Berlin: The Downfall 1945

9. Objective Berlin

On 8 March, just when the Pomeranian operation was getting into full momentum, Stalin suddenly summoned Zhukov back to Moscow. It was a strange moment to drag a Front commander away from his headquarters. Zhukov drove straight from the central airport out to Stalin’s dacha, where the Soviet leader was recuperating from exhaustion and stress.

After Zhukov had reported on the Pomeranian operation and the fighting in the Oder bridgeheads, Stalin led him outside for a walk in the grounds. He talked about his childhood. When they returned to the dacha for tea, Zhukov asked Stalin if anything had been heard of his son Yakov Djugashvili, who had been a prisoner of the Germans since 1941. Stalin had disowned his own son then for having allowed himself to be taken alive, but now his attitude seemed different. He did not answer Zhukov’s question for some time. ‘Yakov is never going to get out of prison alive,’ he said eventually. ‘The murderers will shoot him. According to our inquiries, they are keeping him isolated and are trying to persuade him to betray the Motherland.’ He was silent for another long moment. ‘No,’ he said firmly. ‘Yakov would prefer any kind of death to betraying the Motherland.’

When Stalin referred to ‘our inquiries’, they were of course Abakumov’s inquiries. The most recent news of Yakov had come from General Stepanovic, a commander of the Yugoslav gendarmerie. Stepanovic had been released by Zhukov’s own troops at the end of January, but then grabbed by SMERSH for interrogation. Stepanovic had earlier been in Straflager X-C in Lübeck with Senior Lieutenant Djugashvili. According to Stepanovic, Yakov had conducted himself ‘independently and proudly’. He refused to stand up if a German officer entered his room and turned his back if they spoke to him. The Germans had put him in a punishment cell. Despite an interview printed in the German press, Yakov Djugashvili insisted that he had never replied to any question from anyone. After an escape from the camp, he was taken away and flown to an unknown destination. To this day, the manner of his death is not clear, although the most common story is that he threw himself at the perimeter fence to force the guards to shoot him. Stalin may have changed his attitude towards his own son, but he remained pitiless towards the hundreds of thousands of other Soviet prisoners of war who had in most cases suffered an even worse fate than Yakov.

Stalin changed the subject. He said that he was ‘very pleased’ with the results of the Yalta conference. Roosevelt had been most friendly. Stalin’s secretary, Poskrebyshev, then came in with papers for Stalin to sign. This was a signal for Zhukov to leave, yet it was also the moment for Stalin to explain the reason for the urgent summons to Moscow. ‘Go to the Stavka,’ he told Zhukov, ‘and look at the calculations on the Berlin operation with Antonov. We will meet here tomorrow at 13.00.’

Antonov and Zhukov, who evidently sensed that there was a reason for the urgency, worked through the night. Next morning, Stalin changed both the time and the place. He came into Moscow, despite his weak state, so that a full-scale conference could take place at the Stavka with Malenkov, Molotov and other members of the State Defence Committee. Antonov made his presentation. When he had finished, Stalin gave his approval and told him to issue the orders for detailed planning.

Zhukov acknowledged in his memoirs that ‘when we were working on the Berlin operation we took into account the action of our allies’. He even admitted their concern that ‘the British command was still nursing the dream of capturing Berlin before the Red Army reached it’. What he does not mention, however, was that on 7 March, the day before Stalin summoned him so urgently to Moscow, the US Army had seized the bridge at Remagen. Stalin had immediately seen the implications of the Western Allies breaching the Rhine barrier so quickly.

The British desire to head for Berlin had never been concealed from Stalin. During Churchill’s visit to Moscow in October 1944, Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke told Stalin that after an encirclement of the Ruhr, ‘the main axis of the Allied advance would then be directed on Berlin’. Churchill had re-emphasized the point. They hoped to cut off about 150,000 Germans in Holland, ‘then drive steadily towards Berlin’. Stalin had made no comment.

There was a very strong reason for Stalin to want the Red Army to occupy Berlin first. In May 1942, three months before the start of the battle of Stalingrad, he had summoned Beria and the leading atomic physicists to his dacha. He was furious to have heard through spies that the United States and Britain were working on a uranium bomb. Stalin blamed Soviet scientists for not having taken the threat seriously, yet he was the one who had dismissed as a ‘provocation’ the first intelligence on the subject. This had come from the British spy John Cairncross in November 1941. Stalin’s angry dismissal of the information had been a curious repeat of his behaviour when warned of the German invasion six months before.

Over the next three years, the Soviet nuclear research programme, soon codenamed Operation Borodino, was dramatically accelerated with detailed research information from the Manhattan Project provided by Communist sympathizers, such as Klaus Fuchs. Beria himself took over supervision of the work and eventually brought Professor Igor Kurchatov’s team of scientists under complete NKVD control.

The Soviet programme’s main handicap, however, was a lack of uranium. No deposits had been identified yet in the Soviet Union. The main reserves in Europe lay in Saxony and Czechoslovakia, under Nazi control, but before the Red Army reached Berlin they appear to have had only the sketchiest information on the deposits there. On Beria’s instructions, the Soviet Purchasing Committee in the United States asked the American War Production Board to sell it eight tons of uranium oxide. After consultation with Major General Groves, the head of the Manhattan Project, the US government authorized purely token supplies, mainly in the hope of finding out what the Soviet Union was up to.

Uranium deposits were discovered in Kazakhstan in 1945, but still in insufficient quantities. Stalin and Beria’s greatest hope of getting the project moving ahead rapidly therefore lay in seizing German supplies of uranium before the Western Allies got to them. Beria had discovered from Soviet scientists who had worked there that the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics in Dahlem, a south-western suburb of Berlin, was the centre of German atomic research. Work was carried out there in a lead-lined bunker known as the ‘Virus House’, a codename designed to discourage outside interest. Next to this bunker stood the Blitzturm, or ‘tower of lightning’, which housed a cyclotron capable of creating 1.5 million volts. Beria, however, did not know that most of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute’s scientists, equipment and material, including seven tons of uranium oxide, had been evacuated to Haigerloch in the Black Forest. But a German bureaucratic mix-up had led to a further consignment being sent to Dahlem instead of Haigerloch. The rush for Dahlem was not to be entirely in vain.

There had never been any doubt in the minds of the Nazi leadership that the fight for Berlin would be the climax of the war. ‘The National Socialists,’ Goebbels had always insisted, ‘will either win together in Berlin or die together in Berlin.’ Perhaps unaware that he was paraphrasing Karl Marx, he used to declare that ‘whoever possesses Berlin possesses Germany’. Stalin, on the other hand, undoubtedly knew the rest of Marx’s quote: ‘And whoever controls Germany, controls Europe.’

The American war leaders, however, were clearly unfamiliar with such European dicta. It was perhaps this ignorance of European power politics which provoked Brooke into his uncharitable opinion after a working breakfast with Eisenhower in London on 6 March: ‘There is no doubt that he [Eisenhower] is a most attractive personality and at the same time [has] a very very limited brain from a strategic point of view.’ The basic problem, which Brooke did not fully acknowledge, was that the Americans at that stage simply did not view Europe in strategic terms. They had a simple and limited objective: to win the war against Germany quickly, with as few casualties as possible, and then concentrate on Japan. Eisenhower — like his President, the chiefs of staff and other senior officials — failed to look ahead and completely misread Stalin’s character. This exasperated British colleagues and led to the main rift in the western alliance. Some British officers even referred to Eisenhower’s deference to Stalin as ‘Have a Go, Joe’, a call used by London prostitutes when soliciting American soldiers.

On 2 March, Eisenhower signalled to Major General John R. Deane, the US liaison officer in Moscow, ‘In view of the great progress of the Soviet offensive, is there likely to be any major change in Soviet plans from those explained to Tedder [on 15 January]?’ He then asked whether there would be ‘a lull in operations mid-March to mid-May’. But Deane found it impossible to obtain any reliable information from General Antonov. And when finally they did state their intentions, they deliberately misled Eisenhower to conceal their determination to seize Berlin first.

In the difference of views over strategy, personalities unavoidably played a large part. Eisenhower suspected that Montgomery’s demands to be allowed to lead a single, full-blooded thrust towards Berlin were prompted solely by prima donna ambitions. Montgomery had done little to conceal his conviction that he should be the field commander while Eisenhower was left in a figurehead position. Above all, Montgomery’s unforgivable boasting after the Ardennes battle had clearly entrenched Eisenhower’s bad opinion of him. ‘His relations with Monty are quite insoluble,’ Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke wrote in his diary after that breakfast meeting on 6 March. ‘He only sees the worst side of Monty.’ Yet the Americans, with some justification, felt that Montgomery would in any case be the worst choice to lead a rapid thrust. He was so notoriously pedantic about staff details that he took longer than any other general to mount an attack.

Montgomery’s 21st Army Group in the north at Wesel faced the greatest concentration of German troops. He therefore planned a set-piece crossing of the Rhine with large-scale amphibious and airborne operations. But his minutely prepared performance was rather preempted by events further south. Hitler’s frenzied reaction to the US First Army’s rapidly reinforced bridgehead at Remagen was to order massive counter-attacks. This stripped other sectors of the Rhine. Soon, Patton’s Third Army, which had been clearing the Palatinate with a panache reminiscent of that local cavalry leader Prince Rupert, was across the river at a number of points south of Koblenz.

Once Montgomery’s 21st Army Group had also crossed the Rhine on the morning of 24 March, Eisenhower, Churchill and Brooke met on the banks of the river in euphoric mood. Montgomery believed that Eisenhower would allow him to charge north-eastwards towards the Baltic coast at Lübeck and perhaps even Berlin. He was soon disabused.

General Hodges had been building up the Remagen bridgehead and Patton, in a remarkably short time, had developed his main bridgehead south of Mainz. Eisenhower ordered them to converge their attacks eastwards before Hodges’s First Army swung left to encircle the Ruhr from the south. He then, to Montgomery’s utter dismay, detached Simpson’s Ninth Army from his 21st Army Group and ordered Montgomery to head for Hamburg and Denmark, not for Berlin. The US Ninth Army was to form the northern part of the Ruhr operation to surround Field Marshal Model’s Army Group defending Germany’s last industrial region. The greatest blow to British hopes of a push north-eastwards towards Berlin was Eisenhower’s decision on 30 March to concentrate efforts on central and southern Germany.

Bradley’s 12th Army Group, augmented by the Ninth Army, was to cross the centre of Germany as soon as it had secured the Ruhr to head for Leipzig and Dresden. In the south, General Devers’s 6th Army Group would head for Bavaria and northern Austria. Then, to the anger of the British chiefs of staff, who had not been consulted about the important change of emphasis in the overall plan, Eisenhower communicated its details to Stalin at the end of March without telling them or his British deputy, Air Chief Marshal Tedder. This signal, known as SCAF-252, became a bitter issue between the two allies.

Eisenhower weighted his attack southwards partly because he was convinced that Hitler would withdraw his armies to Bavaria and northwestern Austria for a last-ditch defence of an Alpenfestung, or Alpine Fortress. He conceded later in his memoirs that Berlin was ‘politically and psychologically important as the symbol of remaining German power’, but he believed that ‘it was not the logical nor the most desirable objective for the forces of the Western Allies’. He justified this decision on the grounds that the Red Army on the Oder was much closer and the logistic effort would have meant holding up his central and southern armies, and his objective of meeting up with the Red Army to split Germany in two.

On the banks of the Rhine only six days before Churchill had hoped that ‘our armies will advance against little or no opposition and will reach the Elbe, or even Berlin, before the Bear’. He was now thoroughly dismayed. It seemed as if Eisenhower and Marshall were far too concerned with placating Stalin. The Soviet authorities were apparently furious about American fighters shooting down a number of their aircraft in a dogfight. Their reaction was in strong contrast to Stalin’s remarks to Tedder in January that such accidents were bound to happen in war. The incident had taken place on 18 March between Berlin and Küstrin. The US Air Force fighter pilots thought that they had engaged eight German aircraft and claimed two Focke-Wulf 190s destroyed. Red Army aviation, on the other hand, asserted that the eight aircraft were Soviet and that six of them had been shot down, with two of their flyers killed and one seriously wounded. The mistake was blamed on the ‘criminal action of individuals of the American air force’.

Ironically, it was the Americans, in the form of Allen Dulles of the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) in Berne, who provoked the biggest row with the Soviet Union at this time. Dulles had been approached by SS Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff about an armistice in north Italy. The Soviet leadership’s demands to participate in the talks were rejected in case Wolff might break them off. This was a blunder. Churchill acknowledged that the Soviet Union was understandably alarmed. Stalin clearly feared a separate peace on the Western Front. His recurrent nightmare was a revived Wehrmacht supplied by the Americans, even if this was an illogical fear. The vast majority of Germany’s most formidable formations had either been destroyed, captured or surrounded, and even if the Americans had provided all the weapons in the world, the Wehrmacht in 1945 bore little resemblance to the fighting machine of 1941.

Stalin also suspected that the huge numbers of Wehrmacht troops surrendering to the Americans and British in the west of Germany revealed not just their fear of becoming prisoners of the Red Army. He thought it was part of a deliberate attempt to open up the Western Front to allow the Americans and British to reach Berlin first. In fact, the reason for such large surrenders at that time was Hitler’s refusal to allow any withdrawal. If he had brought his armies back to defend the Rhine after the Ardennes débâcle, the Allies would have faced a very hard task. But he did not, and this allowed them to trap so many divisions west of the Rhine. Similarly, Field Marshal Model’s fixed defence of the Ruhr was equally doomed. ‘We owed much to Hitler,’ Eisenhower commented later.

In any case, Churchill felt strongly that until Stalin’s post-war intentions in central Europe were clearer, then the West had to grab every good card available for bargaining with him. Recent reports of what was happening in Poland, with mass arrests of prominent figures who might not support Soviet rule, strongly suggested that Stalin had no intention of allowing an independent government to develop. Molotov had also become extremely aggressive. He was refusing to allow any western representatives into Poland. In fact, his general interpretation of their agreement at Yalta was very different from what both the British and the Americans had understood to be ‘the letter and the spirit’ of their accord.

Churchill’s earlier confidence based on Stalin’s lack of interference in Greece had now started to disintegrate. He suspected that both he and Roosevelt had been the victims of a massive confidence trick. Churchill still did not seem to realize that Stalin judged others by himself. It would appear that he had acted on the principle that Churchill, after all his comments at Yalta about having to face the House of Commons over the subject of Poland, had simply needed a bit of democratic gloss to keep any critics quiet until everything was irreversibly settled. Stalin now appeared to be angered by Churchill’s renewed complaints over the Soviet Union’s behaviour in Poland.

The Soviet authorities were well aware of the main political and military disagreements between the Western Allies, even if they did not know all the details immediately. The rift grew even greater after Eisenhower’s SCAF-252 signal to Stalin. Eisenhower, stung by the furious British reaction, wrote later that the Combined Chiefs of Staff, after Tedder’s visit to Moscow in January, had allowed him to communicate directly with Moscow ‘on matters that were exclusively military in character’. ‘Later in the campaign,’ he wrote, ‘my interpretation of this authorization was sharply challenged by Mr Churchill, the difficulty arising out of the age-old truth that politics and military activities are never completely separable.’ In any case, Eisenhower’s view that Berlin itself was ‘no longer a particularly important objective’ demonstrated an astonishing naϊvety.

The irony, however, is that Eisenhower’s decision to avoid Berlin was almost certainly the right one, albeit for totally the wrong reasons. For Stalin, the Red Army’s capture of Berlin was not a matter of bargaining positions in the post-war game. He saw it as far too important for that. If any forces from the Western Allies had crossed the Elbe and headed for Berlin, they would almost certainly have found themselves warned off by the Soviet air force, and artillery if in range. Stalin would have had no compunction in condemning the Western Allies and accusing them of criminal adventurism. While Eisenhower gravely underestimated the importance of Berlin, Churchill, on the other hand, underestimated both Stalin’s determination to secure the city at any price and the genuine moral outrage which would have greeted any western attempt to seize the Red Army’s prize from under its nose.

At the end of March, while the British and American chiefs of staff disagreed over Eisenhower’s plans, the Stavka in Moscow put the finishing touches to the plan for ‘the Berlin operation’. Zhukov left his headquarters on the morning of 29 March to fly back to Moscow, but bad weather forced him down in Minsk shortly after midday. He spent the afternoon talking with Ponomarenko, the secretary of the Communist Party of Belorussia, and, since the weather had still not improved, he took the train to Moscow.

The atmosphere in the Kremlin was extremely tense. Stalin was convinced that the Germans would do everything possible to make a deal with the Western Allies in order to hold off the Red Army in the east. The American talks in Berne with General Wolff about a possible cease-fire in northern Italy seemed to confirm his worst fears. Yet the Soviet leadership’s intense suspicions failed to take into account Hitler’s fanaticism. Figures around him might make peace overtures, but Hitler himself knew that surrender in any form, even to the Western Allies, offered him no future, save humiliation and the gallows. There could be no deal without some form of palace coup against the Führer.

Zhukov, who was to be responsible for seizing Berlin, also shared Stalin’s fears that the Germans would open their front to the British and Americans. On 27 March, two days before he left for Moscow, the Reuters correspondent at 21st Army Group wrote that British and American troops heading for the heart of Germany were encountering no resistance. The Reuters report rang alarm bells in Moscow.

‘The German front in the west has entirely collapsed,’ was the first thing Stalin said to Zhukov when he finally reached Moscow. ‘It seems that Hitler’s men do not want to take any measures to stop the advance of the allies. At the same time they are strengthening their groups on the main axes against us.’ Stalin gestured to the map, then knocked the ash from his pipe. ‘I think we are going to have a serious fight.’

Zhukov produced his front intelligence map and Stalin studied it. ‘When can our troops start to advance on the Berlin axis?’ he asked.

‘The 1st Belorussian Front will be able to advance in two weeks,’ Zhukov replied. ‘Apparently the 1st Ukrainian Front will be ready at the same time. And according to our information, the 2nd Belorussian Front will be held up liquidating the enemy at Danzig and Gdynia until the middle of April.’

‘Well,’ Stalin replied. ‘We’ll just have to start without waiting for Rokossovsky’s Front.’ He went to his desk and leafed through some papers, then passed Zhukov a letter. ‘Here, read this,’ Stalin said. According to Zhukov, the letter was from ‘a foreign well-wisher’ tipping off the Soviet leadership about secret negotiations between the Western Allies and the Nazis. It did, however, explain that the Americans and British had refused the German proposal of a separate peace, but the possibility of the Germans opening the route to Berlin ‘could not be ruled out’.

‘Well, what have you got to say?’ said Stalin. Not waiting for a reply, he said, ‘I think Roosevelt won’t violate the Yalta agreement, but as for Churchill… that one’s capable of anything.’

At 8 p.m. on 31 March, the United States ambassador, Averell Harriman, and his British counterpart, Sir Archibald Clerk Kerr, went to the Kremlin, accompanied by General Deane. They met Stalin, General Antonov and Molotov. ‘Stalin was given an English and Russian text of the message contained in [Eisenhower’s] SCAF-252,’ Deane reported late that night. ‘After Stalin had read Eisenhower’s message, we pointed out the operations described in the message on the map. Stalin immediately reacted and said that the plan seemed to be a good one, but that he of course could not commit himself definitely until he had consulted his staff. He said that he would give us an answer tomorrow. He seemed to be favourably impressed with the direction of the attack in central Germany and also of the secondary attack in the south. We emphasized the urgency of obtaining Stalin’s views in order that the plans could be properly concerted… Stalin was much impressed with the number of prisoners that had been taken in the month of March and said certainly this will help finish the war very soon.’ Stalin then talked about every front except the crucial Oder front. He estimated that ‘only about a third of the Germans wanted to fight’. He again came back to Eisenhower’s message. He said that the ‘plan for Eisenhower’s main effort was a good one in that it accomplished the most important objective of dividing Germany in half’… ‘He felt that the Germans’ last stand would probably be in the mountains of western Czechoslovakia and Bavaria.’ The Soviet leader was clearly keen to encourage the idea of a German national redoubt in the south.

The very next morning, 1 April, Stalin received Marshals Zhukov and Konev in his large study in the Kremlin, with its long conference table and the portraits of Suvorov and Kutuzov on the wall. General Antonov, the chief of the general staff, and General Shtemenko, the chief of operations, were also present.

‘Are you aware how the situation is shaping up?’ Stalin asked the two marshals. Zhukov and Konev replied cautiously that they were, as far as the information which they had received.

‘Read the telegram to them,’ Stalin told General Shtemenko. This message, presumably from one of the Red Army liaison officers at SHAEF headquarters, claimed that Montgomery would head for Berlin and that Patton’s Third Army would also divert from its drive towards Leipzig and Dresden to attack Berlin from the south. The Stavka had already heard of the contingency plan to drop parachute divisions on Berlin in the event of a sudden collapse of the Nazi regime. All this was evidently conflated into an Allied plot to seize Berlin first under the guise of assisting the Red Army. One cannot, of course, rule out the possibility that Stalin had the telegram faked to put pressure on both Zhukov and Konev.

‘Well, then,’ Stalin said, eyeing his two marshals. ‘Who is going to take Berlin: are we or are the Allies?’

‘It is we who shall take Berlin,’ Konev replied immediately, ‘and we will take it before the Allies.’

‘So that’s the sort of man you are,’ Stalin replied with a faint smile. ‘And how will you be able to organize forces for it? Your main force is on the southern flank [after the Silesian operation] and you’ll have to do a good deal of regrouping.’

‘You needn’t worry, Comrade Stalin,’ said Konev. ‘The Front will carry out all the necessary measures.’ Konev’s desire to beat Zhukov to Berlin was unmistakable and Stalin, who liked to engender rivalry among his subordinates, was clearly satisfied.

Antonov presented the overall plan, then Zhukov and Konev presented theirs. Stalin made only one amendment. He did not agree with the Stavka demarcation line between the two Fronts. He leaned forward with his pencil and scribbled out the line west of Lübben, sixty kilometres south-east of Berlin. ‘In the event,’ he said, turning to Konev, ‘of severe resistance on the eastern approaches to Berlin, which will definitely be the case… the 1st Ukrainian Front should be ready to attack with tank armies from the south.’ Stalin approved the plans and gave orders for the operation to be ready ‘in the shortest time possible and in any case no later than 16 April’.

‘The Stavka’, as the Russian official history puts it, ‘worked in great haste, fearing that the Allies would be quicker than Soviet troops in taking Berlin.’ They had much to coordinate. The operation to capture Berlin involved 2.5 million men, 41,600 guns and mortars, 6,250 tanks and self-propelled guns and 7,500 aircraft. No doubt Stalin took satisfaction in the fact he was concentrating a far more powerful mechanized force to seize the capital of the Reich than Hitler had deployed to invade the whole of the Soviet Union.

After the main conference on 1 April, Stalin replied to Eisenhower’s message which had provided accurate details of forthcoming American and British operations. The Soviet leader informed the American supreme commander that his plan ‘completely coincided’ with the plans of the Red Army. Stalin then assured his trusting ally that ‘Berlin has lost its former strategic importance’ and that the Soviet command would send only second-rate forces against it. The Red Army would be delivering its main blow to the south, to join up with the Western Allies. The advance of the main forces would start approximately in the second half of May. ‘However, this plan may undergo certain alterations, depending on circumstances.’ It was the greatest April Fool in modern history.