Berlin: The Downfall 1945

18. The Flight of the Golden Pheasants

On the morning of Saturday 21 April, just after the last Allied air raid had finished, General Reymann’s headquarters on the Hohenzollerndamm swarmed with brown uniforms. Senior Nazi Party officials had rushed there to obtain the necessary authorization to leave Berlin. For once the ‘Golden Pheasants’ had to request permission from the army. Goebbels, as Reich Commissioner for Berlin, had ordered that ‘no man capable of bearing arms may leave Berlin’. Only the headquarters for the Defence of Berlin could issue an exemption.

‘The rats are leaving the sinking ship’ was the inevitable reaction of Colonel von Refior, Reymann’s chief of staff. Reymann and his staff officers received a fleeting satisfaction from the sight. Over 2,000 passes were signed for the Party ‘armchair warriors’, who had always been so ready to condemn the army for retreating. Reymann said openly that he was happy to sign them since it was better for the defence of the city to be rid of such cowards.

This idea was echoed strongly two days later by the Werwolfsender, Goebbels’s special transmitter at Königs Wusterhausen, when it broadcast appeals to the ‘Werwölfe of Berlin and Brandenburg’ to rise against the enemy. It claimed that all the cowards and traitors had left Berlin. ‘The Führer did not flee to southern Germany. He stands in Berlin and with him are all those whom he has found worthy to fight beside him in this historic hour… Now, soldiers and officers of the front, you are not only waging the final and greatest decisive battle of the Reich, but by your fight you are also completing the National Socialist revolution. Only the uncompromising revolutionary fighters have remained.’ This deliberately ignored the far larger numbers of reluctant Volkssturm and conscripts forced to fight on with the threat of a noose or a firing squad.

An intensive artillery bombardment of Berlin began at 9.30 a.m., a couple of hours after the end of the last Allied air raid. Hitler’s SS adjutant, Otto Günsche, reported that the Führer, a few minutes after having been woken, emerged unshaven and angry in the bunker corridor which served as an anteroom. ‘What’s going on?’ he shouted at General Burgdorf, Colonel von Below and Günsche. ‘Where’s this firing coming from?’

Burgdorf answered that central Berlin was under fire from Soviet heavy artillery. ‘Are the Russians already so near?’ asked Hitler, clearly shaken.

General Kazakov had pushed forward his breakthrough artillery divisions and all the other heavy gun batteries with 152mm and 203mm howitzers. More messages had been daubed on the shells — ‘For the rat Goebbels’, ‘For Stalingrad’, ‘For the fat belly of Göring’ and ‘For orphans and widows!’ The gun crews were encouraged into a frenzied rate of fire by political officers. Senior artillery officers felt especially proud and made self-satisfied remarks about ‘the bloody god of war’, which had become an almost universal euphemism for Soviet gunnery. From that morning until 2 May, they were to fire 1.8 million shells in the assault on the city.

The casualties among women especially were heavy as they still queued in the drizzling rain, hoping for their ‘crisis rations’. Mangled bodies were flung across the Hermannplatz in south-west Berlin as people queued outside the Karstadt department store. Many others were killed in the queues at the water pumps. Crossing a street turned into a dash from one insecure shelter to another. Most gave up and returned to their cellars. Some, however, took what seemed like the last opportunity to bury silver and other valuables in their garden or a nearby allotment. But the relentlessness of the bombardment and the random fall of shells soon forced the majority of the population back underground.

In the cellars and air-raid shelters distinctive subcultures had grown up during two years of heavy air raids from ‘die Amis?’ by day and ‘die Tommys’ by night. The ‘cellar tribe’, as one diarist called these curious microcosms of society, produced a wide variety of characters, whether in markedly rich or poor districts. Each cellar always seemed to have at least one crashing bore, usually a Nazi trying to justify his belief in the Führer and final victory. A number of Berliners, for some reason, had suddenly started to refer to Hitler as ‘that one’, and it was not necessarily a term of abuse.

People clung to lucky charms or talismans. One mother brought with her the spare artificial leg of a son still trapped in the siege of Breslau. Many cellar tribes developed a particular superstition or theory of survival. For example, some believed that they would survive an almost direct hit by wrapping a towel round their head. Others were convinced that if they bent forward at the first explosion, this would prevent their lungs from tearing. Every eccentricity of German hypochondria seems to have received full expression. When the all-clear sounded after a bombing raid, cellars and shelters echoed with nervous laughter and compulsive jokes. A favourite among older, more raucous women was, ‘Better a Russki on the belly than an Ami on the head.’

During the course of the day, while shattered German units and stragglers fell back, Hitler still insisted that Busse hold a line which had been disintegrating for two days. The remnants of Busse’s left wing, the CI Corps, had been forced out of the Bernau area. Wolfram Kertz of the Grossdeutschland guard regiment was wounded near the Blumberg autobahn junction north-east of Berlin. Of the 1,000 or so men of the guard regiment, only forty reached Berlin. So much depended on ‘Soldatenglück’, or ‘soldier’s luck’. Kertz was propped up against a church wall when Russian soldiers found him. They saw the Knight’s Cross at his neck. ‘Du General?’ they asked. They called up a horse-drawn cart and took him to a headquarters for interrogation. A senior officer asked him whether Hitler was still alive and what he knew about any plans for a German counter-stroke with the Americans against the Red Army.

This no doubt reflected the paranoia in the Kremlin. In fact, the Americans were still fighting the Germans everywhere, including on the Berlin axis. Their ground troops and US Air Force Mustangs were launching continual attacks against the Scharnhorst Division of the Twelfth Army north of Dessau. This was a response to the unexpected Luftwaffe attacks against the Elbe crossings and bridgeheads. Peter Rettich, commanding a battalion in the Scharnhorst, had only fifty men left on 21 April.

In the Ninth Army’s centre, the remnants of Weidling’s LVI Panzer Corps were also pushed back against and across the eastern side of the Berlin autobahn ring. Corpses lay in the ditches on either side of the obvious highways. Most were the victims of Shturmovik low-level strafing attacks.

Side roads and main routes alike were encumbered by civilians with handcarts, prams and teams of farm horses. Soldiers were surrounded by civilians desperate for news of the enemy’s advance, but often had no clear idea themselves. Pickets of Feldgendarmerie at each crossroads again grabbed stragglers to form scratch companies. There were also men hanged from roadside trees, with a card on their chest stating, ‘I was a coward.’ Soldiers sent to defend houses either side of the road were the luckiest. The inhabitants gave them food and some hot water to shave and wash in, the first for many days.

In Petershagen, a company of the Nordland under Sturmbannführer Lorenz, supported by a few reconnaissance vehicles, prepared to make a stand against the 8th Guards Army, but they were suddenly devastated by a massive katyusha strike. One account claims that the Soviet troops had filled the warheads with an improvised napalm. The reconnaissance vehicles apparently burst into flame and in some cases exploded. The panic-stricken survivors jumped into the vehicles left undamaged and drove off, leaving the injured, many with terrible burns, to their fate. Only Lorenz and his radio operator stayed to care for them. They loaded the ones most likely to survive on to the only remaining half-track and drove them back to the dressing station. It had been set up in a barn within a hollow next to a command post. Lorenz had ‘a very bad feeling’. A few moments later the Soviet Guards artillery landed another accurate katyusha strike. Hardly anybody survived unscathed. Lorenz himself received shrapnel in the right shoulder.

Close by, Gerhard Tillery, one of the survivors of a trainee officer battalion, saw a colonel from their division outside a racing stable at Hoppegarten. ‘See that you all get home safe and sound,’ the colonel told the surprised soldier. ‘There’s no more point to any of this.’ But Tillery could not follow this advice straight away. Their new scratch company was commanded by a very determined young artillery officer with no infantry experience at all. He pulled them back to Mahlsdorf, where they took up defensive positions in a cemetery. In the lull before the fighting began again, Tillery and a couple of others were sent to collect food offered by local civilians. They brought it back in a couple of milk churns. Tillery saw that there were some Volkssturm and a police battalion on their right. They all knew that it would not be long before the Russians appeared, feeling their way forward and firing mortars at any likely defensive position.

There, on the eastern side of Berlin, the German remnants of the Ninth Army faced the 5th Shock Army and Chuikov’s 8th Guards Army. But then Zhukov pushed the 8th Guards Army further south towards the Spree. He wanted Chuikov and Katukov’s 1st Guards Tank Army, still working closely together, to enter Berlin from the south-west. This, he hoped, would pre-empt Konev’s attempt to attack Berlin from that direction. On 21 April, some of Katukov’s tank brigades advanced with the infantry of 8th Guards Army and captured Erkner, just south of Rüdersdorf.

To encircle the northern flank of Berlin, Zhukov had sent the 47th Army round towards Spandau and the 2nd Guards Tank Army to Oranienburg. Pressure from Stalin prompted the signal: ‘Due to the slowness of our advance, the Allies are approaching Berlin and will soon take it.’ The leading tank brigades, which were supposed to have reached the city the night before, were only at the outskirts by the evening of 21 April. Zhukov refused to acknowledge that a headlong advance with tanks in such surroundings involved heavy losses. Every house by the side of the road, every allotment or garden, almost every bush could contain a Hitler Youth or Volkssturmer armed with a panzerfaust. Rifle regiments from the 3rd Shock Army and the 5th Shock Army also reached the north-eastern suburbs of Malchow and Hohenschönhausen that night.

Twenty kilometres south of Berlin in the huge underground headquarters at Zossen there was a mood of profound anxiety. The day before, when the threat of Soviet tanks coming up from the south had arisen, General Krebs had sent off the OKH’s small defence detachment in reconnaissance vehicles to investigate. At 6 a.m. on 21 April, Krebs’s second aide, Captain Boldt, was woken by a telephone call. Senior Lieutenant Kränkel, commanding the defence detachment, had just seen forty Soviet tanks coming up the Baruth road towards Zossen. He was about to engage them. Boldt knew that Kränkel’s light armoured vehicles stood no chance against T-34S. He informed Krebs, who rang the Reich Chancellery to ask permission to relocate the headquarters. Hitler refused. Shortly before the 11 a.m. situation conference, tank guns could be heard clearly in the distance. One staff officer observed that the Russians could reach Zossen in half an hour. Another message arrived from Kränkel. His attack had failed with heavy losses. There was nothing left to stop the enemy tanks.

General Krebs appeared from his office. ‘If you’re ready, gentlemen,’ he said, and thus began the very last conference of German general staff officers. It was hard to keep their minds off their imminent capture by Soviet armoured forces and the prison camps which awaited them in Russia. But there was no more shooting. The tanks had halted north of Baruth because they were out of diesel. And finally, at 1 p.m., General Burgdorf rang from the Reich Chancellery. The OKH was to move its headquarters to a Luftwaffe base at Eiche near Potsdam. Their companions in the adjoining OKW bunker system were to move to the nearby tank base at Krampnitz. The decision was taken only just in time.

A larger convoy of vehicles and non-essential personnel left Zossen on a hazardous journey to the south-west and then on down to Bavaria. They knew nothing of Lelyushenko’s tank brigades crossing their path ahead, but instead they were hit by one of the last Luftwaffe sorties. The German pilots misidentified their vehicles. The smaller party, meanwhile, headed for Potsdam, on a parallel route to Lelyushenko’s tanks.

Late that afternoon, Soviet soldiers entered the concealed camp at Zossen with caution and amazement. The two complexes, known as Maybach I and Maybach II, lay side by side, hidden under trees and camouflage nets. It was not the mass of papers blowing about inside the low, zigzag-painted concrete buildings which surprised them, but the resident caretaker’s guided tour. He led them down into a maze of galleried underground bunkers, with generators, plotting maps, banks of telephones and teleprinters. Its chief wonder was the telephone exchange, which had linked the two supreme headquarters with Wehrmacht units in the days when the Third Reich had stretched from the Volga to the Pyrenees and from the North Cape to the Sahara. Apart from the caretaker, the only defenders left were four soldiers. Three of them had surrendered immediately. The fourth could not because he was dead drunk.

A telephone suddenly rang. One of the Russian soldiers answered it. The caller was evidently a senior German officer asking what was happening. ‘Ivan is here,’ the soldier replied in Russian, and told him to go to hell.

Just as Krebs’s staff officers were transferring with unseemly haste to the western side of Berlin, a rumour started that General Weidling had also moved his headquarters to Döberitz, just north of Potsdam. This was to lead to a black comedy two days later, when Hitler first wanted to execute Weidling for treason and cowardice, but then appointed him commander of the defence of Berlin.

Hitler took the Soviet bombardment of Berlin as a personal affront, which, considering the slogans daubed on the Soviet shells, it was intended to be. His instinctive reaction was to blame the Luftwaffe for allowing this to happen. He threatened General Koller with execution, not for the first time. The fact that the Luftwaffe had few serviceable aircraft left and even less aviation fuel did not concern him. Anger, he was convinced, lent him inspiration. The Soviet attempt to encircle the city from the north exposed their right flank. He would order a counter-attack and cut them to ribbons. He remembered from the situation map the III SS Germanische Corps, commanded by Obergrup-penführer Felix Steiner, north-west of Eberswalde. Hitler refused to accept that Heinrici had already allocated most of its divisions to help the Ninth Army. Steiner’s corps, according to Army Group Vistula headquarters, consisted of no more than ‘three battalions and a few tanks’.

Hitler, oblivious of reality, began to talk about ‘Army Detachment Steiner’, an inflation which was grandiose even by his own standards. He argued that it could in any case be reinforced with all the units from CI Corps which had retreated north of Berlin. He even thought of Göring’s Luftwaffe bodyguard at Karinhall, but they had already departed. Every soldier, sailor and airman who could be scraped together would be thrown into battle and any commander who held back his men faced execution within five hours. Hitler had always taken as gospel the remark of Frederick the Great, ‘Whoever throws his last battalion into the struggle will be the winner.’ It bolstered his fantasy that reckless gambling with the lives of others was the mark of greatness.

Steiner, when he received the telephone call from the Führer bunker, was dumbfounded by Hitler’s order to attack. After collecting his thoughts, he rang Krebs back to remind him of the true situation, but Krebs was standing almost next to Hitler. By then it was too late. Steiner received an official order to launch a counter-attack against the right flank of the 1st Belorussian Front. He and his officers were also threatened with execution if they failed to obey. When Heinrici was informed a little later, he rang the Reich Chancellery to protest at this lunacy. Krebs told him that the decision had been made and that he could not speak to the Führer, who was too busy to talk to him.

Hitler, during the course of that night of madness, also sacked General Reymann as commander for the defence of Berlin. General Burgdorf had convinced Hitler that he was no good. And Goebbels had taken against him ever since he refused to move his headquarters into the Zoo bunker alongside his own, as Reich Commissioner for the Defence of Berlin. Reymann was made commandant of a weak division in Potsdam instead, which received the title Army Group Spree. Two replacements were considered and rejected. Hitler then chose a Colonel Käther, whose main qualification for the task was that he happened to be the chief National Socialist Führungsoffizier, the Nazi copy of the Soviet military commissar. Käther was promoted to major general and then lieutenant general, but the appointment was cancelled the following day. Berlin was without a commander just as the Red Army was entering the suburbs.

For Zhukov the pace of advance was still far too slow. Sunday 22 April had been the target date for capturing Berlin, yet his leading divisions were still on the periphery. On that morning he signalled to his army commanders: ‘The defence of Berlin is weakly organized, but the operation of our troops is progressing very slowly.’ He ordered a ‘twenty-four-hour-a-day advance’. But the fact of its being Lenin’s birthday still encouraged political departments to distribute more symbolic red banners to be raised over prominent buildings.

The Russians were unimpressed by the Spree. One officer described it as ‘a dirty, swampy little river’. But just as Zhukov had underestimated the defensive strength of the Seelow Heights, he had also overlooked the networks of rivers, canals and lakes in this forested area of Brandenburg. It was thanks only to the great experience of reconnaissance companies in swimming attacks across rivers during the two-year advance and the bridging skills and bravery of Soviet sappers that the advance did not take longer. The 1st Guards Tank Army prepared to build a pontoon bridge across the Spree near Köpenick, even though still some way off.

The 8th Guards Army, working with the tanks, was forcing Weidling’s LVI Corps back into the city without realizing it. On their right, the 5th Shock Army pushed into the eastern suburbs, and further round, the 3rd Shock Army was ordered to advance into the central northern suburbs and then down towards the centre. On its right, the 2nd Guards Tank Army was to enter the city via Siemensstadt and head for Charlottenburg. Finally, the 47th Army, after astonishing French prisoners of war in Oranienburg with their carts and bowsers towed by camels, moved further westwards to finish the encirclement of the northern half of the city.

Early that Sunday morning, General Weidling summoned his divisional commanders to discuss the situation with them. They all, with one exception, wanted to fight their way through southwards to join up with General Busse and the other two corps of the Ninth Army. The exception was Brigadeführer Ziegler of the SS Nordland Division, who, to Weidling’s fury, made no secret of wanting to rejoin Steiner. Nobody knows whether this was prompted entirely by SS tribalism, or was also a way of pulling his Scandinavian volunteers back into an SS stronghold near the Danish border.

The Nordland continued to defend Mahlsdorf and the entrance to Berlin along Reichstrasse 1. In Friedrichsfelde, one of its detachments rounded up French prisoners of war and forced them to dig trenches at gunpoint. After heavy attacks in the middle of the day, the division pulled back into Karlshorst. One of its detachments dug in beside the track for trotting races, setting up mortar positions. But it was not long before they themselves came under heavy fire, with ‘Soviet shells exploding in the stands and stable-blocks’.

It was by now almost a week since soldiers had seen the last of their iron rations, which often consisted of no more than a tin of processed cheese, a Dauerbrot, or long-life bread, and a waterbottle full of coffee or tea. Now the best they could hope for was a tin of pork left on the shelf of an abandoned house which they stabbed open with their bayonet. They were filthy, bearded and had bloodshot eyes.

Conditions for the bulk of the Ninth Army to their south-east were even worse. Hitler’s orders to hold on to the line of the Oder were senseless. The remnants of the XISS Panzer Corps, the VSS Mountain Corps and the Frankfurt garrison began to pull back into the Spreewald from different directions. Men moved singly or in groups. There were few formed units left and hardly any capable of taking orders from Busse’s headquarters. Vehicles were abandoned as they ran out of fuel along the way.

Odd detachments were left behind as a covering force, but their resistance did not last long. Reinhard Appel, one of the Hitler Youth trained at the Olympic Stadium, formed part of a group detailed to replace SS troops from the 30. fanuar Division not far from Müllrose. His life was saved by an old sergeant, highly decorated from the Eastern Front. As the Soviet soldiers advanced, Appel, in a desperate attempt to sell his life dearly, raised himself ready to throw a grenade. The sergeant grabbed his arm and prised the grenade from his grasp. He yelled at the boy that it was mad to try to be brave in a hopeless position. The Russians would just wipe out everyone in the bunker. He had a white handkerchief attached to a stick and raised his arms in surrender as the Soviet soldiers appeared with their sub-machine guns. With cries of ‘Voina kaputt!’ (‘the war’s had it’) and ‘Gitler kaputt!’, the Russians rushed forward to strip the young soldiers of weapons, which they threw to one side, then grabbed their watches. The boys and the old sergeant were ordered to march eastwards towards the Oder.

Eighty kilometres to their rear, reconnaissance detachments of the 3rd Guards Tank Army had reached Königs Wusterhausen the evening before. It represented an advance from the Neisse of 174 kilometres in less than six days. They were separated from Chuikov’s 8th Guards Army on the north bank of the Müggelsee by a network of lakes and waterways in between. The two Soviet armies and this barrier effectively meant that Busse’s remaining portion of the Ninth Army was now encircled.

Marshal Konev, warned by air reconnaissance of the mass of enemy troops in the Spreewald on his right, speeded up the 28th Army’s move forward in trucks. These divisions were intended to seal the gap between Gordov’s 3rd Guards Army, finishing off the German forces round Cottbus, and the 3rd Guards Tank Army, pushing on to Berlin. Konev decided to reinforce Rybalko’s tank army with an artillery breakthrough corps — ‘a powerful hammer’ — and an anti-aircraft division.

By the evening of 22 April all three of Rybalko’s corps had reached the Teltow Canal, the southern rim of Berlin’s perimeter defence line. The German defenders were ‘completely surprised to find themselves face to face with Russian tanks’. A 3rd Guards Tank Army report, in an unusually poetic phrase, described their arrival as unexpected ‘as snow in the middle of summer’.

German communications were so bad that even Army Group Vistula headquarters knew nothing of this advance. And ‘no steps were taken to remove the supplies’ from a large Wehrmacht ration store on the south side of the canal. ‘On the contrary, even when the first Russian tank was only a few hundred metres away, the administrator refused to let rations be distributed to the Volkssturm troops on the north bank of the canal because a regulation issue certificate had not been filled out.’ He set fire to the provisions instead.

The 9th Mechanized Corps had charged through Lichtenrade, the 6th Guards Tank Corps had captured Teltow and, just to its left, the 7th Guards Tank Corps had taken Stahnsdorf. Further to the west, part of Lelyushenko’s 4th Guards Tank Army was ten kilometres short of Potsdam. Further out, two more of his corps were snaking round the western end of Berlin and were less than forty kilometres away from Zhukov’s 47th Army coming from the north.

French prisoners in Stalag III, close to the Teltow Canal, were enjoying a moment of spring warmth when there was a rush to the barbed-wire perimeter. ‘At about five in the afternoon,’ one of them recorded, ‘the first Russian soldier appeared. He was walking jauntily, quite erect, sub-machine gun at his waist, ready to fire. He was walking along the ditch beside the road. He did not even bother to look at our camp.’ A little later, however, Soviet officers entered the camp. The Russian prisoners there were ordered to fall in. They were handed a rifle or sub-machine gun and expected to go straight into action.

Another French prisoner of war on the south-eastern side of the city happened to see ‘a Hitler Youth aged thirteen or fourteen with the face of a child in spite of his helmet, in a foxhole, awkwardly gripping a panzerfaust’. The boy seemed to have no doubt that the hole in the ground would become his grave the next day.

In their rapid progress north, Konev’s tank brigades had overtaken carts loaded with civilians, some of whom, on closer inspection, turned out to be German soldiers who had concealed their uniforms. Those soldiers who managed to slip westwards through the rear of Lelyushenko’s 4th Guards Tank Army spread word of its advance. In addition to the three corps encircling Berlin from the west, the 5th Guards Mechanized Corps was moving towards the Elbe, ready to block any attempt by Wenck’s Twelfth Army to join up with Busse’s Ninth Army.

At the improvised hospital complex in the barracks near Beelitz-Heilstätten, Sister Ruth Schwarz, who had helped evacuate the sick children from Potsdam, was horrified to hear on 21 April that the Russians were already at Jüterbog. That was less than forty kilometres away. Emergency rations of chocolate, dry sausage and crispbread were distributed to the different wards. Nurses slept at least four to a room, hoping that that might protect them when the Russian soldiers came. Their ‘hearts raced in fear’ on news of the Soviet advance.

On 22 April, they heard that the Red Army had reached Schönefeld, just ten kilometres away. Mother Superior Elisabeth von Cleve, who had arrived with part of the staff and adult patients from Potsdam, set up an altar with candles and had hundreds of patients wheeled in for an impromptu service to provide consolation. When they sang ‘Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott’, tears ran down faces. Their only hope seemed to lie in rumours that Beelitz-Heilstätten had been declared an international zone under Swiss supervision. But this evaporated the next morning when they heard that Soviet troops had reached Beelitz and were ‘plundering, torching and raping’. ‘I immediately took out my small nail scissors for the direst emergency,’ recorded Sister Ruth Schwarz, and the nurses carried on with their work.

Soviet military authorities had their own problems in the rear areas. Groups of German officers and soldiers bypassed on the Seelow Heights were trying to slip back westwards. Desperate for food, they were ambushing the horse-drawn supply carts and even individual Red Army soldiers to get their bread bags.

Now approaching the climax of the war, NKVD rifle regiments continued to react with their usual suspicion and lack of proportion. ‘On 22 April,’ one regiment reported, ‘a Red Army cook, Maria Mazurkevich, met officers of a division in which she had worked previously and went with them by car. This means that she deserted. We are taking every step to find her.’ This was at a time when virtually no steps were taken to stop rape or looting, or even murder.

Vasily Grossman, who was returning to the 1st Belorussian Front from Moscow, came via Zhukov’s rear headquarters at Landsberg. ‘Children are playing soldiers on a flat roof,’ he wrote in his notebook. ‘This is at the very moment when German imperialism is being finished in Berlin, and here the boys with wooden swords and clubs and long legs, and blond fringes and their hair cut short at the back of the head, are shouting, jumping, leaping and stabbing at one another… It’s eternal. It can never be eliminated from mankind.’ But this pessimistic mood did not last long. He found Brandenburg bathed in sunshine, and was struck by the dachas closer to Berlin. ‘Everything,’ he noted, ‘is covered with flowers, tulips, lilac, apple trees, plum trees. The birds are singing: nature feels no pity for the last days of fascism.’ He watched a column of ex-prisoners of war moving in carts, on foot, limping with the aid of sticks, pushing prams and wheelbarrows. They too displayed improvised national flags. ‘French poilus have managed to keep their pipes,’ he observed.

One of the signs of the fall of fascism was the accelerating breakdown of German propaganda services. On 21 April, the Transocean News Agency fell silent and so did the Reichssender Berlin. The following day, the pro-Nazi Irish nationalists at Irland-Redaktion blamed the British and Americans for reducing Europe to a Soviet zone of influence. It was their penultimate broadcast. The transmitter at Nauen was captured two days later.

More and more Berliners had been taking the risk of listening to the BBC on the wireless and even dared to discuss its news. But power cuts were now creating a more effective censorship of foreign broadcasts than the police state had ever achieved. London had little idea of the great Soviet offensive, but its announcement that Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg concentration camp had been liberated just north of Berlin gave a good idea of Red Army progress and its intention to encircle the city. The indication of the horrors found there was also another reminder of the vengeance which Berlin faced. This did not stop most Berliners from convincing themselves that the concentration camp stories must be enemy propaganda.

Apart from broadcasts heard on battery-operated radios and a few announcements on posters about rations, most news now came by word of mouth. Rumour and fact became even more difficult to disentangle. A sense of nightmare unreality pervaded the city as it awaited its doom on that day of bright spring sunshine and heavy showers. Comparisons with its recent status as the imperial capital of occupied Europe were inescapable. Once grandiose buildings were reduced to mere façades, with the sky visible through the upper windows. And the decline from mechanized military power was underlined by the sight of German soldiers driving hay wagons drawn by small Polish horses.

The constant background of Kazakov’s artillery bombardment set nerves on edge. People found that the phrase ‘the thunder of guns’ was not one of those bombastic clichés of war but an entirely accurate description. The sound rolled and echoed, especially in courtyards behind buildings, just like a storm. Everyone was afraid, but women had most to fear. An anonymous diarist recorded that although women in ration queues discussed every advance of the enemy, there was an unspoken agreement. ‘Not a single woman talked about “it”.’

‘These are strange times,’ she added in the large sales ledger which she used as her diary. ‘One experiences history in the making, things which one day will fill the history books. But while living through it, everything dissolves into petty worries and fears. History is very tiresome. Tomorrow I’m going to look for nettles and try to find some coal.’

Hitler, on the other hand, had by now realized that history was all that was left to him — except that his notion of history was fatally dominated by an obsessive desire for immortality. Unlike Himmler, he did not try to change his image with concessions. If anything, his addiction to bloodshed and destruction intensified. One of the main reasons for his decision to stay on in Berlin was quite simple. The Fall of Berchtesgaden did not have quite the same ring as the Fall of Berlin. Nor did it offer the same spectacular images of smashed monuments and blazing buildings.

During the night of 21 April, Hitler had almost collapsed after ordering the Steiner counter-attack. His doctor, Morell, found him in such low spirits that he suggested an injection to revive him. Hitler went into a frenzy. He was convinced that the generals wanted to drug him with morphine and put him on a plane to Salzburg. It appears that he spent most of his days and nights in the bunker, when not in situation conferences, sitting in his room, lost in thought, often gazing at the portrait of Frederick the Great. It had become his icon.

For most of the morning of 22 April, Hitler feverishly demanded news of Steiner’s attack from the north. He told General Koller, the Luftwaffe chief of staff, to send up aircraft to see if Steiner’s troops had yet started to move. He contacted Himmler to ask him. The Reichsführer SS had not the slightest idea of what was going on. He and his chameleon eminence Gruppenführer Walter Schellenberg were still preoccupied with the idea of secret overtures to the Western Allies through Count Bernadotte. Himmler just made a guardedly optimistic reply, which Hitler seized upon as fact.

At the midday situation conference, however, Hitler heard for certain that Steiner had not moved. Soviet forces had also broken the perimeter defence ring in the north of the city. He began to scream and yell. The SS was betraying him now as well as the army. This rage was far worse than any of his rows with Guderian. Eventually he collapsed into an armchair, drained and weeping. He said quite openly for the first time that the war was lost. Keitel, Jodl, Krebs and Burgdorf were shaken. Hitler went on to say that because he could not die fighting, because he was too weak, he would simply shoot himself to avoid falling into the hands of the enemy. They tried to persuade him to leave for Berchtesgaden, but he had clearly made up his mind. He ordered Keitel, Jodl and Bormann to leave for the south, but they refused. Anyone else who wanted to go could go, he told them, but he was staying in Berlin to the end. He wanted an announcement made to that effect.

Goebbels was summoned to the Reich Chancellery to help persuade him to leave, but he was the worst choice, since he was already determined to stay himself. He spoke alone with Hitler in his room for some time, trying to calm him down. When Goebbels came out, he told those waiting outside that the Führer had asked him to bring his family into the bunker. It would appear that Goebbels had told Hitler during this conversation that he and his wife, Magda, had already decided to kill their six children and then themselves.

Hitler, to the surprise of his distraught entourage, re-emerged in calmer mood. Jodl had suggested that General Wenck’s Twelfth Army could be turned around from facing the Americans on the Elbe and ordered to relieve Berlin. Hitler seized on this idea. ‘General Field Marshal Keitel,’ wrote Jodl, ‘was ordered to coordinate the actions of the Twelfth Army and the Ninth Army, which was breaking out of its encirclement.’ Keitel offered to leave immediately, but Hitler insisted that he first sat down while servants brought him a meal as well as sandwiches for his journey, and half a bottle of cognac and chocolate as iron rations. Keitel then left for Wenck’s headquarters and Jodl for the new OKW base at Krampnitz, north of Potsdam.

The debate over Hitler’s degree of sanity or madness can never be resolved. But Colonel de Maizière, who was there on that evening of Sunday 22 April and who had observed him closely during numerous situation conferences, was convinced that ‘his mental sickness consisted of a hypertrophic self-identification with the German people’. This may well explain why he felt that the population of Berlin should share his suicide. But he also seemed to experience real pleasure in casualties among his own men as well as those of the enemy. ‘Losses can never be too high!’ he had exclaimed to Field Marshal von Reichenau in 1942, when informed of heavy casualties in the SS Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler. ‘They sow the seeds of future glory.’

Operation Seraglio, the evacuation to Berchtesgaden, was accelerated. A party prepared to leave early the next day. Admiral von Puttkammer, Hitler’s naval aide, had been given the task of destroying all Hitler’s public papers at the Berghof. Julius Schaub, Hitler’s personal adjutant, who had dealt with all the papers in the Reich Chancellery and bunker, was to destroy all his private correspondence. Two of the four secretaries had already been sent southwards. Dr Morell, who was apparently trembling with fear, managed to attach himself to the party. He took with him a German Army footlocker full of Hitler’s medical records.

Allied intelligence services heard far more extravagant rumours of escape from Berlin. The State Department in Washington, DC, was warned by its embassy in Madrid that ‘the chiefs plan to get to Japan by way of Norway. Heinkel 177s will take them to Norway, and there, already waiting, are planes — probably Vikings — for the non-stop flight to Japan.’ This was no doubt the wishful thinking of Nazis in Spain, who also talked of U-boats being provisioned to take food to Germany and perhaps to bring out Nazi leaders. ‘There exist in Switzerland several hospitals where, under cover of wounds or illness, Germans are hospitalized. In reality these are important personalities to be saved.’ The claim that ‘camouflaged German planes continue to bring in notables [to Spain]’ was, however, much closer to the truth. Pierre Laval, the former prime minister of Vichy France, was among those flown out of Germany to Barcelona in unmarked Junkers transports. Franco felt obliged to return Laval to France, but a number of Nazis obtained sanctuary.

The exodus meant that rooms in the bunker and Reich Chancellery were liberated. Major Freytag von Loringhoven, who had moved into the bunker with General Krebs, found that the ventilation system worked well. But in the tiny conference room, with fifteen to twenty people in there, the air became almost unbreathable. Hitler was the only one to sit. The others were almost asleep on their feet. The bombing and shelling began to create cracks in the walls, and dust seeped out into the air. Since smoking was strictly forbidden in the lower Führer bunker, those desperate for a cigarette had to creep up a floor to the upper bunker. Despite these inconveniences, the bunker and the Reich Chancellery cellars were ‘superbly stocked’ with food and alcohol. The generous supplies of drink did not contribute to clear thinking. ‘In the bunker,’ Colonel de Maizière noted, ‘an atmosphere of disintegration reigned. One saw drunkenness and dejection, yet also men of all ranks acting in a frantic manner. Discipline had ceased to exist.’ This dissipation appeared to provide a striking contrast with the Nazi notion of family values when Frau Goebbels arrived, leading her six children. And yet both contained exactly the same currents of sentimentality, self-pity and brutality.

Freytag von Loringhoven was at the bottom of the stairs when he suddenly saw Magda Goebbels descend the concrete stairs, followed by her six children. She looked ‘sehr damenhaff’ — ‘very ladylike’. The six children behind ranged from twelve years old down to five: Helga, Hilde, Helmut, Holde, Hedda and Heide. Their first names, all beginning with the same letter, had not been chosen like a class of warships, but to honour the place in the alphabet marked by the Führer’s name. They descended the stairs like a school crocodile. Their pale faces stood out against their dark coats. Helga, the oldest, looked very sad, but she did not cry. Hitler knew and approved of the decision by Joseph and Magda Goebbels to kill their children before they killed themselves. This proof of total loyalty prompted him to present her with his own gold Nazi Party badge, which he always wore on his tunic. The arrival of the children in the bunker had a momentarily sobering effect. Everyone who saw them enter knew that they would be murdered by their parents as part of a Führerdämmerung.

After his terrible emotional storm in the early afternoon, Hitler rested in his small bunker sitting room with Eva Braun. He summoned his two remaining secretaries, Gerda Christian and Traudl Junge, his Austrian dietician, Constanze Manzialy, and Bormann’s secretary, Elsa Krüger. Hitler told the women that they must prepare to leave for the Berghof like the others. Eva Braun smiled and went to him. ‘You know that I am never going to leave you,’ she said. ‘I will stay by your side.’ He pulled her head down to him and, in front of everybody, kissed her full on the lips. This act astonished all who knew him. Traudl Junge and Gerda Christian said that they would stay too. Hitler looked at them fondly. ‘If only my generals had been as brave as you,’ he said. He dispensed cyanide pills to them as a farewell present.

It was presumably soon after this that Eva Braun went to type a last letter to her best friend, Herta Ostermayr. This was to accompany all her jewels. One of the men about to fly south was waiting to take the package for her. She told Herta in the letter that the jewels were to be distributed according to her will. Their value would help friends and family keep their heads ‘above water’ in the days to come. ‘Forgive me if this is a bit confused,’ she wrote, ‘but I am surrounded by the six children of G[oebbels] and they are not being quiet. What should I say to you? I cannot understand how it should have all come to this, but it is impossible to believe any more in a God.’