at Buch on the north-eastern outskirts of Berlin. Meanwhile Klimenko enjoyed a little luck: he stumbled across
SS
soldier Mengershausen, who had watched the cremation and could specify the site of the crater where the bodies had been buried. Churakov’s find and Mengershausen’s testimony matched in every respect.

The autopsies began on 8 May in the mortuary of the military hospital at Berlin-Buch. Meanwhile the search for witnesses intensified, the first task being to confirm that the two corpses found in the crater were indeed those of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun. Colonel Mirozhnichenko, head of
SMERSH
(3rd Shock Army), and his deputy Vasili Gorbushin were charged with this mission and set to work checking on the medical evidence which the Soviet military doctors provided through their grisly labours. The result was interminable interrogation and an endless search for confirmation, in some ways a strangely contradictory process since it involved establishing that here indeed was the corpse of Hitler and yet at the same time exploring the possibility that Hitler might have escaped. Soviet interrogators hammered away relentlessly at two questions: could Hitler have escaped from Berlin and what truth was there in the stories of Hitler’s suicide—how was this actually carried out?

While
SMERSH
officers raked over this macabre rubbish of the
Reich
and in spite of the cease-fire enacted in Berlin itself, German units continued to fight desperately to escape the Soviet trap closing on them from many directions. In the early hours of 2 May 3rd Shock Army in Berlin held off an attempt by some 300 troops to break through to Pankow; Bogdanov’s 2nd Guards Tank Army fought off a similar attempt by a battle group of roughly the same size. But in the area of 125th Rifle Corps—holding the western bank of the river Havel—a powerful German column some 17,000 strong with armoured vehicles made a bid for freedom, striking from the Ruhleben area and aiming for the bridges over the Havel, a running battle which lasted until 5 May as Soviet troops pursued retreating Germans through Staaken and on to Ketzin. A column almost twice as strong also struck out from Spandau on the morning of 2 May, making its way to the west and causing a hurried evacuation of its airfield by the Soviet 265th Fighter Division.

The fury of these attacks launched by men often on the verge of total exhaustion took more than one Soviet unit by surprise. To the south-west of Berlin, Lelyushenko experienced one such encounter: taking a nap towards midnight on 30 April at his tank army
HQ
near Schankensdorf, he was awakened abruptly by shouts from his staff—‘Enemy! Look, hordes of them … bring the guns to bear.’ Those German troops who had managed to escape from Wannsee island to the
mainland had now broken through the Soviet lines and were bearing down in columns on Lelyushenko’s vulnerable
HQ
. Soviet staff officers scrambled for their weapons as an urgent call for help went out to the nearest unit, 7th Guards Motorcycle Regiment equipped with ten tanks, a battery of guns and 200 men with machine-pistols. Fierce though this attack was, it did not compare in savagery with the fighting to hold off Wenck and hold back Busse, the one pressing on Yermakov’s 5th Mechanized Corps from the west and the other from the east.

Wenck’s left flank could not hold much longer but he was determined to stay as long as possible to effect a junction with Busse’s Ninth, or the remnants of it. By 10 am on the morning of 1 May only a little more than 2,000 yards separated the two German armies, with 12th Guards Mechanized Brigade struggling to hold them off from each other. With only two Tiger tanks left and those fuelled for the last time from abandoned vehicles, as men literally crawled from overwhelming fatigue and women took up the load of the remaining weapons, Busse urged one last superhuman effort to make contact with Wenck. On the morning of that same 1 May Busse’s lead troops heard firing from behind the Russians facing them and suddenly, incredibly, found themselves within arm’s reach of Wenck’s Twelfth. Behind them lay the ghastliest route strewn with dead, dying and wounded men, men who had been savagely mutilated and men no longer able to march, plus the trudging columns of civilians—the wreckage of an army once 200,000 strong.

While Lelyushenko struggled furiously to spring the trap shut on Busse, further to the north Rokossovskii with 2nd Belorussian Front raced to trap von Manteuffel’s Third
Panzer
—and also raced the British Army into Lübeck. Fedyuninskii’s 2nd Shock Army and Batov’s 65th drove north-westwards towards the Baltic coast, taking Anklam, Greifswald and making for Stralsund; 70th and 49th Army pushed on to the west, rolling over a bout of German resistance in the Waren–Neustrelitz–Fürstenberg area. On 3 May forward elements of 70th Army made contact with the British 2nd Army south-west of Wismar, after which the main body closed up to the Baltic coast along a sector running from Wismar to Warnemunde and taking in the eastern edge of the Schweriner-See. In the ensuing twenty-four hours both 70th and 49th Army, with 8th Mechanized Corps and 3rd Guards Cavalry Corps, had reached the demarcation line with the British, and Soviet cavalry were already on the Elbe. Romanovskii’s 19th Army and Fedyuninskii’s 2nd Shock launched their several expeditions to clear German forces from the islands of Wollin, Usedom and Rügen—two divisions from 19th Army were also dispatched to the Danish island of Bornholm—but by 4–5 May Rokossovskii’s main offensive operations had begun to die away.

At the close of this gigantic effort put forth by the Red Army—the capture of Berlin, the drive to the Elbe and to the Baltic—the Soviet command reckoned that it had destroyed no less than seventy German infantry divisions, twelve
Panzer
divisions and eleven motorized divisions: 480,000 German officers and men were tallied as prisoners of war, 1,500 tanks and
SP
guns captured, plus
10,000 guns and mortars and a massive array of aircraft. In Berlin itself on 2 May Zhukov’s armies made 100,000 men prisoner, and Koniev’s troops took 34,000. The cost to Berlin: probably 100,000 civilian and an undetermined number of German military casualties; to the three Soviet Fronts—1st and 2nd Belorussian, 1st Ukrainian—for the three weeks from 16 April to 8 May: 304,887 men killed, wounded and missing, 2,156 tanks and
SP
guns (with Koniev losing over 800), 1,220 guns and mortars, and 527 combat aircraft lost. By the most conservative calculation, the battle for Berlin thus cost half a million human beings their lives, their well-being or their sanity.