Berlin: The Downfall 1945

25. Reich Chancellery and Reichstag

The dawn of May Day in the centre of Berlin revealed exhausted Soviet soldiers sleeping on pavements up against the walls of buildings. Rzhevskaya, the interpreter awaiting the capture of the Reich Chancellery, saw one soldier sleeping in the foetus position, with a piece of broken door as a pillow. Those who had awoken were retying their foot bandages. They had no idea of Hitler’s suicide the afternoon before. Some of them still called ‘Gitler durak!’ — ‘Hitler’s a blockhead’ — at any German prisoners.

The Führer’s death was kept a closely guarded secret on the German side throughout the night and into the next morning, when just a few senior officers were informed. SS Brigadeführer Mohnke, taking Krukenberg into his confidence, could not forgo the crass pomposity of Nazi rhetoric. ‘A blazing comet is extinguished,’ he told him.

Officers awaited word of the negotiations, but the suddenly renewed storm of fire in the middle of the morning spoke for itself. General Krebs had failed to achieve a cease-fire. The Soviet commanders insisted on unconditional surrender and Goebbels had refused. The massed artillery and katyusha launchers of the 3rd Shock Army, the 8th Guards Army and the 5th Shock Army blasted away again at semi-ruined buildings.

Mohnke also told Krukenberg that morning of his fears that Soviet troops would enter the U-Bahn tunnels and come up behind the Reich Chancellery. ‘As a first priority,’ wrote Krukenberg, ‘I sent a group of Nordland sappers through the U-Bahn towards Potsdamerplatz.’ He gives no further details nor an exact time, but this was probably the order which led to one of the most contentious incidents of the whole battle: the blowing up of the S-Bahn tunnel under the Landwehr Canal near Trebbinerstrasse.

The demolition method used by the SS engineers was almost certainly a ‘hollow charge’, which meant fastening their explosives to the ceiling in a large circle to blast out a chunk. This would have been the only way to penetrate such a depth of reinforced concrete with relatively small amounts of explosive. Estimates of the time — and even the date — of the explosion vary enormously, but this is probably due to the looting of watches and clocks and the confusing, perma-night existence of all those sheltering in bunkers and tunnels. The most reliable accounts point to the explosion taking place in the early morning of 2 May. This suggests either a surprisingly long-delayed charge or that the Nordland sapper detachment experienced considerable difficulties carrying out their task.

In any case, the explosion led to the flooding of twenty-five kilometres of S-Bahn and also U-Bahn tunnels, once the water penetrated through a connecting shaft. Estimates of casualties ranged ‘between around fifty and 15,000’. A number of Berliners are convinced that the new Soviet authorities had the victims carted to a small canal harbour near the Anhalter Bahnhof and then buried under rubble. More conservative estimates, usually around the 100 mark, are based on the fact that, although there were many thousands of civilians in the tunnels, as well as several ‘hospital trains’, which were subway carriages packed with wounded, the water did not rise quickly since it was spreading in many different directions. Women and children running through the dark tunnels as the floodwater rose were naturally terrified. Some recount seeing exhausted and wounded soldiers slip beneath the water, as well as many who had been seeking oblivion in the bottle. This may well have been true in a few cases, yet the high casualty estimates are hard to believe. The water in most places was less than a metre and a half deep and there was plenty of time to evacuate the so-called ‘hospital trains’ near the Stadtmitte U-Bahn station. It is also more than likely that many of the bodies recovered were those of soldiers and civilians who had already died of their injuries in one of the underground dressing stations and been laid aside in adjoining tunnels. The floodwater would have swept bodies along and nobody would have had the time afterwards to distinguish the real cause of death. A few of the dead were almost certainly SS men. They may have ended up among the fifty or so buried in the Jewish cemetery in the Grosse Hamburgerstrasse.

At the Reichstag, the fighting inside was still savage, which made rather a mockery of raising the red banner of victory before midnight on May Day. One Soviet soldier who tried to throw back a German grenade misjudged his aim. It bounced off the door lintel and exploded at his feet, blowing them off. Soldiers on both sides fought on, exhausted and thirsty, their throats and noses raw from dust and smoke. It made a Soviet officer keep thinking of the Reichstag fire in 1933, which Hitler had used to crush the German Communist Party.

The firing did not die down until the late afternoon. Germans in the cellars shouted that they wanted to negotiate with a senior officer. The young Captain Neustroev told Lieutenant Berest to pretend to be a colonel. He gave him a sheepskin coat to hide his shoulder boards and sent him forth to negotiate. Shortly afterwards, Germans began to appear from the basement, dirty and unshaven in their ragged uniforms, with their eyes flickering nervously around and ‘smiling like obedient dogs’. Some 300 enemy soldiers and officers laid down their weapons. Nearly 200 had been killed. In the improvised dressing station in the basement lay another 500, although many of them had been wounded before the Reichstag was stormed.

An even more massive fortress to be reduced was the vast Zoo flak tower in the south-west corner of the Tiergarten. Although it was powerful enough to resist direct hits from 203mm howitzers, the conditions inside, with several thousand terrorized civilians, were unspeakable. There were also over a thousand wounded and sick in the field hospital section, which was well equipped.

Katukov’s 1st Guards Tank Army and Chuikov’s 8th Guards Army had attacked into the Tiergarten from the south across the Landwehr Canal. But the task of tackling the Zoo flak tower was left to two regiments from the 79th Guards Rifle Division. Storming it was out of the question, so on 30 April they sent German prisoners as envoys bearing an ultimatum written in pencil to the commander: ‘We propose that you surrender the fortress without further fighting. We guarantee that no troops, including SS and SA men, will be executed.’

On 1 May one of the prisoners eventually returned with a reply: ‘Your note was received at 11 p.m. We will capitulate [tonight] at midnight. Haller, garrison commander.’ Haller was not in fact the garrison commander and the reason for the long delay was to allow them to prepare a breakout that evening.

Another fortress besieged that day was the Citadel of Spandau at the extreme north-western corner of Berlin. Architecturally, it was a good deal more distinguished than the concrete horror at the Zoo. Spandau was built in brick in 1630 on an island at the confluence of the Havel and the Spree. During the war it served as the Army Gas Defence Laboratories, but this appears to have been a camouflage for its true work.

On 30 April, the Soviet 47th Army finally came to grips with this formidable obstacle whose guns could cover both of the nearby bridges over the Havel. Hoping to avoid a full-scale assault, the army commander, General Perkhorovich, sent forward the 7th Department under Major Grishin to soften up the enemy with propaganda. Loudspeaker trucks broadcast on the hour every hour and the Germans replied with artillery fire.

The next day, 1 May, Perkhorovich ordered Major Grishin to send surrender proposals to the garrison commander. Grishin summoned his officers. ‘Because this mission is so dangerous,’ he told them, ‘I cannot order anyone on it. I need a volunteer to accompany me.’ All seven officers volunteered. Grishin told Konrad Wolf, the future East German film-maker and brother of Markus Wolf, that he could not go. There were SS officers in the fortress, and if they suspected for a moment that he was a German in Russian uniform, they would shoot him on the spot. Wolf’s best friend, Vladimir Gall, was selected instead. He and Grishin emerged from the edge of the trees waving a white flag. They slowly approached a barricade built around a burnt-out Tiger tank in front of the brick bridge over the moat.

The Germans, seeing them coming, threw down a rope ladder from a balustraded stone balcony some dozen metres above the main entrance. Grishin and Gall climbed the rope ladder, which swung around wildly. They reached the balcony and, with considerable apprehension, entered the unlit room beyond. They made out a group of officers of the Wehrmacht and the SS. The apparent commandant of the citadel was Colonel Jung and his deputy was Lieutenant Colonel Koch. Jung, with metal-rimmed spectacles, an old lined face, grey hair clipped short and the collar of his uniform loose around his neck, did not look like a professional soldier. But neither Grishin nor Gall had any idea of his true position.

Negotiations began, conducted on the Russian side almost entirely by Gall, the Jewish philologist, since Grishin spoke very little German. Koch explained that Hitler had issued an order that any officer who attempted to surrender a fortress must be shot on the spot. Unfortunately, the 47th Army had not yet heard that Hitler was now dead. Gall sensed that the SS officers especially were in a state of nervous exhaustion and were quite capable of shooting anyone down, whatever the consequences. He told them that Berlin was now almost entirely occupied, the Red Army had joined up with the Americans at Torgau on the Elbe, and further resistance would mean only a futile loss of life. If they surrendered, there would be no executions, food would be given to everyone and medical assistance provided for their wounded and sick. He made it clear that if they refused to surrender and if the Red Army had to take the fortress by storm, none of these guarantees would apply. ‘We are all soldiers and we all know that a great deal of blood would be shed. And if many of our soldiers die in the process, I cannot answer for the consequences. Also, if you refuse to surrender, you will be responsible for the deaths of all your civilians here. Germany has lost so much blood that each life must surely be important for its future.’

The SS officers stared at him with total hatred. The tension was so great that he feared ‘the smallest spark’ would cause an explosion. On Grishin’s instruction, he told them that they had until 3 p.m. to make up their minds. In deadly silence, the two officers turned and then walked back towards the light of the window. As they climbed down the rope ladder, their bodies quivering from the tension, Gall could not help fearing that an SS officer would cut the rope.

On reaching the ground, they longed to run across the open space in front of the fortress to the safety of the trees, where their comrades awaited them, but they restricted themselves to a purposeful stride. In the trees, their colleagues ran up to embrace them, but they had to explain that no answer had been given. They could only wait. The presence of SS officers and Hitler’s order about shooting officers who surrendered did not encourage them.

At 47th Army headquarters, General Perkhorovich asked the same question: ‘Will they surrender?’

‘We don’t know. We gave them until 15.00 hours, as instructed. If they agree, they have to send a representative to our front trenches.’

‘Well, Comrade Gall, just in case they do surrender, make sure that you are ready in that trench.’

The tension returned as 3 p.m. approached. Nervous jokes were made about German punctuality.

‘Comrade Captain!’ a soldier suddenly cried. ‘Look! They’re coming, they’re coming.’

They made out two figures on the balcony, preparing to climb down the ladder. The garrison was going to surrender. Gall told himself to act as if he were used to receiving the surrender of a fortress as a normal part of the day’s work.

When the two German emissaries, Lieutenants Ebbinghaus and Brettschneider, appeared, Russian officers and soldiers rushed up to slap them on the back in congratulation. They explained to Gall that the terms of surrender were agreed, but they must be written and signed first. They were led off in triumph to 47th Army headquarters, where they saw empty bottles everywhere from May Day celebrations. A senior officer was still asleep on a mattress on the floor. On being woken, he caught sight of the two German officers and told orderlies to prepare some food for them. Major Grishin then turned up. He was told that the garrison insisted on first having the surrender details in writing. ‘Typically German!’ he muttered.

When the details were written and signed, the Soviet officers brought out a bottle of cognac and filled glasses for a toast. The Russians swallowed the whole lot, and when Lieutenant Brettschneider, who had eaten very little over the past week, cautiously drank only two fingers, they laughed uproariously and refilled the glasses. ‘Woina kaputt!’ they cried. ‘The war’s packed up.’

The celebration was interrupted by the arrival of a staff colonel from 1st Belorussian Front headquarters. The situation was explained to him. He turned to Lieutenant Ebbinghaus, the older of the two German officers, and asked how long he thought the citadel could have held out if the Red Army had bombed and shelled it heavily. ‘At least a week,’ Ebbinghaus said stiffly. The Russian colonel looked at him in disbelief.

‘The war is over,’ Major Grishin said. ‘Your duty as an officer is at an end.’ There was a box of Ritmeester cigars on the table and Lieutenant Ebbinghaus helped himself.

Two hours later, Grishin and Gall entered the fortress, not via the balcony but through the main gate. Russian soldiers were piling the arms of the surrendered garrison and waving the men into columns outside.

As the two officers stood watching the scene, Jung and Koch came up to them. ‘We are about to say goodbye to you,’ Koch said in perfect Russian. Seeing their surprised expressions, he smiled. ‘Yes, I speak a little Russian. I lived in St Petersburg as a child.’

Gall suddenly thought with a rush of horror that during the negotiations Koch must have understood every word that had passed between them. Then, to his relief, he remembered that Grishin had not said anything like, ‘Promise them whatever they want and we’ll deal with them later.’

In the courtyard, Gall and Grishin saw pale and trembling civilians emerging from the cellars of the fortress. General Perkhorovich told Gall to tell them that they could all go home. Afterwards, a young woman wearing a turban, as many did at that time of unwashed hair, came up to him holding a baby. She thanked him for having persuaded the officers to surrender, thus avoiding a bloodbath. She then burst into tears and turned away.

This heart-warming tale of the surrender of Spandau is, however, rather spoiled by subsequent revelations. Colonel Jung and Lieutenant Colonel Koch were in fact Professor Dr Gerhard Jung and Dr Edgar Koch, the leading scientists in the development of Sarin and Tabun nerve agents. Rather than being concerned solely with defence against chemical weapons, as its name implied, the Heeresgasschutzlaboritorium’s first task was ‘general testing of war gases for suitability as field agents’.

A Russian lieutenant colonel with the 47th Army immediately recognized the importance of their find at Spandau and informed the general in charge of a commission of Red Army experts — they wore a cogwheel and spanner badge on their shoulder boards. The general looked forward to interviewing the two men next day, but the NKVD got to hear of the discovery and, on that evening of 1 May, NKVD officers arrived to seize Jung and Koch. The general was furious. It took the Red Army until mid-June to find where the NKVD was holding Jung and Koch and extract them. They finally flew them to Moscow in August.

Two other leading scientists, Dr Stuhldreer and Dr Schulte-Overberg, were kept under guard at Spandau and ordered to ‘continue work’. Stuhldreer, who specialized in nerve gas attacks against tanks, had used the old artillery testing ground at Kummersdorf, which had been the rendezvous in the forest for the Ninth Army. They all denied any knowledge of Tabun and Sarin, and since all the batches had been destroyed as soon as the Red Army threatened Berlin, the Soviet experts could prove nothing and they did not know what questions to ask.

In the summer, Stuhldreer and Schulte-Overberg were flown to the Soviet Union. They were reunited with Jung and Koch in a special camp at Krasnogorsk. Under Professor Jung’s leadership, the group refused to cooperate with the Soviet authorities. They insisted that they were prisoners of war. Other German scientists collaborating with the Soviet Union were brought in to persuade them to change their minds, but this did little good. They were not maltreated for their stand, however, and were eventually returned to Germany with one of the last batches of prisoners of war in January 1954.

South of Berlin, the remnants of the Ninth Army made a final effort to break through Konev’s last barrier. The Twelfth Army had managed to hold on just long enough in the area of Beelitz to keep open an escape route to the Elbe, as well as opening a route for nearly 20,000 men from General Reymann’s so-called Army Group Spree in the Potsdam area. But pressure was building up. Beelitz was shelled heavily that morning by Soviet self-propelled guns diverted down from Potsdam. Shturmovik squadrons increased their dive-bombing and strafing attacks in the area.

A Soviet rifle regiment had occupied the village of Elsholz, six kilometres south of Beelitz. It was a crucial crossing point for the exhausted German troops. Fortunately for the Germans, the sudden appearance of the last four Panthers of the Kurmark Division forced the Red Army soldiers to retreat. In fact the Panthers, with virtually empty fuel tanks, had to be abandoned there, but the way ahead was clear. Many stragglers were so exhausted and malnourished that they collapsed in Elsholz. Civilians shared their food with the soldiers and cared for the wounded, carrying them to the schoolhouse, where a doctor from Berlin and a district nurse worked together as best they could. Only one SS unit had the strength to march through the village without pausing for a rest.

Fighting still flared behind them in the forests, where Konev’s troops continued to hunt down both small and large groups of stragglers. That May Day morning, a brigade of the 4th Guards Tank Army was sent back into the forest ‘to liquidate a large group of Germans wandering around’. The report claims that the T-34S ran into German tanks and other armoured vehicles. ‘The Soviet commander got down to business immediately,’ the report stated. ‘In two hours the enemy lost thirteen personnel carriers, three assault guns, three tanks and fifteen trucks.’ It is very hard to believe that so many vehicles were still serviceable in a single group.

Soviet troops were also attacking Beelitz itself. A group of 200 Germans, with the last Tiger tank and an assault gun, came under automatic fire south of Beelitz as they crossed asparagus fields. All they needed to do was to carry on to the woods and wade the River Nieplitz. Just beyond was the road which led to Brück and safety.

General Wenck’s Twelfth Army staff had assembled every truck and vehicle in the area to transport the exhausted mass. They had set up field kitchen units, which began to feed the 25,000 men, as well as several thousand civilian refugees. ‘When the soldiers reached us, they just collapsed,’ said Colonel Reichhelm, Wenck’s chief of staff. ‘Sometimes we even had to beat them, otherwise they would not have climbed up into the trucks and would have died where they lay. It was terrible.’ The formerly plump General Busse was unrecognizably thin. ‘He was totally at the end of his physical strength.’

Many of those who had experienced the horror of the Halbe Kessel developed an anger which did not fade with the years. They blamed senior officers for continuing the battle when all was lost. ‘Was it really unquestioning obedience,’ wrote one survivor, ‘or was it cowardice in the face of their responsibility? The officer corps with its support for Hitler left behind a bitter aftertaste. During those last days they all tried only to save their own skin and they abandoned soldiers, civilians and children.’

This diatribe, while containing a large measure of truth, was far too sweeping, especially when one considers the efforts of the Twelfth Army to save soldiers and civilians. Even within the Ninth Army, not all was black. Another soldier recorded how, on that same day, Major Otto Christer Graf von Albedyll, who had seen the defeat of his army and the destruction of his family’s estate near the Reitwein Spur, was killed trying to help a badly wounded man. ‘A much loved leader’, he was buried at the side of the road to Elsholz by his soldiers.

Colonel Reichhelm himself was scathing about the most flagrant case of a senior officer abandoning his own men. General Holste, the commander of the XLI Panzer Corps, had appeared at Twelfth Army headquarters between Genthin and Tangermünde at 2 a.m. ‘What are you doing here, Herr General?’ Reichhelm asked him in astonishment. ‘Why aren’t you with your troops?’

‘I do not have any any more,’ Holste retorted.

In fact he had abandoned them. He had departed with his wife, two cars and two of his best horses. Reichhelm said that he must speak to General Wenck immediately. He went in to wake the army commander and told him that Holste had to be arrested. But Wenck was too exhausted. Reichhelm returned. ‘You can leave Hitler, because he’s a criminal,’ he told Holste, ‘but you can’t leave your soldiers.’ Holste ignored him and left to continue on his way across the Elbe.

In Berlin during the afternoon an order came through from the Reich Chancellery that the last Tiger tank supporting Nordland was to pull back ‘to be at the immediate disposal of General Mohnke’. No explanation was given. Presumably without telling Goebbels, who categorically refused any suggestion of surrender, Bormann and Mohnke had started planning their escape from Berlin. These two, who had ordered immediate execution for anybody who failed to fight to the end, had already brought civilian clothes into the bunker ready for their escape.

The renewed bombardment had made communications with Krukenberg’s detachments even more difficult. The wounded Fenet and his Frenchmen were still defending Gestapo headquarters in the Prinz-Albrechtstrasse. The ‘Danmark’ was a few hundred metres east, round the Kochstrasse U-Bahn station on the Friedrichstrasse, while the ‘Norge’ defended their left rear round the Leipzigerstrasse and the Spittelmarkt.

Goebbels, realizing that the end was now very close, summoned Kunz, the SS doctor who had agreed to help kill his six children. Goebbels was in his study in the Führer bunker talking with Naumann, the state secretary of the Propaganda Ministry. Kunz was made to wait for ten minutes, then Goebbels and Naumann got up and left him with Magda Goebbels. She told him that the Führer’s death had made the decision for them. Troops would try to break out of the encirclement that night, so the whole family was to die. Kunz claimed afterwards that he tried to persuade her to send the children to the hospital and put them under the protection of the Red Cross, but she refused. ‘After we had been talking for about twenty minutes,’ he recounted, ‘Goebbels returned to the study and said to me, “Doctor, I would be very grateful if you help my wife kill the children.” ’ Kunz again repeated his suggestion about saving them.

‘It’s impossible,’ the Reichsminister for Propaganda answered. ‘They are the children of Goebbels.’ He left the room. Kunz stayed with Magda Goebbels, who played patience for about an hour.

A little later, Goebbels returned. ‘The Russians might arrive at any moment and interfere with our plan,’ his wife said. ‘That’s why we should hurry up doing what we have to do.’

Magda Goebbels led Kunz to their bedroom and took a syringe filled with morphine from a shelf. They then went to the children’s room. The five girls and one boy were already in bed in their nightgowns, but not yet asleep. ‘Children, don’t be alarmed,’ she told them. ‘The doctor will give you a vaccination which children and soldiers now need to have.’ Then she left the room. Kunz stayed and started giving them morphine injections. ‘After that,’ he told his SMERSH interrogators, ‘I went out again to the front room and told Frau Goebbels that we had to wait about ten minutes for the children to fall asleep. I looked at my watch and saw that it was twenty minutes to nine.’

Kunz said that he could not face giving poison to the sleeping children. Madga Goebbels told him to find Stumpfegger, Hitler’s personal doctor. Together with Stumpfegger, she opened the mouths of the sleeping children, put an ampoule of poison between their teeth and forced their jaws together. The oldest daughter, Helga, was found later with heavy bruising to the face. This suggests that the morphine may not have worked very well in her case and that she may have struggled with the two adults trying to force her mouth open. After the deed was done, Stumpfegger went away and Kunz went down to Goebbels’s study with Magda Goebbels. Goebbels was walking about in a very nervous state.

‘It’s all over with the children,’ she told him. ‘Now we have to think about ourselves.’

‘Let’s be quick,’ said Goebbels. ‘We’re short of time.’

Magda Goebbels took both the gold party badge which Hitler had given her on 27 April in token of his admiration and also her gold cigarette case inscribed ‘Adolf Hitler, 29 May 1934’. Goebbels and his wife then went upstairs to the garden, accompanied by his adjutant, Günther Schwaegermann. They took two Walther pistols. Joseph and Magda Goebbels stood next to each other, a few metres from where the bodies of Hitler and his wife had been burned and then buried in a shell crater. They crunched on glass cyanide ampoules[5] and either they shot themselves with the pistols at the same moment, or else Schwaegermann shot both of them immediately afterwards as a precautionary coup de grâce. The two pistols were left with the bodies, which Schwaegermann doused in petrol from jerry cans, as he had promised. He then ignited the last funeral pyre of the Third Reich.

At 9.30 p.m., Hamburg radio station warned the German people that a grave and important announcement was about to be made. Suitably funereal music from Wagner and Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony was played to prepare listeners for Grand Admiral Dönitz’s address to the nation. He stated that Hitler had fallen, fighting ‘at the head of his troops’, and announced his succession. Very few people in Berlin heard the news because of the lack of electric current.

Bormann, meanwhile, was evidently impatient at having to wait for the Goebbels family drama to finish. Weidling’s surrender was to take place at midnight and the breakout northwards over the Spree was due to start an hour before. The personnel from the Führer bunker, including Traudl Junge, Gerda Christian and Constanze Manzialy, had been told to assemble ready for departure. Krebs and Burgdorf, who both intended to shoot themselves later, were not to be seen.

Krukenberg, who had been summoned earlier by Mohnke, encountered Artur Axmann and Ziegler, the previous commander of the Nordland. Mohnke asked Krukenberg whether, as the senior officer, he wished to continue the defence of the city centre. He added that General Weidling had given an order to break out of Berlin north-westwards through the Soviet encirclement, but that a cease-fire would come into effect around midnight. Krukenberg agreed to join the breakout. He and Ziegler left to rally the Nordland and other units in the area. Krukenberg sent one of his aides on ahead, with messages to outlying detachments to fall back. The group led by Captain Fenet, defending Gestapo headquarters on Prinz-Albrechtstrasse, heard nothing. Krukenberg’s aide, who was never seen again, probably met his death before he reached them.

The scenes in the bunker were chaotic as Bormann and Mohnke tried to organize everybody into groups. In the end, they did not leave until nearly 11 p.m., two hours later than planned. The first group, led by Mohnke, set out through the cellars of the Reich Chancellery, and then followed a complicated route to the Friedrichstrasse Bahnhof. The others followed at set intervals. The most difficult part was just north of the station, where they had to cross the Spree. This could not be done under cover of darkness because the flames from bombarded buildings lit up the whole area. The first group from the Reich Chancellery, which included Mohnke and the secretaries, wisely avoided the main Weidendammer bridge. They used a metal footbridge 300 metres downstream and headed for the Charité hospital.

The Nordland Tiger tank and a self-propelled assault gun were to spearhead the main charge across the Weidendammer bridge. Word had spread of the breakout and many hundreds of SS, Wehrmacht soldiers and civilians had assembled. It was a gathering which Soviet troops could not fail to miss. The first mass rush, led by the Tiger tank, took place just after midnight, but although the armoured monster managed to smash through the barrier on the north side of the bridge, they soon ran into very heavy fire in the Ziegelstrasse beyond. An anti-tank round struck the Tiger and many of the civilians and soldiers in its wake were mown down. Axmann was wounded, but managed to stagger on his way. Bormann and Dr Stumpfegger were knocked over by the blast when the tank was hit, but they recovered and went on. Bormann carried the last copy of Hitler’s testament, and he evidently hoped to use it to justify his claim to a position in Dönitz’s government when he reached Schleswig-Holstein.

Another attack over the bridge was made soon afterwards, using a self-propelled 20mm quadruple flak gun and a half-track. This too was largely a failure. A third attempt was made at around 1 a.m., and a fourth an hour later. Bormann, Stumpfegger, Schwaegermann and Axmann kept together for a time. They followed the railway line to the Lehrterstrasse Bahnhof. There they split up. Bormann and Stumpfegger turned north-eastwards towards the Stettiner Bahnhof. Axmann went the other way, but ran into a Soviet patrol. He turned back and followed Bormann’s route. Not long afterwards he came across two bodies. He identified them as Bormann and Stumpfegger, but he did not have time to discover how they had died. Martin Bormann, although not of his own volition, was the only major Nazi Party leader to have faced the bullets of the Bolshevik enemy. All the others — Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler and Göring — took their own lives.

Krukenberg had meanwhile assembled most of his French SS escort. They joined up with Ziegler and a much larger group from the Nordland. Krukenberg estimated that there were four or five holders of the Knight’s Cross among them. They managed to cross the Spree shortly before dawn. But they came under heavy fire just a few hundred metres short of the Gesundbrunnen U-Bahn station. Ziegler was hit by a ricochet and mortally wounded. Several others in their group also fell, among them Eugène Vanlot, the young French recipient of the Knight’s Cross. He died in a nearby cellar three days later.

The Soviet forces in the area had been reinforced so strongly that Krukenberg and his remaining companions had no choice but to retreat the way they had come. At the top end of the Ziegelstrasse they saw the Tiger tank which Mohnke had taken from them. There was no sign of any of its crew. One of Krukenberg’s officers had spotted a joinery workshop nearby and there they discovered some overalls to disguise themselves. Krukenberg managed to make his way to Dahlem, where he hid for over a week in the apartment of friends. Eventually he had no choice but to surrender.

Zhukov, on hearing of the breakout attempts from General Kuznetsov of the 3rd Shock Army, ordered a maximum alert. He was understandably perturbed by the ‘unpleasant suggestion’ that senior Nazis, especially Hitler, Goebbels and Bormann, might be trying to escape. It was not hard to imagine Stalin’s anger if this should happen. Soviet officers hastily rounded up men who were celebrating May Day with alcohol and women-hunts. Brigades from the 2nd Guards Tank Army were sent in pursuit and cordons hurriedly put into place. This thwarted a second attempt to break through northwards up the Schönhauserallee by Major General Bärenfänger’s troops from the eastern side of the Zitadelle defence area. Bärenfänger, a devoted Nazi, committed suicide with his young wife in a side street.

Shortly before midnight, the time when Colonel Haller had promised to surrender the Zoo flak tower, the remaining tanks and half-tracks of the Müncheberg Panzer Division and the 18th Panzergrenadier Division set out from the Tiergarten westwards. They then pushed northwestwards towards the Olympic stadium and Spandau. Word had also spread rapidly in this case. The rumour was that Wenck’s army was at Nauen, to the north-west of the city, and hospital trains were waiting there to take soldiers to Hamburg. Thousands of stragglers and civilians made their way on foot and in a variety of vehicles in the same direction. One group of around fifty came in three trucks from the Grossdeutscher Rundfunk. They included Himmler’s very different younger brother, Ernst, a leading studio technician.

The Charlottenbrücke, the bridge over the Havel to the old town of Spandau, was still standing and held by Hitler Youth detachments. In heavy rain and under artillery fire from the 47th Army, the armoured vehicles charged across, followed by a ragged crowd of soldiers and civilians. The slaughter was appalling. ‘There was blood everywhere and trucks were exploding,’ one of the escapers recounted. A tactic was instinctively worked out. Self-propelled army flak vehicles with quadruple 20mm guns gave covering fire from the eastern bank to keep Soviet heads down, and during this frantic firing for up to a minute, another wave of civilians and soldiers surged across to hide in the ruined houses opposite. The slow and the lame were caught in the open by Soviet guns. As well as wave after wave of people on foot, trucks, cars and motorcycles also crossed, running over bodies already crushed by the tracks of armoured vehicles. Ernst Himmler was one of the many who died on the Charlottenbrücke, either shot or trampled in the desperate rush.

Although the massacre at the bridge was horrific, the sheer weight of German numbers forced the Soviet troops back from the river bank. But Soviet machine guns in the tower of the Spandau town hall continued to cause heavy losses. Two of the Tiger tanks then shelled the Rathaus itself, and a small group from the 9th Parachute Division stormed the tower. The main force of armoured vehicles pushed on westwards towards Staaken, but most of the troops were encircled or rounded up over the next two days. Only a handful reached the Elbe and safety.

Soviet officers searched the burnt-out remains of tanks carefully on orders from Front headquarters. ‘Among the crews killed,’ wrote Zhukov, ‘none of Hitler’s entourage were found, but it was impossible to recognize what was left in the burnt-out tanks.’ Nobody knows how many died in these attempts to escape Soviet captivity.

At 1.55 a.m. on 2 May, the eighteen-year-old announcer Richard Beier made the very last broadcast of the Grossdeutscher Rundfunk from its studio in the bunker on the Masurenallee. The transmitter at Tegel had been overlooked by the Russians. ‘The Führer is dead,’ he announced, according to his script. ‘Long live the Reich!’