Berlin: The Downfall 1945

21. Fighting in the City

The civilians to be administered by Beria’s deputies had little idea of the realities of Soviet rule. They also had more urgent preoccupations as the battle was fought out on their streets, in their apartments and even through the cellars in which they sheltered. The only benefit in the early hours of Thursday 26 April was a thunderstorm, with such heavy rain that it put out some of the fires. Strangely enough, that seemed to increase the smell of burning, not diminish it.

Civilian casualties had been heavy already. Like Napoleonic infantry, the women standing in line for food simply closed ranks after a shellburst decimated a queue. Nobody dared lose their place. Some claimed that women just wiped the blood from their ration cards and stuck it out. ‘There they stand like walls,’ noted a woman diarist, ‘those who not so long ago dashed into bunkers the moment three fighter planes were announced over central Germany.’ Women queued for a handout of butter and dry sausage, while men emerged only to line up for an issue of schnapps. It seemed to be symbolic. Women were concerned with the immediacy of survival while men needed escape from the consequences of their war.

The failure of mains water meant more dangerous queues. Women waited in line with pails and enamel jugs at their nearest street pump, listening to the constant metallic squeaking from the rusty joint of its handle. They found that they had changed under fire. Swearwords and callous remarks which they would never have uttered before now slipped out quite naturally. ‘Over and over again during these days,’ the same diarist wrote, ‘I’ve been noticing that not only my feelings, but those of almost all women towards men have changed. We are sorry for them, they seem so pathetic and lacking in strength. The weakly sex. A kind of collective disappointment among women seems to be growing under the surface. The male-dominant Nazi world glorifying the strong man is tottering, and with it the myth “man”.’

The Nazi regime, which had never wanted women to be sullied by war, or indeed anything which interfered with child-rearing, now claimed in its desperation that young women were fighting alongside men. On one of the very few radio stations still on the air, there was an appeal to women and girls: ‘Take up the weapons of wounded and fallen soldiers and take part in the fight. Defend your freedom, your honour and your life!’ Germans who heard this appeal far from Berlin were shocked at this ‘most extreme consequence of total war’. Yet only a very few young women took up weapons. Most were auxiliaries attached to the SS. A handful, however, found themselves caught up in the fighting, through either extraordinary circumstances or an ill-judged rush of romanticism. In order to stay with her lover, Ewald von Demandowsky, the actress Hildegard Knef put on uniform and joined him at Schmargendorf, defending the freight yards with his scratch company.

In the cellars of apartment blocks, the different couples from upstairs ate their food avoiding each other’s eyes. It was rather like families in railway compartments on a long journey, consuming picnics in front of each other with a pretence of privacy. Yet when news came through that a barracks nearby had been abandoned, any semblance of civility disappeared. Law-abiding citizens became frenzied looters of the storerooms. It was every man, woman and child for themselves and anything they could grab. Once outside with their boxes, spontaneous bartering began as they eyed each other’s unlawful gains. There was no fixed black-market rate at that time. It depended on caprice or particular need — a loaf of bread for a bottle of schnapps, a torch battery for a block of cheese. Abandoned shops were also plundered. Folk and personal memories from Berlin in the winter of 1918 were strong. This was another generation of ‘hamsters’, storing food for an oncoming catastrophe.

Starvation, however, was not the main danger. Many were simply not prepared for the shock of Russian revenge, however much propaganda they had heard. ‘We had no idea what was going to happen,’ the Lufthansa secretary Gerda Petersohn remembered. Relatives serving as soldiers on the Eastern Front had never mentioned what had been done to the Soviet population. And even when relentless propaganda made Berlin women aware of the danger of rape, many reassured themselves that although it must be a risk out in the countryside, here in the city it could hardly happen on an extensive scale in front of everybody.

Gerda, the nineteen-year-old who had brought back the Luftwaffe malt tablets from the looted railway wagon in Neukölln, saw a certain amount of another girl of her age who lived in the same building. She was called Carmen and had been a member of the Bund deutscher Mädel, the female equivalent of the Hitler Youth. Carmen had pin-up posters of Luftwaffe fighter aces on her bedroom wall and had wept copiously when Molders, the most famous of them all, had been killed.

On the night of 25 April, as the Red Army advanced into Neukölln, it was unusually quiet. The inhabitants of the building were sheltering in the cellar. They then felt the vibration from a tank coming down their street. Soon afterwards, a draught of fresh air which made the candles flicker told them that the door had been opened. The first Russian word they heard was ‘Stoi!’ A soldier from Central Asia armed with a sub-machine gun came in and took their rings, watches and jewellery. Gerda’s mother had hidden Gerda under a pile of laundry. Another young soldier came in later and indicated to Gerda’s sister that he wanted her to come with him, but she put her child on her lap and looked down. The soldier told a man in the cellar to tell her to do as she was told, but the man pretended not to understand. The soldier wanted to take her into a little room adjacent to the cellar. He kept pointing, but she kept the baby on her lap and did not move. The baffled young soldier lost his nerve and left abruptly.

When the morning of 26 April came, they emerged to find that they had got off very lightly. They heard terrible stories of what had happened during the night. A butcher’s daughter aged fourteen had been shot when she resisted. Gerda’s sister-in-law, who lived a short distance away, had been gang-raped by soldiers and the whole family had decided to hang themselves. The parents died, but Gerda’s sister-in-law was cut down by a neighbour and brought to the Petersohn apartment. They all saw the rope marks round her neck. The young woman was beside herself when she recognized her surroundings and realized that her parents had died and she had been saved.

The next night, the families in the house decided to avoid the cellar. They would all pack into one sitting room to find safety in numbers. Over twenty women and children assembled there. Frau Petersohn grabbed the chance to hide Gerda, her other daughter and her daughter-in-law under a table with a long cloth reaching almost to the floor. It was not long before Gerda heard Russian voices and then saw Red Army boots so close to the table that she could have reached out to touch them. The soldiers dragged three young women from the room. One of them was Carmen. Gerda heard her screams. She felt so strange because Carmen was screaming her name and she did not know why. The screams eventually dissolved into sobbing.

While the soldiers were still occupied with their victims, Frau Petersohn made up her mind. ‘They’ll be back,’ she murmured to the three of them under the table. She told them to follow her and led them rapidly upstairs to the bomb-damaged top floor, where an old woman still lived. Gerda spent the night huddled on the balcony, determined to jump to her death if the Russians came for them. But their immediate worry was how to keep her sister’s baby from crying. Gerda suddenly remembered the Luftwaffe malt tablets. Whenever the baby became restless, they slipped a malt tablet in her mouth. When dawn came, they saw that the baby’s face was smeared with brown, but the tactic had worked.

Mornings were safe, with Soviet soldiers either sleeping off their debauches or returned to the fighting, so they crept back down to their own apartment. There, in a grotesque version of Goldilocks, they found that their beds had been used by the soldiers for their activities. The sisters also discovered their brother’s Wehrmacht uniform laid out carefully on the floor and defecated upon.

Gerda sought out Carmen to try to offer some sort of sympathy, but also in the hope of discovering why she had screamed out her name again and again. The moment Carmen set eyes on her, Gerda saw a bitter hostility. Carmen’s attitude immediately became clear. ‘Why me and why not you?’ That was why she had yelled her name. The two never spoke to each other again.

Although there appears to have been a fairly general pattern, the course of events when Soviet troops arrived was never predictable. In another district, frightened civilians heard a bang on the door of their bunker after the sound of fighting died away. Then a Red Army soldier armed with a sub-machine gun entered. ‘Tag, Russki!’ he greeted them cheerily, and went away without even taking their watches. Another lot of soldiers two hours later were more aggressive. They grabbed Klaus Boeseler, a fourteen-year-old boy who was just over six foot one and had blond hair. ‘Du SS!’ one of them shouted. It was more of a statement than a question. They seemed so determined to execute him that he was terrified. But the others in the cellar eventually managed to persuade the soldiers by sign language that he was in fact a schoolboy.

As a very tall boy, Boeseler was hungry the whole time. He had no compunction about slicing up a horse killed by a shell to take the meat home for his mother to preserve in vinegar. Soviet soldiers were amazed and impressed by the speed with which city-bred Berliners, who were not ‘kulaks and landowners’, managed to strip a dead horse to the bone. Sensing the Russian fondness for children, Boeseler took his three-year-old sister to visit a bivouac of Soviet soldiers nearby. The soldiers gave them a loaf, then added a slab of butter. The next day, they were given soup. But then he heard of cases of gang rape in the neighbourhood, so Boeseler hid his mother and a neighbour in the coal cellar for three days.

German standards of cleanliness suffered badly. Their clothes and skin felt impregnated with the dust from plaster and pulverized masonry, and there was no water to waste on washing. In fact, prudent Berliners had been boiling water to put in preserving jars, knowing that reliable drinking water would be the greatest need in the days ahead.

The few unevacuated hospitals which had remained in Berlin were so inundated with casualties that most newcomers were turned away. The situation was made even worse by the fact that wards were limited to the cellars. In the days of bombing, staff had been able to get the patients downstairs when the sirens went, but with constant artillery fire, there was no warning. One woman who went to offer her services saw chaos and ‘wax-like faces wreathed in blood-stained bandages’. A French surgeon operating on fellow prisoners of war described how they had to work in a cellar on a wooden table, ‘almost without antiseptic and with the instruments scarcely boiled’. There was no water to wash their surgical clothes and lighting depended on two bicycles with dynamos.

Because of the virtual impossibility of obtaining official help, many wounded soldiers and civilians were tended in the cellars of houses by mothers and girls. This was dangerous, however, because the Russians reacted to the presence of any soldier in a cellar as if the whole place were a defensive position. To avoid this, the women usually stripped the wounded of their uniforms, which they burned, and gave them spare clothes from upstairs. Another danger arose when members of the Volkssturm, on deciding to slip away home just before the Russians arrived, left behind the vast majority of their weapons and ammunition. Women who found any guns wasted no time in disposing of them. Word had got round that the Red Army was liable to execute all the inhabitants in a building where weapons were found.

The parish pump was once again the main place for exchanging information. Official news was unreliable. The Panzerbär, a news-sheet called the ‘armoured bear’ after the symbol of Berlin, claimed that towns such as Oranienburg had been retaken. Goebbels’s propaganda ministry, or the ‘Promi’ as Berliners called it, was reduced to distributing handbills now that the radio transmitters were in enemy hands. ‘Berliner! Hold on. Wenck’s army is marching to our relief. Just a few more days and Berlin will be free again.’ With several Soviet armies approaching the centre of the city, fewer and fewer people were convinced by the notion of Berlin being freed by a single German army. Many, however, still clung to the idea of the Americans riding to their rescue, even though Stalin’s encirclement of the city had put paid to any hope of that.

Colonel Sebelev, an engineer attached to the 2nd Guards Tank Army in Siemensstadt, in the north-west of the city, took a moment to write to his family. ‘At the moment I am sitting with my officers on the fifth floor of a building, writing orders to units. Signallers and runners come and go constantly. We are moving towards the centre of Berlin. Gunfire, fires and smoke everywhere. Soldiers run from one building to another and creep through the courtyards carefully. Germans were shooting at our tanks from windows and doors, but General Bogdanov’s tankists adopted a clever tactic. They are moving not in the middle of the streets, but on the pavements, and some of them are shooting with cannons and machine guns at the right side of the street and others at the left side and Germans are running away from windows and doors. In the courtyards of the houses the soldiers from the support services are handing out food from vehicles to the city’s population, which is starving. The Germans have a starved and long-suffering look. Berlin is not a beautiful city, narrow streets, barricades everywhere, broken trams and vehicles. The houses are empty because everybody is in the basements. We all are happy here to know that you are already sowing grain. How happy I would be if I could sow potatoes, tomatoes, cucumbers, pumpkins and so forth. Goodbye, kisses and hugs. Your Pyotr.’

Sebelev did not mention that tactics had not been clever to begin with and losses were heavy. Zhukov’s desperation for speed, which prompted him to send the two tank armies straight into the city, led to tanks driving in a line straight up the middle of a street. Even Chuikov’s 8th Guards Army, proud of their street-fighting inheritance at Stalingrad, made many mistakes at first. The roles of course were completely reversed this time, with the Red Army as the attacker enjoying a huge superiority in armour and air power, and the Wehrmacht as the defender and ambusher.

The Waffen SS did not believe in standing behind the makeshift barricades erected close to street corners. They knew that these not very effective obstacles would be the first thing to be blasted by gunfire. It was all right to put riflemen at windows of the upper floors or on roofs, because tanks could not elevate their guns enough. But with the panzerfaust, they made their ambushes from basements and cellar windows. This was because the panzerfaust was very hard to fire accurately from above. The Hitler Youth copied the SS enthusiastically, and soon the Volkssturm — the ones who had seen service in the First World War and stayed at their posts — followed the same tactics. Red Army soldiers referred to the Hitler Youth and the Volkssturm as ‘totals’ because they were the product of ‘total mobilization’. Wehrmacht officers called them the ‘casserole’ because they were a mixture of old meat and green vegetables.

Tank losses, especially in the 1st Guards Tank Army, prompted a rapid rethink of tactics. The first ‘new tactic’ was to cover each tank with sub-machine gunners who sprayed every window and aperture ahead as the vehicles advanced. But there were so many soldiers clinging to the tank that it could hardly traverse its turret. Then they went in again for festooning their vehicles with bedsprings and other metal to make the panzerfausts explode prematurely. But more and more they relied on heavy guns, especially 152mm and 203mm howitzers, to blast barricades and buildings over open sights. The 3rd Shock Army also used its anti-aircraft guns constantly against rooftops.

Infantry tactics were based largely on Chuikov’s notes, evolved since Stalingrad and hurriedly updated after the storming of Poznan. He started from the precept that ‘Offensive operations carried out by major formations as if in normal battle conditions stand no chance of success.’ This was exactly how the two tank armies began. He rightly emphasized the need for careful reconnaissance, both the approach and the enemy’s likely escape routes. Smoke or darkness should be used to cover the approach of infantry until they were within thirty metres of their objective, otherwise losses would be prohibitively high.

The assault groups of six to eight men should be backed by reinforcement groups and then by reserve groups, ready to deal with a counterattack. The assault groups, as in Stalingrad days, were to be armed with ‘grenades, sub-machine guns, daggers, and sharpened spades to be used as axes in hand-to-hand fighting’. The reinforcement groups needed to be ‘heavily armed’, with machine guns and anti-tank weapons. They had to have sappers equipped with explosives and pick-axes ready to blast through walls from house to house. The danger was that as soon as they opened a hole in the wall, a German soldier the other side would throw a grenade through first. But most Red Army men soon found that the panzerfausts abandoned by the Volkssturm offered the best means of ‘flank progress’. The blast was enough to flatten anyone in the room beyond.

While some of the assault groups made their way from house to house on the ground, others progressed along the rooftops, and others made their way from cellar to cellar to take the panzerfaust ambushers in the side. Flame-throwers were used to terrible effect. Sappers also prepared sections of railway line with dynamite attached to it to act as shrapnel for the final attack.

The presence of civilians made no difference. The Red Army troops simply forced them out of the cellars at gunpoint and into the street, whatever the crossfire or shelling. Many Soviet officers, frustrated by the confusion, wanted to evacuate all German civilians by force, which was just what the German Sixth Army had attempted when fighting in Stalingrad. ‘We didn’t have time to distinguish who was who,’ said one. ‘Sometimes we just threw grenades into the cellars and passed on.’ This was usually justified on the grounds that German officers were putting on civilian clothes and hiding with women and children. Yet civilian accounts show that any officer or soldier who wanted to hide in a cellar or shelter was forced to get rid of his weapon as well as his uniform. There were very few genuine cases of German troops hiding among civilians to strike the Red Army in the rear.

Chuikov urged a ruthless panache when house-clearing. ‘Throw your grenade and follow up. You need speed, a sense of direction, great initiative and stamina because the unexpected will certainly happen. You will find yourself in a labyrinth of rooms and corridors all full of danger. Too bad. Chuck a grenade at every corner. Go forward. Fire bursts of machine-gun fire at any piece of ceiling which still remains. And when you get to the next room chuck in another grenade. Then clean it up with your sub-machine gun. Never waste a moment.’

This was all very well for experienced troops. But so many of the young officers who had graduated after short courses had no idea of how to train or to control their men in unfamiliar surroundings. And after the Oder battle and the relentless ‘twenty-four-hour’ advance ordered by Zhukov, most of the Soviet frontline troops were exhausted. Tiredness slowed their reactions dangerously. Mortar fuses were sometimes set incorrectly and the bomb exploded in the tube, while soldiers who tried to use German grenades often ended up disabling themselves and their comrades.

Self-inflicted casualties occurred on an even greater scale at army level. Despite the U-2 biplanes spotting for gun batteries, the artillery and katyusha batteries supporting one army often shelled another as they converged on approaching the centre. There were ‘frequent cases of mutual firing at our own troops,’ wrote General Luchinsky, the commander of the 28th Army supporting Rybalko’s 3rd Guards Tank Army. And with all the smoke over the urban battlefield, the three different aviation armies attached to Zhukov and Konev’s Fronts were frequently bombing other Red Army troops. The situation became particularly bad in the south of the city. The aviation regiments supporting the 1st Ukrainian Front frequently attacked the 8th Guards Army. Chuikov made representations to Zhukov, demanding the withdrawal of the ‘neighbours’.

The battle for Tempelhof aerodrome against the 8th Guards Army and the 1st Guards Tank Army continued through most of 26 April. When the Müncheberg Panzer Division counter-attacked, so few tanks were left that they had to operate singly, supported by small groups of infantry and Hitler Youth armed with panzerfausts. The survivors extricated themselves towards evening. Sturmbannführer Saalbach pulled back the remaining vehicles of the Nordland reconnaissance battalion to the Anhalter Bahnhof. The division’s remaining armour, eight Tigers of the ‘Hermann von Salza’ battalion and several assault guns, was ordered to the Tiergarten.

The morning began with an intensive bombardment. ‘Poor inner city,’ wrote a woman diarist in Prenzlauerberg as the artillery thundered away. The shelling of the Klein Tiergarten was particularly heavy. Churned up by explosions, the park was hard to imagine as a favourite playground for children.

Chuikov and Katukov ordered their forces on towards the Belle-Allianceplatz — named after the battle of Waterloo and ironically defended by French SS — and the Anhalter Bahnhof, the marker separating the advance of the two Fronts. The rivalry with Konev’s troops had become intense, though masked by jokes. ‘Now we should be scared not of the enemy, but of our neighbours,’ one of Chuikov’s corps commanders said to Vasily Grossman. ‘I’ve ordered that the burnt-out tanks should be used to block our neighbours from getting to the Reichstag. There’s nothing more depressing in Berlin than learning about the successes of your neighbour.’

Chuikov did not take the matter so lightly. Over the next two days, he pushed his left flank across the front of the 3rd Guards Tank Army to head it off the axis which led to the Reichstag. He did not even warn Rybalko, so this almost certainly led to the slaughter of many of his own men under the artillery shells and rockets of the 1st Ukrainian Front.

Katyusha rockets — ‘thunderbolts from the sky’ — continued to be used as a psychological weapon as well as for area targets. Early on the morning of 26 April, Colonel Refior, the chief of staff of the defence of Berlin, was brusquely awoken from a snatched sleep in their headquarters on the Hohenzollerndamm by a rapid sequence of ranging shells. (The Russians called it ‘framing’.) ‘Old frontline hares’, Refior noted, knew this to be the ‘greeting’ before a salvo of katyushas. And if their headquarters were now in katyusha range, it was time to move. General Weidling had already chosen the ‘Bendlerblock’, the old army headquarters on the Bendlerstrasse, where Colonel Count von Stauffenberg had been executed after the failure of the July plot. It possessed well-equipped air-raid shelters and was close to the Reich Chancellery, where Weidling was constantly summoned.

In the depths of the Bendlerblock, Weidling’s staff had no idea whether it was day or night. They kept awake on coffee and cigarettes. Thanks to the generators, they had lighting the whole time, but the air was clammy and heavy. There they continued to deal with increasingly urgent calls for help from sector commanders, but there were no reserves.

That evening Weidling presented to Hitler his recommendations for a mass breakout from Berlin to avoid further destruction and loss of life. His plan was for the garrison, acting as Hitler’s escort, to break out westwards and join up with the remains of Army Group Vistula. There would be a spearhead consisting of the remaining battle-worthy tanks, nearly forty of them, and the bulk of the combat divisions. This would be followed by the ‘Führergruppe’, with Hitler and his Reich Chancellery staff, along with other ‘Prominente’. The rearguard would consist of a single reinforced division. The breakout should take place on the night of 28 April. When Weidling came to an end, Hitler shook his head. ‘Your proposal is perfectly all right. But what is the point of it all? I have no intention of wandering around in the woods. I am staying here and I will fall at the head of my troops. You, for your part, will carry on with the defence.’

The futility of it all was summed up in the slogan painted on walls: ‘Berlin stays German.’ One of these had been crossed out and underneath was scrawled in Cyrillic, ‘But I’m already here in Berlin, signed Sidorov.’

The Red Army was not merely in Berlin, it was already setting up a provisional administration to get essential services going again. Zhukov, still unaware of Beria’s plan to have the NKVD running civilian affairs, had just appointed Colonel General Berzarin, the commander of the 5th Shock Army, as commandant of Berlin. Marshal Suvorov in the eighteenth century had insisted that the commander of the first army to enter a city became its commandant and the Red Army maintained the tradition. Chuikov’s jealousy of his rival must have been intense.

Grossman visited Berzarin in his headquarters on 26 April. ‘The commandant of Berlin,’ he wrote in his notebook, ‘is fat with sly, brown eyes and prematurely white hair. He is very clever, very balanced and crafty.’ It was the ‘creation of the world’ that day. Bürgermeisters, directors of Berlin electricity, Berlin water, sewers, the U-Bahn, trams, gas supply, factory owners and public figures had been summoned. ‘They all receive their appointments here in this office. Vice-directors become directors, chiefs of regional enterprises become magnates of national importance.’ Grossman was fascinated by signs other than words: the ‘shuffling of feet, greetings, whisperings’. Old German Communists from before the Nazis’ rise to power appeared, hoping for an appointment. ‘An old housepainter shows his [German Communist] Party card. He has been a Party member since 1920. Berzarin’s officers show little reaction. They tell him, “Take a seat.”’

Like the other Russians present, Grossman was taken aback when a bürgermeister, on being told to provide working parties to clear streets, asked, ‘How much will the people be paid?’ After the way Soviet citizens had been treated as slave labourers in Germany, the answer was obvious. ‘Everyone here certainly seems to have a very strong idea of their rights,’ observed Grossman. But German civilians received a shock the next day, 27 April, when Soviet troops rounded up 2,000 German women in the southern suburbs and marched them to Tempelhof aerodrome to clear the runways of shot-up machines. Red Army aviation wanted to be able to use it as a base within twenty-four hours.

During the withdrawal towards the centre, Sector Z, the battle intensified. Whenever Germans managed to knock out a Soviet tank with a panzerfaust, the local Soviet commander always tried to retaliate with a katyusha strike. But revenge with such an area weapon was akin to shooting hostages in response to a partisan attack.

A small panzerfaust group of the French SS were captured by Soviet troops. The French ΝCO claimed that they were forced labourers who had been press-ganged into uniform by the Germans when the Red Army launched its attack on the Oder. They were lucky to be believed. At that stage, Soviet troops did not know about SS tattoos.

That evening, one of the grotesque melodramas which so characterized the fall of the Third Reich took place. General Ritter von Greim, whom Hitler had summoned from Munich to take over command of the Luftwaffe from Göring, was carried into the bunker anteroom on a stretcher. He had been wounded in the leg by Soviet anti-aircraft fire. He was accompanied by his mistress, Hanna Reitsch, a test pilot and devotee of the Führer. Flying in a Fieseler Storch for the last leg of their extremely hazardous journey, they had been hit over the Grune-wald. Hanna Reitsch, reaching around the wounded Greim’s shoulders, had managed to land the small aircraft near the Brandenburg Gate. It was a feat requiring considerable bravery and skill. Yet that does not alter the fact that Hitler, by insisting on this symbolic handover, had nearly managed to kill the very man he wanted to promote to the supreme command of an organization which had effectively ceased to exist.

On the following day, 27 April, General Krebs followed the Nazi leaders who were deceiving the troops under his command. Although evasive on the question of negotiations, he claimed that ‘the Americans could cross the ninety kilometres from the Elbe to Berlin in the shortest space of time and then everything would change for the better’.

Everyone there was obsessed with reinforcements, whatever their number or effectiveness. Mohnke was ecstatic when he told Krukenberg that a company of sailors had been flown in and had taken up position in the gardens of the Foreign Office on the Wilhelmstrasse. Krukenberg was more encouraged to hear that eight assault guns from the 503rd SS Heavy Panzer Battalion had been assigned to support the Nordland. Other reinforcements included a group of Latvian SS. This prompted Krukenberg to claim that soon the whole of Europe would be represented in their sector. Considering the fact that by 1945 half of the Waffen SS was not German, this was not such a remarkable fact. And when you force an international civil war upon the world, as the Communists and fascists had done between them by the unscrupulous manipulation of alternatives, then the downfall of Berlin was an unsurprising pyre for the remnants of the European extreme right.

Krukenberg’s divisional headquarters were reduced to a subway carriage in the U-Bahn station Stadtmitte without any electric light and without a telephone. His men kept going only because they had stripped the grocery shops in the nearby Gendarmenmarkt. Their fighting strength now rested on the large quantities of panzerfausts from the improvised arsenal in the Reich Chancellery cellars. Short of other weapons and ammunition, the French, like many other troops, were using them in close-quarter house combat as well as in their official anti-tank role. Hauptssturmführer Pehrsson arrived with four armoured personnel carriers taken from the Red Army and two of the original half-tracks belonging to the Nordland to guard the Reich Chancellery. The others had been blown up as they ran out of fuel or broke down in the withdrawal from Neukölln.

In Sector Z, wounded soldiers were sent back to the dressing station set up in the cellars of the Adlon Hotel. SS soldiers were taken to another one in the Reich Chancellery cellars run by SS doctors and surgeons. There were nearly 500 wounded packed in there by the end of the battle. A bigger one, the Thomaskeller Lazarett, resembled a ‘slaughterhouse’. Like the civilian hospitals, the military field hospitals lacked food and water, as well as anaesthetic.

The Soviet advance into Berlin was extremely uneven. In the north-west, the 47th Army, which had completed the encirclement of the city by meeting up with Konev’s 4th Guards Tank Army, was now approaching Spandau. Its officers had no idea that the huge citadel there housed German research into the nerve gases Tabun and Sarin. It was also involved in fierce fighting on Gatow airfield, where Volkssturm and Luftwaffe cadets used the 88mm anti-aircraft guns and shot back from behind wrecked aircraft.

In the north, the and Guards Tank Army had hardly advanced out of Siemensscadt, while the 3rd Shock Army had reached the northern barrier to the Tiergarten and Prenzlauerberg. The 3rd Shock Army had bypassed the immensely powerful Humboldthain flak bunker, which was left as a target for their heavy artillery and the bombers. Continuing in a clockwise direction, the 5th Shock Army, driving into the eastern districts, similarly bypassed the Friedrichshain bunker. The bulk of its strength was between the Frankfurterallee and the south bank of the Spree after its 9th Corps crossed into Treptow.

From the south, the 8th Guards Army and the 1st Guards Tank Army had reached and breached the Landwehr Canal on 27 April. This was the last major obstacle to the government district and less than two kilometres from the Reich Chancellery, even though all of Zhukov’s armies were obsessed with Stalin’s target of the Reichstag. In the south-west, the 3rd Guards Tank Army had just entered Char-lottenburg, with a left-flanking hook through the Grunewald against the remains of the 18th Panzergrenadier Division.

Red Army troops reached Dahlem on 24 April, and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics the next day. The fighting, with katyushas firing and tanks advancing amid the spacious villas and neat tree-lined streets, produced strange contrasts. The frontline troops were followed by the ubiquitous panje-wagons pulled by shaggy little ponies and even pack camels.

There is nothing to show that any commanders in Rybalko’s army, or even Rybalko himself, had been warned of the Institute’s significance, yet they must have been aware of the large force of NKVD troops and specialists who secured the complex off the Boltzmannstrasse within two days.

Since the one thing holding up Soviet attempts to replicate the Manhattan Project’s research was the shortage of uranium, the importance which Stalin and Beria attached to securing research laboratories and their supplies was considerable. They also wanted German scientists capable of processing uranium. Beria’s preparations for the Berlin operation had clearly been enormous. Colonel General Makhnev was in charge of the special commission. The large numbers of NKVD troops to secure the laboratories and uranium stores were directly supervised by no less a personage than General Khrulev, the chief of rear area operations for the whole of the Red Army. The chief NKVD metallurgist, General Avraami Zavenyagin, had set up a base on the edge of Berlin and scientists from the main team of researchers oversaw the movement of materials and the dismantling of laboratories.

The NKVD commission made its report. As well as all the equipment at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, they found ‘250kgs of metallic uranium; three tons of uranium oxide; twenty litres of heavy water’. The three tons of uranium oxide misdirected to Dahlem was a real windfall. There was a particular reason for speed, Beria and Malenkov reminded Stalin rather unnecessarily in a retrospective confirmation of action already carried out: the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute was ‘situated in the territory of the future Allied zone’. ‘Taking into account the extreme importance for the Soviet Union of all the above-mentioned equipment and materials,’ they wrote, ‘we request your decision on disassembling and evacuating equipment and other items from these enterprises and institutes back to the USSR.’

The State Committee for Defence accordingly authorized the ‘NKVD Commission headed by Comrade Makhnev’ to ‘evacuate to the Soviet Union to Laboratory No. 2 of the Academy of Sciences and Special Metal Department of the NKVD all the equipment and materials and archive of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin’.

Makhnev’s men also rounded up Professor Peter Thiessen and Dr Ludwig Bewilogua, who were flown to Moscow. But the major figures of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute — Werner Heisenberg, Max von Laue, Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker and Otto Hahn, who had won the Nobel Prize for chemistry only a few months before — were beyond their grasp. They were earmarked by the British and taken back to be lodged at Farm Hall, their debriefing centre for German scientists in East Anglia.

Other less important laboratories and institutes were also stripped out and many more scientists were arrested and sent to a special holding pen in the concentration camp of Sachsenhausen. Professor Baron von Ardenne volunteered. He was persuaded by General Zavenyagin to write ‘an application addressed to the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR that he wished to work with Russian physicists and place the Institute and himself at the disposal of the Soviet government’.

Beria and Kurchatov’s scientists at last had some uranium to start work in earnest, and experts to process it, but the need for further supplies was desperate in their eyes. General Serov, the NKVD chief in Berlin, was ordered to concentrate on securing the uranium deposits in Czechoslovakia and, above all, in Saxony, south of Dresden. The presence of the uncompromising General George Patton’s Third Army in the region must have caused the Soviet authorities considerable concern. It may also explain why they were so nervous about whether US forces would withdraw to the previously agreed occupation zones.

In Dahlem, some of Rybalko’s officers visited Sister Kunigunde, the mother superior of Haus Dahlem, a maternity clinic and orphanage. She informed them that they had not hidden any German soldiers. The officers and their men behaved impeccably. In fact, the officers even warned Sister Kunigunde about the second-line troops following on behind. Their prediction proved entirely accurate, but there was no chance of escape. Nuns, young girls, old women, pregnant women and mothers who had just given birth were all raped without pity. One woman compared events in Dahlem to ‘the horrors of the Middle Ages’. Others thought of the Thirty Years War.

The pattern, with soldiers flashing torches in the faces of women huddled in the bunkers to select their victims, appears to have been common to all the Soviet armies involved in the Berlin operation. This process of selection, as opposed to the immediate violence shown in East Prussia, indicates a definite change. By this stage Soviet soldiers treated German women much more as sexual spoils of war than as substitutes for the Wehrmacht on which to vent their rage.

Rape has often been defined by writers on the subject as an act of violence which has little to do with sex. But that is a definition from the victim’s perspective. To understand the crime, however, one needs to see things from the perpetrator’s point of view, especially in this second stage when unaggravated rape had succeeded the extreme onslaught of January and February. The soldiers concerned appear to have felt that they were satisfying a sexual need after all their time at the front. In this most soldier rapists did not demonstrate gratuitous violence, provided the woman did not resist. A third stage in the process, and even a fourth, developed in the weeks to come, as will be seen. But the basic point is that, in war, undisciplined soldiers without fear of retribution can rapidly revert to a primitive male sexuality. The difference between the incoherent violence in East Prussia and the notion of carnal booty in Berlin underlines the fact that there can be no all-embracing definition of the crime. On the other hand, it tends to suggest that there is a dark area of male sexuality which can emerge all too easily, especially in war, when there are no social and disciplinary restraints. Much also depends on the military culture of a particular national army. As the Red Army example shows, the practice of collective rape can even become a form of bonding process.

Soviet political officers still talked of ‘violence under the pretext of revenge’. ‘When we broke into Berlin,’ the political department of the 1st Belorussian Front reported, ‘some of the troops indulged in looting and violence towards civilians. Political officers tried to control this. They organized meetings devoted to such topics as “the honour and dignity of the Red Army warrior”, “a looter is the worst enemy of the Red Army” and “how to understand correctly the problem of taking revenge”.’ But the idea of controlling their troops through political exhortation, particularly when the Party line had suddenly changed, was doomed to failure.

Germans were deeply shocked by the lack of discipline within the Red Army and the inability of officers to control their men, except in extreme cases by shooting them on the spot. All too often, women encountered total indifference or amusement that they should attempt to complain about rape. ‘That? Well, it certainly hasn’t done you any harm,’ said one district commandant in Berlin to a group of women who had come to request protection from repeated attacks. ‘Our men are all healthy.’ Unfortunately, many of them were not free from disease, as women soon found to their even greater cost.