Berlin: The Downfall 1945

10. The Kamarilla and the General Staff

During the final phase of the Soviet onslaught on Pomerania, General von Tippelskirch gave an evening reception for foreign military attachés out at Mellensee. They went mainly because it offered a good opportunity to hear something other than the official version of events, which hardly anybody believed. The capital was obsessed with rumours. Some were convinced that Hitler was dying from cancer and that the war would end soon. Many whispered, with rather more justification, that German Communists were rapidly stepping up their activities as the Red Army approached. There was also talk of a mutiny among the Volkssturm.

German officers present that evening were discussing the Pomeranian catastrophe. They blamed it on their lack of reserves. According to the Swedish military attaché, Major Juhlin-Dannfel, conversations ended with German officers saying how much they hoped that serious negotiations would start with the British. ‘The British are partly responsible for the destiny of Europe,’ he was told. ‘And it is their duty to prevent German culture from being annihilated by a Red storm-flood.’ German officers still seemed to believe that if Britain had not been so tiresome holding out in 1940 and the whole might of the Wehrmacht had been concentrated on the Soviet Union in 1941, the outcome would have been decisively different. ‘Some of those present,’Juhlin-Dannfel concluded, ‘became very sentimental and the whole thing seemed quite sad.’

The delusions of the German officer class, although different from those of Hitler’s court circle, were no less deeply held. Their real regret about the invasion of the Soviet Union had been its lack of success. To the German Army’s shame, no more than a small minority of officers had been genuinely outraged by the activities of the SS Einsatzgruppen and other paramilitary formations. In the course of the last nine months, anti-Nazi feelings had developed in army circles partly because of the cruel repression of the July plotters, but mainly as a result of Hitler’s blatant ingratitude and prejudice against the army as a whole. His outright loathing of the general staff, and his attempts to shift the blame for his own catastrophic meddling on to the shoulders of field commanders were deeply resented. In addition, the preference given to the Waffen SS in weapons, manpower and promotion stirred strong feelings of resentment towards the Nazi praetorian guard.

A senior Kriegsmarine officer told Juhlin-Dannfel about a recent conference where senior military officers discussed the possibility of a last-ditch attack on the Eastern Front to force the Red Army back to the frontier of 1939. ‘If the attempt were successful,’ the naval officer said, ‘then this would provide the right opportunity to open negotiations. In order to do this, Hitler must be removed. Himmler would take over and be the guarantor of maintaining order.’ This idea revealed not just a stupendous lack of imagination. It also shows that Wehrmacht officers in Berlin seemed to have no understanding of the state of affairs at the front. The Vistula—Oder operation had smashed the German Army’s capacity to launch another sustained offensive. The only question which remained was the number of days it would take the Red Army to reach Berlin from the front along the Oder, the line which — they now heard to their horror — might become the future frontier of Poland.

The events which brought the conflict between Hitler and Guderian to a head were linked to the rather grim fortress town of Küstrin, which stood between the two main Soviet bridgeheads across the Oder. Küstrin was known as the gateway to Berlin. It was situated on the confluence of the rivers Oder and Warthe, eighty kilometres east of Berlin and astride Reichsstrasse 1, the main road from the capital to Königsberg.

Küstrin was the focal point of operations for both sides. Zhukov wanted to merge the two bridgeheads — Berzarin’s 5th Shock Army had the northern one and Chuikov’s 8th Guards Army the southern one — to prepare a large forming-up area for the forthcoming Berlin offensive. Hitler, meanwhile, had insisted on a counter-attack with five divisions from Frankfurt an der Oder, to encircle Chuikov’s army from the south.

Guderian had tried to put a stop to Hitler’s plan, knowing that they had neither the air and artillery support nor the tanks necessary for such an enterprise. The débâcle which happened on 22 March, the day Heinrici had been lectured by Himmler at the headquarters of Army Group Vistula, had taken place as divisions were redeployed for the offensive. The 25th Panzergrenadier Division withdrew from the Küstrin corridor before its replacement was ready. Berzarin’s 5th Shock Army and Chuikov’s 8th Guards Army advanced inwards on previous orders from Marshal Zhukov and managed to cut off Küstrin.

Guderian, however, still hoped that peace negotiations would save the Wehrmacht from total destruction. On 21 March, the day before the loss of the Küstrin corridor, he had approached Himmler in the Reich Chancellery garden, where he had been ‘taking a stroll with Hitler among the rubble’. Hitler left the two men to talk. Guderian said straight out that the war could no longer be won. ‘The only problem now is how most quickly to put an end to the senseless slaughter and bombing. Apart from Ribbentrop, you are the only man who still possesses contacts in neutral countries. Since the foreign minister has proved reluctant to propose to Hitler that negotiations be begun, I must ask you to make use of your contacts and go with me to Hitler and urge him to arrange an armistice.’

‘My dear Colonel General,’ Himmler replied. ‘It is still too early for that.’ Guderian persisted, but either Himmler was still afraid of Hitler, as Guderian thought, or he was playing his cards carefully. One of his confidants in the SS, Gruppenführer von Alvensleben, sounded out Colonel Eismann at Army Group Vistula, and told him in the strictest confidence that Himmler wanted to approach the Western Allies through Count Folke Bernadotte of the Swedish Red Cross. Eismann replied that first of all he thought it too late for any western leader to consider terms, and secondly Himmler struck him as ‘the most unsuitable man in the whole of Germany for such negotiations’.

During the evening of 21 March, just after Guderian’s approach to Himmler, Hitler told the army chief of staff that he should take sick leave, because of his heart trouble. Guderian replied that with General Wenck still recovering from his car crash, and General Krebs wounded in the heavy bombing raid on Zossen six days before, he could not abandon his post. Guderian states that while they were talking, an aide came in to tell Hitler that Speer wanted to see him. (He must have confused the date or the occasion, because Speer was not in Berlin at this time.) Hitler exploded and refused. ‘Always when any man asks to see me alone,’ he apparently complained to Guderian, ‘it is because he has something unpleasant to say to me. I cannot stand any more of these Job’s comforters. His memoranda begin with the words, “The war is lost!” And that’s what he wants to tell me now. I always just lock his memoranda away in the safe, unread.’ According to his aide, Nicolaus von Below, this was not true. Hitler did read them. But as Hitler’s reaction to the loss of the bridge at Remagen had shown, he had only one reaction to disaster. It was to blame others. On that day, 8 March, Jodl had come in person to the conference to tell Hitler of the failure to blow the bridge. ‘Hitler was very quiet then,’ said a staff officer who had been present, ‘but the next day he was raging.’ He ordered the summary execution of five officers, a decision which horrified the Wehrmacht.

Even the Waffen SS soon found that it was not exempt from the Führer’s rages. Hitler heard from either Bormann or Fegelein, both eager to undermine Himmler, that Waffen SS divisions in Hungary had been retreating without orders. As a humiliating punishment, Hitler decided to strip them, including his personal guard, the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, of their prized armband divisional titles. Himmler was forced to implement the order himself. ‘This mission of his to Hungary,’ Guderian noted with little regret, ‘did not win him much affection from his Waffen SS.’

The attack to relieve Küstrin, which Hitler still refused to give up, took place on 27 March. General Busse, the commander of the Ninth Army, was its reluctant orchestrator. The operation was a costly failure, even though it initially took the 8th Guards Army by surprise. German panzer and infantry troops in the open were massacred by Soviet artillery and aviation.

The next day, during the ninety-minute drive from Zossen into Berlin for the situation conference, Guderian made his intentions clear to his aide, Major Freytag von Loringhoven. ‘Today I am really going to give it to him straight,’ he said in the back of the huge Mercedes staff car.

The atmosphere in the Reich Chancellery bunker was tense even before General Burgdorf announced Hitler’s arrival with his usual call — ‘Meine Herren, der Führer kommt!’ This was the signal for everyone to come to attention and give the Nazi salute. Keitel and Jodl were there, and so was General Busse, whom Hitler had had summoned along with Guderian to explain the Küstrin fiasco.

While Jodl displayed his usual ‘ice-cold lack of emotion’, Guderian was clearly in a truculent frame of mind. Hitler’s mood was evidently not improved by having just heard that General Patton’s tanks had reached the outskirts of Frankfurt am Main. General Busse was told to present his report. As Busse spoke, Hitler demonstrated a mounting impatience. He suddenly demanded why the attack had failed. And before Busse or anyone else had the chance to reply, he began another tirade against the incompetence of the officer corps and the general staff. In this case he blamed Busse for not using his artillery.

Guderian stepped in to tell Hitler that General Busse had used all the artillery shells available to him. ‘Then you should have arranged for him to have more!’ Hitler screamed back at him. Freytag von Loringhoven observed Guderian’s face turn red with rage as he defended Busse. The chief of staff turned the subject to Hitler’s refusal to withdraw the divisions from Courland for the defence of Berlin. The row escalated rapidly to a terrifying intensity. ‘Hitler became paler and paler,’ noted Freytag von Loringhoven, ‘while Guderian became redder and redder.’

The witnesses to this dispute were deeply alarmed. Freytag von Loringhoven slipped out of the conference room and put through an urgent call to General Krebs at Zossen. He explained the situation and suggested that he must interrupt the meeting with some excuse. Krebs agreed and Freytag von Loringhoven went back into the room to tell Guderian that Krebs needed to speak to him urgently. Krebs spoke to Guderian for ten minutes, during which time the chief of staff calmed down. When he went back into Hitler’s presence, Jodl was reporting on developments in the west. Hitler insisted that everyone should leave the room except Field Marshal Keitel and General Guderian. He told Guderian that he must go away from Berlin to restore his health. ‘In six weeks the situation will be very critical. Then I shall need you urgently.’ Keitel asked him where he would go on leave. Guderian, suspicious of his motives, replied that he had made no plans.

Staff officers at Zossen and at Army Group Vistula headquarters were shocked by the day’s events. Hitler’s dismissal of Guderian threw them into a deep gloom. They were already suffering from what Colonel de Maizière described as ‘a mixture of nervous energy and trance’ and a feeling of ‘having to do your duty while at the same time seeing that this duty was completely pointless’. Hitler’s defiance of military logic reduced them to despair. The dictator’s charisma, they had finally realized, was based on a ‘kriminelle Energie’ and a complete disregard for good and evil. His severe personality disorder, even if it could not quite be defined as mental illness, had certainly made him deranged. Hitler had so utterly identified himself with the German people that he believed that anybody who opposed him was opposing the German people as a whole; and that if he were to die, the German people could not survive without him.

General Hans Krebs, Guderian’s deputy, was appointed the new chief of staff. ‘This short, bespectacled, somewhat bandy-legged man,’ wrote one staff officer, ‘had a perpetual smile and the air of a faun about him.’ He had a sharp, often sarcastic, wit and always had the right joke or anecdote for any moment. Krebs, a staff officer and not a field commander, was the archetypal second-in-command, which was exactly what Hitler wanted. Krebs had been military attaché in Moscow in 1941 shortly before the German invasion of the Soviet Union. And for an officer of the Wehrmacht, he enjoyed the unusual distinction of having been slapped on the back by Stalin. ‘We must always remain friends, whatever should happen,’ the Soviet leader had then said to him, when saying farewell to the Japanese foreign minister on a Moscow railway platform early in 1941. ‘I’m convinced of it,’ Krebs had replied, quickly recovering from his astonishment. Field commanders, however, had little respect for Krebs’s opportunism. He was known as ‘the man who can make white out of black’.

On Guderian’s departure, Freytag von Loringhoven asked to be sent to a frontline division, but Krebs insisted that he stayed on with him. ‘The war’s over anyway,’ he said. ‘I want you to help me in this last phase.’ Freytag von Loringhoven felt obliged to agree. He thought that Krebs was ‘no Nazi’ and that he had refused to join the July plotters only because he was convinced that the attempt would fail. But others noticed how General Burgdorf, an old war academy classmate, persuaded Krebs to join the Bormann-Fegelein circle. Presumably in Bormann’s scheme, a loyal Krebs would ensure the army’s obedience. The bull-necked and rubber-faced Bormann appeared to be collecting supporters for the fast-approaching day when he hoped to slip into his master’s shoes. He appears to have earmarked Fegelein, his favourite companion in the privacy of the sauna, where they almost certainly bragged to each other about their numerous affaires, as the future Reichsführer SS.

Staff officers from Zossen and Army Group Vistula observed the court of the Third Reich with a horrified fascination. They also watched Hitler’s treatment of his entourage in case it signified a change in favour and therefore in the power struggle. Hitler addressed the discredited Göring as ‘Herr Reichsmarschall’ in an attempt to prop up what little dignity he had left. Although he remained on familiar ‘du’ terms with Himmler, the Reichsführer SS had lost power since his moment of glory after the July plot. At that time, Himmler, as commander of the Waffen SS and the Gestapo, had appeared to be the only counterweight to the army.

Goebbels, although his propaganda talents were essential to the Nazi cause in its eclipse, had still not been accepted back to the same degree of intimacy he had enjoyed before his love affair with a Czech actress. Hitler, appalled that a leading member of the Nazi Party should consider divorce, had sided with Magda Goebbels. The Reichsminister for Propaganda was forced to uphold the family values of the regime.

Grand Admiral Dönitz was favoured because of his complete loyalty and because Hitler saw his new generation of U-boats as the most promising weapon of revenge. In German navy circles, Dönitz was known as ‘Hitlerjunge Quex’ — the devoted Nazi youth in a famous propaganda movie — because he was the ‘mouthpiece of his Führer’. But Bormann appeared to be the best-placed member of the ‘Kamarilla’. Hitler called his indispensable assistant and chief administrator ‘dear Martin’.

The officers also watched the deadly competition among the heirs apparent within the ‘Kamarilla’. Himmler and Bormann addressed each other as ‘du’ but ‘mutual respect was thin on the ground’. They also observed Fegelein, ‘with his dirty finger sticking into everything’, do his utmost to undermine Himmler, a man whose friendship he had sought and achieved. Himmler appears to have been oblivious of the treachery. He generously permitted his subordinate, no doubt as the Führer’s brother-in-law presumptive, to address him as ‘du’.

Eva Braun had already returned to Berlin to stay by her adored Führer’s side right to the end. The popular notion that her return from Bavaria was much later and totally unexpected is undermined by Bormann’s diary entry of Wednesday 7 March: ‘In the evening Eva Braun left for Berlin with a courier train.’ If Bormann had known of her movements in advance then so, presumably, had Hitler.

On 13 March, a day in which 2,500 Berliners died in air raids and another 120,000 found themselves homeless, Bormann ordered ‘on the grounds of security’ that prisoners must be moved from areas close to the front to the interior of the Reich. It is not entirely clear whether this instruction also accelerated the existing SS programme for evacuating concentration camps threatened by advancing troops. The killing of sick prisoners and the death marches of concentration camp survivors were probably the most ghastly developments in the fall of the Third Reich. Those too weak to march and those regarded as politically dangerous were usually hanged or shot by the SS or Gestapo. On some occasions, even the local Volkssturm was used for execution squads. Yet men and women condemned for listening to a foreign radio station apparently constituted the largest group among those defined as ‘dangerous’. The Gestapo and SS also reacted brutally to reports of looting, especially when it involved foreign workers. German citizens were usually spared. In this frenzy of reprisal and revenge, Italian forced labourers suffered more than almost any other national group. They suffered presumably because of a Nazi desire to take revenge on a former ally who had changed sides.

Soon after issuing his order for the evacuation of prisoners, Bormann flew to Salzburg on 15 March. Over the next three days he visited mines in the area. The purpose of this must have been to choose sites for concealing Nazi loot and Hitler’s private possessions. He was back in Berlin on 19 March, after an overnight train journey. Later that day, Hitler issued what became known as the ‘Nero’ or ‘scorched-earth’ order. Everything which might be of use to the enemy should be destroyed on withdrawal. The timing, just after Bormann’s journey to conceal Nazi loot, was an ironic coincidence.

It was Albert Speer’s latest memorandum which had suddenly triggered Hitler’s insistence on a scorched-earth policy to the end. When Speer tried to persuade Hitler in the early hours of that morning that bridges should not be blown up unnecessarily, because their destruction meant ‘eliminating all further possibility for the German people to survive’, Hitler’s reply revealed his contempt for them all. ‘This time you will receive a written reply to your memorandum,’ Hitler told him. ‘If the war is lost, the people will also be lost [and] it is not necessary to worry about their needs for elemental survival. On the contrary, it is best for us to destroy even these things. For the nation has proved to be weak, and the future belongs entirely to the strong people of the East. Whatever remains after this battle is in any case only the inadequates, because the good ones will be dead.’

Speer, who had travelled straight to Field Marshal Model’s headquarters in the Ruhr to persuade him not to wreck the railway system, received Hitler’s written reply on the morning of 20 March. ‘All military, transport, communication and supply facilities, as well as all material assets in the territory of the Reich’ were to be destroyed. Reichsminister Speer was relieved of all his responsibilities in this field and his orders for the preservation of factories were to be rescinded immediately. Speer had cleverly used an anti-defeatist argument, saying that factories and other structures should not be destroyed since they were bound to be recaptured in a counter-attack, but now Hitler had rumbled his tactic. One of the most striking aspects of this exchange was that Speer finally realized that Hitler was a ‘criminal’ only after receiving his patron’s reply.

Speer, who had been touring the front from Field Marshal Model’s headquarters, returned to Berlin on 26 March. He was summoned to the Reich Chancellery.

‘I have reports that you are no longer in harmony with me,’ Hitler said to his former protégé. ‘It is apparent that you no longer believe that the war can be won.’ He wanted to send Speer on leave. Speer suggested resignation instead, but Hitler refused.

Speer, although officially deposed, still managed to thwart those Gauleiters who wished to carry out Hitler’s order, because he retained control over the supply of explosives. But on 27 March, Hitler issued yet another order, insisting on the ‘total annihilation by explosives, fire or dismantlement’ of the whole railway and other transport systems and all communications, including telephones, telegraph and broadcasting. Speer, who returned to Berlin in the early hours of 29 March, contacted various sympathetic generals, including the recently deposed Guderian, as well as the less fanatical Gauleiters, to see if they supported his plan to continue thwarting Hitler’s mania for destruction. Guderian, with ‘funereal laughter’, warned him not to ‘lose his head’.

That evening Hitler began by warning Speer that his conduct was treasonous. He asked Speer again whether he still believed that the war could be won. Speer said that he did not. Hitler claimed that it was ‘impossible to deny the hope of final victory’. He talked about the disappointments of his own career, a favourite refrain which also confused his own fate with that of Germany. He demanded and advised Speer ‘to repent and have faith’. Speer was given twenty-four hours to see whether he could bring himself to believe in victory. Hitler, clearly nervous of losing his most competent minister, did not wait for the ultimatum to expire. He rang him in his office at the armaments ministry on the Pariserplatz. Speer returned to the Reich Chancellery bunker.

‘Well?’ Hitler demanded.

‘My Führer, I stand unconditionally behind you,’ Speer replied, suddenly deciding to lie. Hitler became emotional. His eyes filled with tears and he shook Speer’s hand warmly. ‘But then it will help,’ Speer continued, ‘if you will immediately reconfirm my authority for the implementation of your 19 March decree.’ Hitler agreed at once, and told him to draw up an authorization which he would sign. In the document, Speer reserved almost all demolition decisions for the minister of armaments and war production, that is to say for himself. Hitler must have sensed that he was being deceived, and yet his greatest need appears to have been to have his favourite minister back at his side.

Bormann, meanwhile, was issuing orders through the Gauleiters on a wide range of issues. It came to his attention, for example, that doctors were already carrying out abortions on many rape victims who arrived as refugees from the eastern provinces. On 28 March, he decided that the situation had to be regularized and issued an instruction classified ‘Highly confidential!’ Any woman requesting an abortion in these circumstances first had to be interrogated by an officer of the Kriminalpolizei to establish the probability that she had really been raped by a Red Army soldier as she claimed. Only then would an abortion be permitted.

Speer, in his attempts to prevent needless destruction, was a frequent visitor to Army Group Vistula headquarters at Hassleben. He found that General Heinrici entirely agreed with his aims. Speer claimed when interrogated by the Americans after the defeat that he had suggested to Heinrici’s chief of staff, General Kinzel, the possibility of withdrawing Army Group Vistula to the west of Berlin to save the city from more destruction.

Heinrici had now been given responsibility for the defence of Berlin, so he and Speer worked together on the best way to save as many bridges as possible from demolition. This was doubly important because water mains and sewage pipes were an integral part of their construction. The fifty-eight-year-old Heinrici, according to one of his many admirers on the general staff, was ‘in our eyes the perfect example of a traditional Prussian officer’. He had recently been awarded the Knight’s Cross with Swords and Oak-Leaves. This ‘grizzled soldier’ was a scruffy dresser who preferred a frontline sheepskin jacket and First World War leather leggings to the smart general staff uniform. His aide tried in vain to persuade him to order a new tunic at least.

General Helmuth Reymann, a not very imaginative officer who had been designated the commander of Berlin’s defence, was planning to demolish all the city’s bridges. So Speer, with Heinrici’s support, played his defeatist card again and asked Reymann whether he believed in victory. Reymann could not, of course, say no. Speer then persuaded him to accept Heinrici’s compromise formula: to restrict his demolition plans to the outermost bridges on the Red Army’s line of advance and leave the bridges in the centre of the capital intact. After the meeting with Reymann, Heinrici told Speer that he had no intention of fighting a prolonged battle for Berlin. He just hoped that the Red Army would get there quickly and take Hitler and the Nazi leadership unawares.

The headquarters staff at Hassleben were interrupted by a constant stream of less welcome visitors. Gauleiter Greiser, who had claimed urgent duties in Berlin when abandoning the besieged population of Poznan to their fate, had turned up at Army Group Vistula headquarters and hung around listlessly. He said he wanted to work as an aide on the staff. Gauleiter Hildebrandt of Mecklenburg and Gauleiter Stürz of Brandenburg also turned up, demanding briefings on the situation. There was just one question which they really wanted to ask — ‘Wann kommt der Russe?’ — but they did not quite dare, because it was defeatist.

Göring was also a frequent visitor to Army Group Vistula headquarters from his ostentatious mansion at Karinhall. He made much of the Sonderstaffel — the special planning group led by the famous Stuka ace Lieutenant Colonel Baumbach to target the Soviet bridges and crossing points to their Oder bridgeheads, dropping newly developed radio-controlled bombs. The Kriegsmarine also organized ‘Sprengboote’, an explosive version of Elizabethan fireships, floating downriver. Attacks from neither the air nor the river achieved any lasting damage. Repairs were made with great sacrifice by Soviet engineers working in freezing water. Many of them lost their lives to the cold or the current. Colonel Baumbach admitted to army staff officers that it was pointless to continue. It would be better to distribute the aircraft fuel used to armoured units. Baumbach, who, according to Colonel Eismann, had none of the ‘Primadonna-Allüren’ of many fighter aces, was a realist, unlike the Reichsmarschall.

Göring’s vanity was as ludicrous as his irresponsibility. According to one staff officer at Army Group Vistula, his twinkling eyes and the fur trimming on his specially designed uniform gave him more the appearance of ‘a cheerful market woman’ than a Marshal of the Reich. Göring, wearing all his medals and thick gold-braid epaulettes, insisted on going on tours of inspection, and then spent his time sending messages to army commanders complaining that he had not been saluted properly by their men.

During one planning session at Hassleben, he described his two parachute divisions on the Oder front as ‘Übermenschen’. ‘You must attack with both my paratroop divisions,’ he declared, ‘then you can send the whole Russian army to the devil.’ Göring failed to acknowledge that even many of the officers were not paratroopers at all, but Luftwaffe personnel transferred to ground combat duties of which they had no experience. His cherished 9th Parachute Division would be the first to crack when the attack came.

Göring and Dönitz intended to raise at least 30,000 men from Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine base units to throw them into the battle. The fact that they had received virtually no training did not seem to concern them. A marine division was formed, with an admiral as divisional commander and only one army officer on the staff to advise them on tactics and staff procedures. Not to be outdone in the competitive bidding between the armed forces, the SS had formed more police battalions and a motorized brigade of Waffen SS headquarters staff. It was designated ‘Thousand and One Nights’. SS codenames became curiously exotic as the end of the Third Reich approached: the brigade’s tank-hunting detachment was codenamed Suleika and the reconnaissance battalion Harem.

On 2 April, one of Himmler’s staff officers proposed from the special train of the Reichsführer SS that another 4,000 ‘front helpers’ could be added to the figure of 25,000 men marked to come from the Reichspost. The Nazi leadership was trying to meet the target of ‘Der 800,000 Mann-Plan’. Army Group Vistula headquarters argued that if there were no weapons to give all these untrained men, then they would be worse than useless. Yet the Nazi authorities were quite prepared to distribute a few panzerfausts among them and give them a grenade each to take a few of the enemy with them. ‘It was quite simply,’ wrote Colonel Eismann, ‘an order of organized mass murder, nothing less.’

The Nazi Party itself tried to keep alive the idea of the Freikorps Adolf Hitler. Bormann was still discussing it on Wednesday 28 March ‘with Dr Kaltenbrunner’. Members of the SS were conspicuously punctilious about their academic qualifications. They were also keen to display their historical knowledge at a time when Dr Goebbels was dragging up every example of reversals of military fortune for his propaganda barrage. Frederick the Great and Blücher had been overused, so Kaltenbrunner recommended to the propaganda ministry the defeat of King Darius of Persia.

Army Group Vistula’s two armies received largely unrealizable promises from the Nazi leadership. General Hasso von Manteuffel’s so-called Third Panzer Army, on the Oder front north of the Ninth Army, had little more than a single panzer division. The bulk of his divisions were also composed of composite battalions and trainees. General Busse’s Ninth Army was a similar hotch-potch. It even included an assault gun company wearing U-boat uniforms.

That sector of the Oderbruch front was almost entirely manned by training units sent forward with a small ration of bread, dry sausage and tobacco. Some soldiers were so young that they were given sweets instead of tobacco. Field kitchens were set up in the villages just behind the lines and the trainees were marched forward to start digging their trenches. A comrade, one of them wrote, was ‘a companion in suffering’. They were not a unit in any usual military sense of the word. Nobody, not even their officers, knew what their duties were or what they were supposed to do. They just dug in and waited. Jokes reflected their mood. One of the current ones, a captured soldier told his Soviet interrogator, was, ‘Life is like a child’s shirt — short and shitty.’

German soldiers with enough experience of war to know that any fool could be uncomfortable took great pride in creating a ‘gemütlich’ ‘earth bunker’, usually about two metres by three metres, with small tree trunks holding up the metre of earth cover above. ‘My main dugout was really cosy,’ wrote one soldier. ‘I turned it into a little room with a wooden table and bench.’ Mattresses and eiderdowns looted from nearby houses provided the final home comforts.

Since firelight or smoke attracted the attention of snipers, soldiers soon gave up shaving and washing. Rations started to get worse towards the end of March. On most days, each soldier received half a Kommissbrot, a rock-hard army loaf, and some stew or soup which reached the front at night, cold and congealed, from a field kitchen well to the rear. If the soldiers were lucky, they received a quarter-litre bottle of schnapps each and, very occasionally, ‘Frontkämpferpäckchen’ — small packs for frontline combatants containing cake, sweets and chocolate. The main problem, however, was the lack of clean drinking water. As a result many soldiers suffered from dysentery and their trenches became squalid.

The faces of the young trainees were soon gaunt from tiredness and strain. Attacks by Shturmovik fighter-bombers in clear weather, the ‘midday concert’ of artillery and mortar fire, and random shelling at night took their toll. From time to time, the Soviet artillery ranged in on any buildings, in case they contained a command post, and then fired phosphorous shells. But for the young and inexperienced, the most frightening experience was a four-hour stint on sentry duty at night. Everyone feared a Soviet raiding party coming to grab them as ‘a tongue’.

Nobody moved by day. A Soviet sniper shot Pohlmeyer, one of Gerhard Tillery’s comrades in the ‘Potsdam’ Regiment of officer cadets, straight through the head as he climbed out of his slit trench. Otterstedt, who tried to help him, was also picked off. They never spotted the muzzle flash, so they had no idea where the shot had come from. The Germans on that sector, however, had their own sniper. He was ‘a really crazy type’ who dressed up when off-duty in an undertaker’s black top hat and tailcoat, to which he pinned his German Cross in Gold, a vulgar decoration known as ‘the fried egg’. His eccentricities were presumably tolerated because of his 130 victories. This sniper used to take up position just behind the front line in a barn. Observers with binoculars in the trenches would then relay targets to him. One day when little was happening, the observer told him of a dog running around the Russian positions. The dog was killed with a single shot.

Ammunition was in such short supply that exact figures had to be reported every morning. Experienced company commanders were over-reporting expenditure to build up their own reserves for the big attack, which they knew must come soon. German formation commanders became increasingly uneasy during that last part of March. They felt that the Soviets were playing with them ‘like a cat with a mouse’, deliberately achieving two goals at once. The battle for the bridgeheads on the west side of the Oder was not only preparing the Red Army’s springboard for Berlin, it was also grinding down the Ninth Army and forcing it to use up its dwindling supplies of ammunition before the big attack. German artillery guns, restricted to less than a couple of shells per gun per day, could not indulge in counter-battery fire, so the Soviet gunners were able to range at will on specified targets, ready for their opening bombardment. The major offensive against the Seelow Heights towards Berlin was only a matter of time.

Soldiers passed the day either catching up on sleep or writing home, even though little post had been getting through since the end of February. Officers felt that this collapse of the postal system at least had one advantage. There had been a number of suicides when soldiers received disastrous news from home, whether damage from bombing or members of the family killed. Captured German soldiers told their Soviet interrogators, and it is impossible to know whether they were speaking the truth or trying to curry favour, that their own artillery fired salvoes to explode behind their trenches as a warning not to retreat.

Soldiers knew that they were going to be overwhelmed and they waited only for one thing, the order to retreat. When a platoon commander rang back to company headquarters on the field telephone and received no reply, there was nearly always panic. Most jumped to the assumption that they had been abandoned by the very commanders who had ordered them to fight to the end, but they did not want to risk the Feldgendarmerie. The best solution was to bury themselves deep in a bunker and pray that Soviet attackers would give them a chance to surrender before chucking in a grenade. But even if their surrender was accepted, there was always the risk of an immediate German counter-attack. Any soldier found to have surrendered faced summary execution.

Despite all its weaknesses in trained men and ammunition, the German Army at bay could still prove itself a dangerous opponent. On 22 March, Chuikov’s 8th Guards Army attacked at Gut Hathenow, on the treeless flood plain near the Reitwein Spur. The 920th Assault Gun Training Brigade with the 303rd Döberitz Infantry Division was alerted. They deployed rapidly on seeing T-34 tanks. Oberfeldwebel Weinheimer yelled his fire orders: ‘Range — Armour-piercing — Target — Fire!’ Gerhard Laudan reloaded as soon as the gun recoiled. The crew established a good rhythm of firing. They hit four T-34S in a matter of minutes, but then there was a blinding flash of light and they felt a huge blow as their armoured vehicle shuddered. Laudan’s head struck the steel plate. He heard their commander scream, ‘Raus!’ Laudan forced open the hatch to throw himself out, but was yanked back by his headset and microphone, which he had forgotten to detach. By the time he had extracted himself with only minor wounds, he found the rest of the crew outside sheltering in the lee of the vehicle. Amid the chaos of enemy tanks charging around, there seemed to be no chance of rescue or recovery. But then their driver, Soldat Klein, climbed back into the vehicle through a hatch. To their astonishment, they heard the engine restart. They scrambled back inside and the vehicle reversed slowly. They found that the enemy shell had struck the armour near the gun, but fortunately there was a gap there between the outer armour and the inner steel skin of the hull. This had saved them. ‘For once “soldier’s luck” was on our side,’ Laudan commented. They were even able to drive the vehicle back to the brigade repair base at Rehfelde, south of Strausberg.

Both on the Oder front and on the Neisse opposite the 1st Ukrainian Front, officers suffered from mixed feelings. ‘Officers have two opinions of the situation,’ Soviet interrogators reported, ‘the official version and their own views, which they share only with very close friends.’ They firmly believed that they had to defend the Fatherland and their families, yet they were well aware that the situation was hopeless. ‘One should distinguish between regiments,’ a captured senior lieutenant told a 7th Department interrogator at 21st Army headquarters. ‘The regular units are strong. The discipline and fighting spirit are good. But in the hastily thrown-together battle-groups, the situation is totally different. Discipline is terrible and as soon as Russian troops appear, the soldiers panic and run from their positions.’

‘To be an officer,’ another German lieutenant wrote to his fiancée, ‘means always having to swing back and forth like a pendulum between a Knight’s Cross, a birchwood cross and a court martial.’