CHAPTER FIFTEEN

“The Earth Will Shake as We Leave the Scene”

THE ABYSS

EVEN AS THE Americans and British were advancing eastwards in April, and while Zhukov and Konev marshalled their forces on the Oder, elsewhere Soviet armies were fighting gigantic battles along almost a thousand miles of front. In the west, Germans were surrendering. In the east they were dying in their tens of thousands. The testimony of Wehrmacht soldiers who survived the war is unrepresentative of the experience of Hitler’s forces fighting the Russians in the last weeks, because so many such men perished. The fate of some units, especially those of the Waffen SS, is lost in fire and smoke, because no witnesses remained to record their destruction. Significant numbers of young soldiers, children of the Third Reich, betrayed no interest in surviving its collapse. Any temptation to applaud their courage is undone by an understanding of its futility, and of the depravity of the mindset which it reflected.

Hitler himself was indifferent, of course, and consumed by self-pity. “If the war should be lost,” he said in one of the most notorious of all his utterances, “then the nation, too, will be lost . . . There is no need to consider the basic requirements that a people needs in order to live a primitive life. On the contrary, it is better to destroy such things, for this nation will have proved itself the weaker and the future will belong exclusively to the stronger Eastern nation. Those who remain alive after the battles are over are in any case only inferior persons, since the best have fallen.” The Third Reich had always been in love with death. Now, its passion would achieve a final consummation.

Major Karl-Günther von Hase’s father, Paul, commandant of Berlin, had been hanged for his part in the July bomb plot. His son was recalled from Italy for interrogation. Although he established his innocence, he was discharged from the General Staff, and sent in mid-January 1945 to serve as operations officer of one of Hitler’s designated fortresses, Schneidemühl in East Pomerania. Von Hase saw no dilemma in continuing to fight, despite his family’s purgatory at Hitler’s hands: “I was a professional—I had to do my duty. Obviously the war was lost, but there was an obligation to defend Germany, and a clear distinction between fighting the Russians and the Western allies. German behaviour in 1945 reflected a determination not to repeat the experience of 1918, when the German army was not defeated, but gave up.”

As von Hase drove through the snow to his new posting, a black cat crossed the road. He found nothing in the “fortress” to discourage superstition. Its commander was an able regular officer a few years older than himself, Colonel Remlinger. Yet the garrison was pitifully weak. Beyond a few regular Wehrmacht troops, Schneidemühl was manned by 6,000 Volkssturm, the teenagers of an NCO cadet school and a few self-propelled guns from a local artillery school. There were no tanks. The entire civilian population of the town was recruited to dig defences. They were swiftly encircled by the Russians, and lost their airstrip at the beginning of February. Thereafter, they received only a few air-drops. Repeated requests to be permitted to break out were rejected. The garrison of Schneidemühl soon found itself some thirty miles behind the front.

Remlinger’s men defended themselves with energy, mobilizing an armoured train which sallied from the perimeter to rescue a load of ammunition and supplies from beneath the Russian guns. Rationing was strictly enforced in anticipation of a long siege, with the result that much of the available food eventually fell into Soviet hands. It was ammunition that was lacking, and by mid-February almost exhausted. The Russians maintained a constant heavy mortar barrage, and bombed the defenders by night. Von Hase was dismayed by the fate of the fourteen- and fifteen-year-old NCO cadets: “It was terrible. They tried so hard to be brave. Whenever we needed volunteers for a patrol or a dangerous counter-attack, those teenagers put themselves forward. We had to get back lost ground—so we used them.” Von Hase was presented with the Knight’s Cross, pinned on him by Remlinger, for his own part in leading counter-attacks. “Discipline remained amazing to the very end.”

As the situation grew desperate, von Hase thought of his fiancée, Renate, who was nursing in Thuringia. The Wehrmacht had long since established a system of proxy marriage for soldiers absent at the front. The landlines to Schneidemühl were cut, but the major sent a wireless message proposing their marriage, which Renate received. On 13 February, in accordance with the regulations, she went to her local registrar and took the vows with her hand upon a steel helmet, intended to symbolize her absent fiancé. It was impossible, however, to signal to Karl-Günther that the ceremony had been performed. When later asked by Russian interrogators whether he was married, he answered: “I don’t know.” On 22 February, when it was plain that the “fortress” was no longer defensible, Remlinger decided to defy his orders. The survivors of the garrison broke out and scattered into small groups to attempt escape. After walking for three days, Remlinger, von Hase and a dozen others fell into Russian hands. Remlinger died in captivity.

After the fall of Budapest on 14 February, the Russians expected a relatively untroubled advance through the rest of Hungary and on to Vienna. Instead, on 6 March, Hitler committed Sixth SS Panzer Army, veterans of the Bulge, to a dramatic counter-attack north and south of Lake Balaton, to save his Hungarian oilfields. Second Panzer Army was also directed to strike east towards the Danube. In a sea of mud, the Germans launched their offensive—and at first gained ground against the startled Russians. In Hungary, the Soviets were weak in armour. Russian infantry and anti-tank guns found themselves meeting the brunt of the German thrust. Lieutenant Valentin Krulik’s motorized infantry unit of Sixth Guards Tank Army was ordered to take up defensive positions in a village near the Czech border. They were digging hard, and extremely scared at the prospect of facing tanks with only a few anti-tank grenades. Suddenly, Krulik saw an 85mm anti-tank gun being towed past. He waved down the driver and begged the NCO in charge of the gun to stay and support them, which the sergeant obligingly did. Krulik was pleased to see that the man was wearing a string of medals, indicating that he was a veteran. They dragged the gun into concealment behind the paling fence surrounding a vegetable garden. There were only two gunners, so the infantrymen helped sort armour-piercing ammunition from high explosive. Then they waited. At last, three German Mark IVs crawled slowly across the fields towards them, followed by infantry. The sergeant gunner said nonchalantly: “Oh, it’s only those old things!” The Russians lingered minute by minute, allowing the range to close. Then the sergeant said: “Drop the fence!” As soon as they pushed over the paling, the gun fired. A tank caught fire. Its two consorts began to drop ineffectual shells around the Russians. Krulik’s men swept the German infantry with automatic fire. After a few minutes, the surviving tanks and footsoldiers retired. This was not the German army of 1941 or 1942. These were the last writhings of desperate men. Krulik, deeply relieved, said to the gunners: “That’s the first time we’ve had our own private artillery support. Nice evening, sergeant.”

Once the Soviets recovered their balance after the shock of the Germans’ Lake Balaton assault, they disposed ruthlessly of the attackers. German tanks and vehicles were anyway coughing to a halt all over the battlefield, for lack of fuel. The Germans ended the battle with fewer than 400 operational tanks and assault guns, against the 900 they had started with. The men of 1st SS Panzer Corps were exhausted. “We were at the end of our physical strength,” said Corporal Martin Glade, of the retreat that began once more in mid-March, as the Soviets renewed their offensive.

At each orientation stop, comrades dropped to the ground where they stood . . . [Our officer] distributed the company along a ridge in the darkness. “Dig in! Dig in!” I heard him shout, time and again. We . . . dug shallow holes for ourselves. Mine was the depth of a spade. Then, fatigue overcame me. When I woke up again, I was hardly able to get to my feet. I was frozen right through. The sky was turning red in the east . . . With my frozen fingers I dug in my haversack for a dry bread crust and a piece of sausage.

The Russians opened fire on the featureless hill, bereft of cover: “The effect was devastating . . . to the right and left of me, men were lying motionless, silent, strangely curled up—more than half the company, I thought. Last night when we moved onto that damned hill, we had been 48.”

The Germans abandoned their attack and began to pull back on 16 March. The Russians resumed their advance on Vienna, reaching the city outskirts on 4 April. Two days later, Valentin Krulik was sent with a reconnaissance patrol into the heart of the Austrian capital. He cared little for its illustrious history: “We didn’t pay much attention. For us, it was just another battlefield.” Alexandr Vostrukhin reached the suburbs with a T-34 battalion of the same brigade as Krulik. “The city looked amazingly untouched by the war, so quiet and serene, with no fires in sight.”

Krulik led his men into the streets from the west in a couple of trucks, without meeting resistance. They caught sight of German troops, but found no organized defences. For a few minutes, they were bemused to find themselves following a column of Wehrmacht vehicles. “The silence was really creepy.” But as night came on, despite Krulik’s report that the path was open, his regimental commander felt uneasy about penetrating deep into the city without support. They pulled back to the suburbs. It was several days before the Russians were ready to address Vienna in force. In the interim, the Germans regrouped. SS panzergrenadiers fought ferociously through the streets for a week. Among them was Otto Skorzeny, Hitler’s favourite commando. By 10 April, even Skorzeny despaired. He reported to Berlin: “The situation is hopeless. There are no defensive preparations, utter despondency. Organization has broken down . . . Troops are bewildered and deprived of initiative. I ordered that three officers accused of treachery were not to be shot, but hung from the Floritzdorfer bridge. Withdrawal of the Luftwaffe is using fuel needed by tanks and fighting troops—and they are taking with them only women and furniture.”

It cost the Red Army a week of bloody fighting to cover the ground Valentin Krulik’s men had travelled so easily at the outset. “Our problem in 1945,” said Krulik, “was that we were always in a hurry—being replenished on the march, very short of experienced officers, with a lot of very young and pretty old replacements filling the ranks. We were often confused about our own location. We would pore over the map and say: ‘Well, we’ve been through here and here. We’re going where? And after that, where?’ ” The Austrian capital was not finally secured until 14 April. On that date, Sixth SS Panzer Army sent a final signal to Berlin: “The garrison of Vienna has ceased to exist. Despite their exhaustion, the troops are fighting with exemplary courage.” Bombardment had reduced much of Vienna’s beauty to rubble. The Soviet occupiers trudged through a city in which whole avenues blazed, littered with corpses and the wrecks of tanks and self-propelled guns destroyed by the score in the street fighting.

Rokossovsky’s armies swung westwards during March, after gaining all of East Prussia save a few German strongholds. They smashed through West Prussia and Pomerania. Refugees and Wehrmacht soldiers alike were pressed relentlessly back upon the Baltic coast. Hundreds of thousands of them crowded into Danzig. It was defended by the remains of the German Second Army, while behind its positions huddled some 1.5 million refugees, most from East Prussia, together with 100,000 wounded jamming the hospitals. On 12 March, command was entrusted to the tough, effective General Dietrich von Saucken. “He was a son of East Prussia,” in the words of German admirers, “and what mattered to him . . . was the seething mass of refugees, whom he was determined to save from the grasp of the Russians.” The gauleiter of Danzig, Albert Forster, wrote: “I still believe in some kind of miracle. I still believe in Almighty God, who has given us our Führer . . . All that is left is for the West to recognize where its real enemy lies.”

Instead, however, hysteria was overwhelming many of Forster’s people. On 12 March, Russians found sixteen members of three families, including mothers and children aged between two and fifteen, in a shed a few miles outside Danzig. All had had their throats or wrists slashed by one Irwin Schwartz, a prominent local Nazi who said that this had been done at their own request. Some of those involved, who were still alive, persisted with their efforts to die even as a Red Army doctor attempted to save them. Schwartz, who survived cutting his own wrists, said that he had killed his own wife and three children, then offered the same service to his neighbours. “It is better to die than live with the Russians,” he told his interrogators. Fifty-eight women and teenagers killed themselves by slitting their wrists in the town of Mednitz in 1st Ukrainian Front’s sector. The same day, Konev’s headquarters reported to Moscow: “Many Germans in areas we have occupied are dying of starvation.”

On 15 March, six Russian armies began a simultaneous assault on Danzig. At last, the surviving heavy units of the German surface fleet, which had contributed so little to Hitler’s war effort, found a role. The old battleship Schlesien and the cruisers Prince Eugen and Leipzig fired on the Russians from stations offshore, shaking the earth with the impact of their huge shells. The Germans remained faithful as ever to their doctrine of active defence. For four days, the line held. On 19 March, under fierce Russian pressure von Saucken’s positions began to crack. On the 22nd, the first Soviet tanks reached the Baltic north of Danzig. The city centre came within Russian artillery range. A ferocious bombardment began. Civilians descended to the cellars, from which most did not emerge for many days. Russian fire was also raking ships in the harbour which were still attempting to evacuate civilians. A Russian soldier observed with satisfaction that once gunners accustomed to firing at ground targets adjusted to the demands of hitting ships, the results were devastating: “A gun would fire, then came the explosion of the shell, and another craft capsized and went to the bottom with its load of fascists.”

Lieutenant Gennady Ivanov, commanding a Stalin tank troop, found the Danzig fighting as tough as anything he had known in three years of war: “The Germans fought very hard and very well, right up to the end.” Ivanov’s unit was dispersed by companies, to support the advance of Sixty-fifth Army’s infantry. “I have never seen such a terrible battlefield—so much mud that we could hardly manoeuvre.” Ivanov, a genial, exuberant twenty-one-year-old from Kazan in Tartary, had enjoyed an unusually untroubled upbringing, as the son of a successful Soviet bureaucrat. His elder brother had been killed early in the war—the family never knew when or where. An enthusiastic photographer, Ivanov took his looted Leica everywhere he went with the victorious Red Army.

On 19 March, his company stood just north of Danzig, peering at their next objective, a brickworks a thousand yards distant, flanked by a pine wood. When the supporting artillery barrage stopped, to Ivanov’s surprise and dismay their company commander Chernyavsky, in whose judgement he had little faith, ordered the tanks to advance without infantry. The heavy Stalins thrashed clumsily forward on their bellies in the soft going, the lead troop eighty yards ahead of Ivanov’s. They were firing half-heartedly at the brickworks, in lieu of any identifiable target. Suddenly, a German Panther crept out from the nearby wood, fired once at a range of 700 yards and disappeared behind cover again. It repeated this process three times in as many minutes. Three Stalins stood blazing, their crews running for the rear. The rest of the company retreated in confusion.

The Russian officers dismounted and were discussing what to do next when the divisional commander limped forward, leaning on the stick he had carried since he was wounded, and nursing a towering rage. “How long have you commanded armour?” he demanded of their company commander. “Is this your idea of how to fight a tank battle? What’s the range of your guns? Eleven hundred metres? Then why don’t you use it!” He started beating Chernyavsky furiously with his stick. “Now get on with it!” They remounted the tanks and resumed the advance. Within minutes, a Panther shell struck Chernyavsky’s tank, setting it on fire and killing the crew—“which,” said Ivanov laconically, “saved our captain from a court martial.”

It took the Russians two days to get across that open field to their objective. Supporting infantry crept forward yard by yard towards the wood where German infantry and anti-tank guns were dug in, enfilading the attackers. When the tanks at last followed, “we found our tommy-gunners lying dead in heaps.” Two brothers, Nikolai and Pyotr Oleinik, were gunner and driver in the same tank when it was hit. They bailed out alive, but Nikolai disappeared as they ran for their lives under fire. Pyotr, concussed, wandered hopelessly for hours searching for his brother, but never even found his body.

On 27 March, the regiment was ordered to advance to cut the railway north of Danzig. They set out in darkness, and halted when they believed they had secured their objective. Dawn revealed, however, that instead of the train tracks they had merely reached a tramline. On the radio net, the regimental commander told the point troop gloomily: “I’ve already informed Division we are on the railway.” Reluctantly, he now reported their mistake. General Panov, commanding I Guards Tank Corps, radioed back personally, in one of the rages characteristic of Russian commanders: “You’re all heading for court martial,” he told the hapless colonel, “but I’ll shoot you myself before the tribunal gets to sit.” The tanks resumed their advance, until they found before them a blown rail bridge, with two trains deliberately driven into the gap, creating a tangled mass of wreckage, covered by German machine-gun fire. Russian engineers dashed forward. They lost a lot of men, but at last laid charges in the debris. The explosions blew a gap just large enough for the passage of self-propelled guns, though not tanks. Supported by infantry, the guns raced forward and forced open the road. “Everybody got medals,” said Ivanov. But the Germans had delayed them almost until nightfall, in the sort of action that was fought a hundred times in a hundred places in those days.

Ivanov’s tank column, still two miles from Danzig city centre, resumed its advance at first light. As they left open country behind and began to move among buildings, they met group after group of Hitler Youth armed with fausts and Molotov cocktails, who wreaked havoc. The regiment lost at least fifteen tanks to hand-held weapons in the street fighting that followed. Ivanov’s own Stalin was hit in Hochenstrasse, in the first daylight hours of 30 March. He found himself soaked in blazing fuel, against which his fire-resistant suit provided scant protection. He was fully conscious and watched his cherished German boots burning before his eyes. He collapsed into the turret, screaming in pain. His crew dragged him out through the lower hatch, still under fire, and threw him into a big pool of melted snow by the roadside. Ivanov wrote gaily to his parents, in the tones of reassurance used by many soldier sons: “I am completely safe and well, and enjoying wonderful weather in Germany!” In reality, he spent twenty-two days in a field hospital. His regiment lost forty out of its fifty-five tanks in Danzig. All its company commanders were killed.

There was a black-comic song Russian tank crews sang, of which one line ran: “Our legs are torn off and our faces are on fire!” Ivanov’s friend and fellow troop commander Vladimir Dobroradov, who led their column into Danzig, had a leg amputated after the battle. He was a dazzlingly handsome young man, an ardent dancer. When Dobroradov awoke from anaesthesia, he gave way to despair and shot himself with a small pistol. Ivanov believed that Dobroradov met his fate because over the preceding weeks he had diverted himself in off-duty hours by flirting with the “field wife” of his brigade commander. That officer, who was unamused, ordered his impertinent young rival to take point position in the Danzig attack. Ivanov always afterwards thought of the biblical tale of Uriah the Hittite. Their regimental commander, who had incurred Panov’s wrath, also died in those days. A German woman walked up and shot the colonel at point-blank range, in an act of vengeance for her own rape by Soviet soldiers. “Such things were happening,” shrugged Ivanov. “In Rokossovsky’s mob, Rokossovsky permitted it.” The woman survived only long enough to explain her motive, before being bayoneted.

IN THE STREETS of Danzig during the last days of its defence, the SS and field police hanged scores of men who had abandoned their units. Russian aircraft harried to destruction retreating columns of German troops and vehicles. On 25 March, a certain Colonel Christern passed through Danzig to assume command of 4th Panzer Division. Given the urgency of his appointment, his signals officer was astonished when the panzer leader halted beside one of the city’s few surviving churches.

The colonel looked about inquisitively, and then a delicate smile lit his battle-scarred face. He shot a silent glance at me to indicate that I was to seat myself on a bench, thereupon he and the driver climbed a steep flight of steps to the loft . . . I was somewhat uncomfortable sitting there while the rumble of combat carried from outside. Then I nearly jumped out of my skin . . . the organ roared into life . . . I knew that the colonel was devoted to music . . . but this was the first time I had heard him on the organ—and he played it like a master.

Von Saucken ordered the final evacuation of the ruined city, which had become indefensible, on the night of 27 March. The surviving German troops in the area were now isolated on the Hela peninsula, where some remained until the end of the war, and on the coastal plateau of the Oxhofter Kampe, from which von Saucken was able to evacuate several units by sea in the week following the fall of Danzig. Until the very end of the war, soldiers and refugees continued to be rescued by sea from the marshy meadows of the Vistula delta.

Fourteen-year-old Erich Pusch, a fugitive who had lost his parents on the ice of the Frisches Haff, lay in a cellar in Danzig with his young brother and a dozen or so other terrified people, mostly women and children. The first Russian entered their refuge early on the morning of 31 March. The man demanded to know if there were any German soldiers present. Assured that there were not, he collected all watches and rings, then left. Young Erich put his head cautiously into the street to investigate, and saw some very young Russian soldiers standing around their tanks. Occasional shells were still exploding, fired by German naval guns. Erich returned to the cellar. They all sat in dread, awaiting the worst. The next Russians to arrive were very drunk. They took all the women into the adjoining room and raped them, amid hysterical pleas for mercy. Returning, the Russians noticed lying on the floor a young Russian PoW, who had lost a leg before his capture. One Red soldier bayoneted him and then, when the doomed man screamed, shot him. Every soldier in the Soviet armies had been thoroughly briefed that fellow countrymen who had surrendered to the fascists were traitors. The soldiers then demanded the shoes of everyone present, collected these in a bag, and departed. The women were left sobbing. Late that night, Mongolians came, and raped a fifteen-year-old girl. After that, successive waves of Russians reappeared all night, bent on the same business. They ignored the old men and children, but raped the women repeatedly.

Next morning, the Pusch boys and their companions emerged traumatized from the cellar, to find the city in flames. People were streaming from their houses clutching such possessions as they could carry. Erich saw German soldiers hanging from the tram pylons, executed as deserters. The great column of refugees shuffled through the streets, watched by throngs of Red soldiers. Russians began to pull men from the line and examine them. Some, presumably suspected of being soldiers in civilian clothes, were shot. Then the Russians began to pick out girls. One or two clutching babies handed these to older women to take away, then went sobbing after the Russians to meet their fate. Twenty-five-year-old Frieda Engler, a cousin of Elfi Kowitz, was raped eighteen times by Russian soldiers outside Danzig.

On and on the Pusch boys walked westwards, beyond the city and its suburbs. They were exhausted and desperately hungry. They slept that night in a ditch. Next day, a woman saw them walking in their stockinged feet and took pity. She led them to her house, where her two teenage daughters were hidden behind the bedroom wardrobe. There they lived as scavengers through the two desperate, ravening months that followed.

The same fate befell eleven-year-old Anita Bartsch. The Russians swept into the air-raid shelter where she was hiding with her family, demanding watches and women, “Uri! Uri! Frau! Frau!,” in their usual fashion. After being relieved of their watches, the fugitives unwillingly ascended to the street, to perceive a pile of corpses. Anita’s eldest sister Maria was raped, then sent to a Russian detention camp with their mother and teenage brother. Anita found herself living alone with her four-year-old brother and three-year-old nephew in a derelict flat. Through the weeks that followed, she scavenged and stole just sufficient fragments of food to keep them alive: “We lived like little animals.” The ruined city was a ghastly place for survivors of any age. Once, she came upon a shallow river bed, filled with the bloated and decayed corpses of German soldiers. After six weeks, the Russians released the rest of the family. By a miracle, Anita’s sister Maria found them: “She was in a bad way, and all of us were suffering from severe malnutrition. My mother scarcely had any flesh left on her bones.” Soon afterwards, the Russians began evicting all Germans from Danzig to make way for the new Polish occupants. The traumatized survivors of the Bartsch family rode a railway flatcar to Berlin, and thereafter to a displaced-persons camp where they spent the next three years. “My mother never got over it and died five years later—she was just fifty,” said Anita Bartsch. “My father was very sick when at last we were reunited. He never worked again.” Photographs of the family at that time show faces imprinted with imperishable pain.

In the streets of Danzig, Captain Vasily Krylov watched the manic looting of abandoned shops. “The whole place stank of corpses.” He saw soldiers cheering the discovery of a tanker wagon of alcohol. They emptied their weapons into it until spirits spouted from a hundred holes, then stood open-mouthed beneath the fountains of liquor. Many men, said Krylov, were angered by the splendour in which they perceived the Germans to have been living, the riches of their houses. “They were bitter about what the Germans had done to us, when they saw how Hitler’s people lived at home.” “It was very difficult to maintain order as we advanced into Germany,” admitted Major Fyodor Romanovsky of the NKVD. There was considerable confusion in the upper ranks of the Red Army about the limits of tolerable behaviour. Yelena Kogan’s commanding officer took a call one day in Poznan from a Polish unit complaining that two Russians had raped a local woman. “Shoot them!” ordered the Soviet officer. Kogan observed drily: “His attitude proved to be behind the times. Our colonel did not know what the rest of the army was doing in Germany.”

The old Pomeranian coastal fortress of Kolberg was cut off by the Russians on 4 March. Its garrison consisted of only 3,300 men, mostly stragglers and Volkssturm, commanded by an elderly veteran of German South-West Africa, Colonel Fritz Fullriede. They could call on the support of four broken-down tanks, which had to be towed into action by trucks, and naval gunfire from two destroyers offshore. Fullriede was also obliged to assume responsibility for 68,000 civilians. Russian attacks began on 13 March. Fullriede dismissed calls for Kolberg’s surrender. Warships continued the evacuation throughout the siege, taking off refugees to Swinemünde. It was painfully slow work. Some families killed themselves, despairing of escape. Yet Fullriede’s garrison, at the cost of almost half its strength, held the line until the evacuation of civilians was complete on 16 March. The colonel then achieved a last small miracle, supervising the evacuation of his soldiers from their coastal perimeter only a mile wide and 400 yards deep, early on the morning of 18 March. Fullriede was awarded the Knight’s Cross for what was, indeed, the fulfilment of a heroic humanitarian purpose.

For most of March, 105,000 men of Third Panzer Army retained one major German foothold east of the Oder, a sixty-mile strip of front known as the Altdamm bridgehead, commanded by Hasso von Manteuffel. The Russians attacked here on 14 March. Next day Hitler began systematically stripping Third Panzer Army of troops to reinforce Berlin. Von Manteuffel decided that his position was untenable. He withdrew all his surviving forces across the Oder next night, demolishing the river bridges. On 21 March, the Russians mopped up the survivors in Altdamm town, capturing large quantities of abandoned equipment and armour.

Germany’s generals were stunned by Hitler’s appointment of Heinrich Himmler, whose skills lay solely in the field of mass murder, to military command of the Vistula front late in January. Guderian described Himmler’s role as “preposterous . . . I used such argumentative powers as I possessed in an attempt to stop such an idiocy being perpetrated on the unfortunate Eastern front . . . all in vain.” Once arrived at his headquarters, the Reichsführer SS proved wholly unable to exercise command functions, even with the assistance as his chief of staff of another accomplished killer, SS General Heinz Lammerding, whose men had carried out the Oradour massacre in France. Himmler’s tenure as Vistula commander proved as disastrous as the Wehrmacht had anticipated. On 18 March, Guderian discovered that the SS chief had abandoned his headquarters and was said to be nursing a bad cold in a sanatorium at Hohenlychen. In truth, he had suffered a nervous collapse. Guderian had little trouble persuading Himmler that he should ask to be relieved of responsibility for command of the front, and there was no resistance from Hitler.

On 22 March, General Gotthard Heinrici, commander of First Panzer Army in the Carpathians, a dogged little old soldier, went to see Guderian at his headquarters in the complex of low, camouflage-painted concrete buildings at Zossen, nerve centre of the German Army’s war effort. Guderian told him that a big counter-attack was being planned from the Frankfurt-on-Oder bridgehead, against the Russians threatening Küstrin. This fortress, once the prison of Frederick the Great, stood on an island in the Oder some fifty miles east of Berlin. The Russians had briefly penetrated its defences early in February, before being evicted.

Now, Hitler insisted that an attempt to relieve Küstrin should start in two days. The hapless Heinrici must assume responsibility. Yet before the attack could be launched, the Russians themselves attacked, on that same morning of 22 March. When the German counter-attack was launched on the 23rd, it was halted in its tracks by Soviet artillery fire. Heinrici urged Hitler to abandon Küstrin, which was isolated. As usual, the Führer demurred. He insisted on further counter-attacks. On 27 March, three divisions of Ninth Army launched an assault which so surprised the Russians that the leading German tanks reached the outskirts of Küstrin. But there they were stopped, and ruthlessly destroyed. “It was a massacre,” said Heinrici grimly. Eight thousand men had died for nothing. Next day, Hitler dismissed Guderian, asserting that his health required an immediate six weeks’ convalescent leave. The last of Germany’s great field commanders was replaced as Chief of Staff by General Hans Krebs on 29 March. The same day, the Russians launched an intense bombardment of Küstrin. The garrison broke out and escaped on its own initiative that night, though a few survivors lingered to die fighting as the Russians occupied the fortress. On reaching the German lines, Küstrin’s commander was immediately imprisoned by Hitler.

Breslau, capital of lower Silesia, held out through an epic siege of seventy-seven days, which only ended a week after Hitler’s death. The city was encircled on 16 February. It took the Russians a fortnight to fight their way through a bare mile of southern suburbs, against determined resistance. The garrison, some 50,000 strong, still looked for relief from Schörner’s Army Group Centre. After the flight west of many Silesian refugees, plunging into snows and perils that brought death to thousands, some 80,000 civilians remained in Breslau. Behind the front lines, scores of houses had been destroyed by the defenders to open a fire zone. Firemen, industrial workers, service personnel threw themselves into the defence with a courage worthy of a better cause. Factories continued to produce ammunition, cigarettes—600,000 of them a day—heavy mortar bombs. The garrison even constructed an armoured train. Luftwaffe night sorties maintained deliveries of mail and some stores.

The gauleiter, Karl Hanke, was among the most repellent officials of the Third Reich. He hanged Breslau’s burgomaster for suggesting that the city was indefensible. He sent exuberant daily reports to Berlin, prompting Goebbels to remark in delight: “If all our gauleiters in the east were like this . . . we should be in better shape than we are.” Hitler described Hanke admiringly as “a devil of a fellow.” Yet Hanke’s interventions in the military conduct of the defence were disastrous. He pressed constantly for a breakout to reach Schörner’s army, a notion which the army’s commandant dismissed. Such an initiative would have required several divisions. Thousands of Breslau men and women were forced to work almost to death, building a new airstrip at Hanke’s bidding.

The gauleiter established his own headquarters in the cellars beneath the city’s university library. He proposed to demolish the building above, to render his own quarters impregnable beneath its rubble, and was dissuaded from incinerating half a million books only by fears that the pyre would spread flames across the city. By 1 April, the Russians were bombarding Breslau with huge guns of up to 280mm calibre. The cathedral tower fell, the botanical garden burned, and large areas of the south and west became uninhabitable. Yard by yard, the Russians pushed back the defenders into the city centre.

Everywhere along the Eastern Front, Germany’s forces were cut off, or disintegrating as they fell back to the last bastions of the Reich. When survivors of 10th SS Panzer were refused permission to break out of encirclement on 19 April, “we saw it as our death sentence,” said Captain Karl Godau, a gunner. He still had his battery, but no fuel to move it. Command and control had broken down. On the 20th, they fired off the last of their ammunition, then blew up the guns and trucks within sight of the Russians: “It was horrible—like being stripped naked.” A few men escaped. Godau’s battalion commander, a much admired officer named Harry Jops, swam the Elbe to escape imprisonment. The remainder surrendered. To their surprise, at first the Russians treated them quite well. It was later, during the long march to imprisonment in Silesia and afterwards in Russia, that their descent to misery took place, with stragglers shot down and many men perishing of starvation or despair.

Germany’s armies were crumbling one by one. In the west, resistance had almost ceased. In the east, men manned their positions conscious that to hope even for personal survival was extravagant. Fanatical Nazis aspired only to make an end in keeping with their demented, heroic vision of the Third Reich. Yet every other foothold of German resistance paled into insignificance alongside Hitler’s capital. It was there, the world knew, that the last terrible melodrama must be played out. All eyes now turned upon the grimy, battered, desperate streets of Berlin.

“HITLER KAPUTT! HITLER KAPUTT!”

IT IS IN the nature of war that many people find it impossible to acknowledge that the horrors they witness represent reality, or that a familiar environment is doomed. How can the heart accept the signals of the brain, however powerful and rational, that a known universe, in which the blotter stands where it has always stood on the office desk, the sofa in the lounge of the house, the shop on the corner of the street, is about to disappear for ever? If this phenomenon is true for ordinary mortals, then it becomes unsurprising that the Nazi leadership, with the notable exception of Speer, retreated into fantasy even as the Allied armies closed in for the kill. A regime that had suborned a nation and sought to conquer the world sustained its giant edifice of self-delusion to the last. Grand-Admiral Karl Dönitz had directed Germany’s campaign in the Atlantic with some skill if no imagination. Now, with mindless devotion to the cause he had slavishly served, he continued to conduct the Navy’s affairs as if he was making policy for decades of Nazi hegemony. On 14 April, he volunteered to the Führer the services of 3,000 young naval personnel to operate as guerrillas behind enemy lines in the west, oblivious of the fact that these men were wholly untrained. Four days later, he circulated an order from naval headquarters, applauding the actions of a petty officer of the raiding cruiser Cormoran, who languished in a prison camp in Australia. This exemplary fig-ure, said the grand-admiral, had successfully killed every man among his fel-low PoWs who displayed communist leanings: “This petty officer is certain of my full recognition for his resolve and his execution. I shall promote him . . . on his return.”

Hitler’s ranting against his subordinates had increased in intensity. Guderian described one such session which continued for two hours, “his fists raised, his cheeks flushed with rage, his whole body trembling . . . After each outburst of rage Hitler would stride up and down the carpet edge, then suddenly stop immediately before me and hurl his next accusation. He was almost screaming, his eyes seemed about to pop out of his head and the veins stood out on his temples.” Afterwards Keitel, most despicable of Hitler’s military creatures, accosted Guderian and demanded: “How could you contradict the Führer in that way? Didn’t you see how excited he was getting? What would happen if as the result of such a scene he were to have a stroke?” After the Allies had seized Remagen, when Hitler demanded reinforcements, he was told that just five tank destroyers were available, under repair at Sennelager. The master of Germany, overlord of armies that once swept Europe, engrossed himself for some minutes in the deployment of five broken-down Jagdtiger. To the end, he maintained his determination that the German people should perish, rather than be permitted to save themselves by yielding. “No German town will be declared open,” asserted a signal from Berlin to Army Group Centre on 15 April. “Every village and every town will be defended and held by every possible man. Every German who contravenes his obvious natural duty will forfeit his honour and his life.”

Desperate shortages caused Hitler to strip weapons and equipment from units which seemed unwilling to fight, to arm and clothe those that would. Boots, uniforms, even underclothes were taken from customs and police departments and naval warehouses for issue to the Wehrmacht. Even among formations which still possessed substantial numbers of tanks and fuel to move them, many were immobilized by mechanical defects or lack of parts. The last available order of battle for the Eastern Front, which is dated 15 March, shows 2nd SS Panzer, for instance, with twenty-seven Panthers of which seventeen were operational, and twenty-six assault guns of which just seven were runners; likewise 9th SS Panzer, with twenty-five assault guns of which eleven were operational, along with twelve out of its thirty-five Panthers. The Grossdeutschland Panzergrenadier Division was reduced to two assault guns, neither operational; five Panthers, of which one was a runner; and six Tigers. This was the sum total of armoured support for a formation with an establishment of 16,000 men.

Hitler exploded when he heard that thousands of small arms were still in the hands of the Indian Legion, formed from prisoners taken while serving with the British. Their unit, he observed, is “a joke. These are Indians who couldn’t kill a louse, who’d rather be eaten themselves. They wouldn’t kill an Englishman.” He expressed similar scepticism about whether much could be expected from the Estonians in Wehrmacht uniform: “What are they still supposed to be fighting for, anyway? They’ve gone from their homeland.” General Wilhelm Burgdorf interjected apologetically: “If there are a lot of fainthearted people even with us, we really can’t demand it of those people.” It was ironic that amid crisis deficiencies of so many creations of twentieth-century technology for waging war, Germany’s generals in 1945 also found themselves protesting the shortage of horses. One of the last signals to OKH from General von Hoffman of 10th Parachute Division, on 16 April, complained that he lacked 60 per cent of the animals essential for his formation: “My parachutists have been obliged to drag their artillery 12 miles, for lack of horses to pull the guns.”

Lieutenant Tony Saurma of the Grossdeutschland Division was among those brought back from the beleaguered garrison of Samland on the Baltic by submarine, to train men for the defence of Berlin. He was horrified to be appointed to command a troop of Mark IV tanks dug in near the Larterbahnhof station. “I found myself commanding men of sixty, even seventy. And the Russians were only thirty miles away!” After a few days, Saurma said to the grateful old men: “Go home. We don’t need you. And if anybody wants to report me, they can do so.” The lieutenant was profoundly relieved when he was reposted to Schleswig-Holstein before the Berlin battle began.

In one of Hitler’s rare moments of realism, he dismissed suggestions that he should leave the capital, to maintain his defence of the Reich from the south: “As an inglorious refugee from Berlin, I would have no authority in either northern or southern Germany, and in Berchtesgaden even less.” Somewhere in the tortured maze of his consciousness, he knew that the end was at hand. He perceived a dignity in fighting to the last for Berlin, which would be denied to him as a fugitive. His own passing might attain an appropriate grandeur if it also embraced the deaths of sufficient thousands of lesser mortals. “Everyone now has a chance to choose the part which he will play in the film a hundred years hence,” Goebbels told his Propaganda Ministry staff in an oration on 17 April. “I can assure you that it will be a fine and elevating picture . . . Hold out now, so that a hundred years hence the audience does not hoot and whistle when you appear on the screen.”

EISENHOWER’S FRANKNESS with Stalin about his lack of ambitions towards Berlin was neither credited nor reciprocated. Stalin did not believe that the Supreme Commander would forgo this great prize when it was plain that the German front was collapsing before the Americans and British. Indeed, Stalin was irked that the enemy had opened to the Western allies so easy a passage. This fed all his paranoia about the collusion natural between bourgeois capitalist societies. Russia’s warlord was determined that the Soviet Union should seize Hitler’s capital. He shared with his German counterpart an absolute indifference to the human cost of his decisions. The two foremost monsters of twentieth-century history embarked upon their last encounter with matching appetites for a titanic showdown.

At a critical meeting in his study at the Kremlin on 1 April, Stalin told Zhukov and Konev of his belief that the Anglo-Americans were driving for Berlin. Famously, he asked: “Who is going to take Berlin: are we or are the Allies?” Konev instantly gave Stalin the reply he wanted: “It is we who shall take Berlin, and we will take it before the Allies.” Stalin smiled thinly: “So that’s the sort of man you are.” Doubt persists about whether the Russians sincerely feared a Western drive for Berlin, or whether Stalin merely used the threat to goad his marshals. It seems likely that he indeed feared pre-emption.

In Moscow, he observed to Zhukov and Konev that virtually all remaining German military strength was now concentrated on the Oder. Zhukov said that according to his own intelligence reports the Germans had deployed against him some ninety divisions in four armies, together with 1,500 tanks, 3,500 aircraft and 10,000 guns. This was a wildly extravagant estimate. The German divisions were ruins, largely bereft of equipment. It was years since the Luftwaffe had possessed 3,500 operational aircraft. Overall German strength of some 300,000 men facing Zhukov was vastly outweighed by that of the Russian armies. But it was true that Hitler had thrown into his line east of Berlin almost every man capable of holding a weapon, and every fighting vehicle the Wehrmacht and SS could move to the Oder. “I think it’s going to be quite a fight,” said Stalin. Over the years, Zhukov had become skilled in reading the Soviet warlord’s mood by every detail of his behaviour: the tunic he wore, whether he stroked his moustache, whether he lit his Dunhill pipe. Now, he did the latter, usually a good sign. Zhukov and Konev were mighty men at the head of their armies, yet they became no more than useful creatures, utterly at the mercy of his whims, in the presence of their terrible master.

Stalin signalled Eisenhower that he agreed with the Americans that Berlin was no longer important, and that Russia would commit only limited forces. In reality, 2.5 million men and 6,250 tanks were deployed for the assault on Hitler’s capital. Zhukov and his 1st Belorussian Front would be granted the dubious honour of launching the assault. Konev’s 1st Ukrainian Front would attack from the south. Konev’s men would initially drive westwards, south of Berlin, and turn north towards the city only if Zhukov’s tank armies failed to smash their way through. “Whoever breaks in first, let him take Berlin,” said Stalin, drawing the start line on the Oder bank for his marshals’ race for Hitler’s capital. Rokossovsky’s forces were still mopping up north-east Germany, but would join the attack as soon as they could redeploy. The plan anticipated the capture of the city on 22 April, Lenin’s birthday.

It would be foolish to suppose that every man of the Red Army welcomed the opportunity for glory thrust upon him by the Oder crossing and the battle for Berlin. Most had been fighting for a long, long time. Like American and British soldiers, as victory beckoned, they began to cherish the possibility of survival, of going home. “In the last days of the war,” wrote Gabriel Temkin, with Twenty-seventh Army near Lake Balaton, “everybody, much more than ever before, was thinking about life and death—his own.” “We’d all had enough,” said Corporal Nikolai Ponomarev of the 374th Rifle Division. He had been wounded twice, and was now increasingly fearful of being sent to the Far East to fight the Japanese when the German war was over. “In the last month, especially, one felt that one wanted to get home alive,” said Vladimir Gormin of 3rd Ukrainian Front. Their loneliness was compounded by the fact that the Red Army was now so far from its homes that its men could no longer pick up Russian stations on their radios.

Zhukov and Konev cleared a zone fifteen miles deep behind their front of all civilians, as they prepared for the battle. They found themselves facing severe difficulties with a flood of new replacements, some of whom reached the armies with only a week’s military training. “Many have proved unstable in action, and indeed cowardly,” reported 1st Ukrainian Front on 7 April. “There have been cases of self-inflicted wounds. One rifle battalion containing 75% replacements broke and ran. Its officers shot five men on the spot to restore order.” Konev’s staff reported cases of mutiny which seem astounding given the inevitable fate of those involved. On 6 April, Privates Tarasyuk and Cheburko “categorically refused to take the military oath, asserting that they were Evangelists.” Cheburko said: “I follow in the footsteps of Christ. I will not take up arms or kill people.” The two men were dispatched immediately to a military tribunal. Another soldier who wounded himself before the battle began was shot in front of his unit. Yet the Political Department continued to record extraordinary instances of dissent. One soldier named Kaleshov, a former captive of the Germans, was rash enough to grumble that Russia’s rulers “betrayed us in 1941 and they will betray us again now . . . I was better off as a German prisoner.” Konev’s staff complained that they were desperately short of clothing and equipment for replacements. Sixty-five thousand uniforms ordered in January had still not been delivered, and young soldiers were parading in rotten boots, without tunics or even underclothes: “They don’t look like soldiers.”

Yet, fortunately for the Red Army, there were some men still eager for glory. Lieutenant Nikolai Dubrovsky’s commanding officer of the 136th Independent Artillery Regiment rushed his unit forward to Zhukov’s front as soon as he was ordered to move there from East Prussia. The colonel was desperate to qualify for the Berlin campaign medal. Although Dubrovsky himself had been drafted at sixteen in 1942, he had thus far been fortunate enough to see no action. He felt far less emotionally committed to the struggle than many men: “I wanted to fight, because everybody else was fighting, but I felt no hatred for the Germans—I was too young to be embittered.” The gunner officer was lucky, first, to come from eastern Russia, which the 1941–42 German onslaught never reached; and second, to serve in a heavy artillery unit, where personal risk was small. From his brigade’s Fire Control Centre, Dubrovsky was responsible for calling down 152mm howitzer fire on Hitler’s capital from a range of twelve miles.

In this last period of the war, the Soviets’ reputation for savagery cost them dearly. In the west, many German soldiers were embracing captivity. All but the most committed Nazi fanatics knew that, if they picked the right moment to surrender, they were likely to survive, and to be humanely treated. On the Eastern Front, by contrast, there was not only a generalized fear about the behaviour of the Russians towards Germany, but a personal one about any man’s slender prospects of surviving captivity. “Many Germans seemed to feel that they were going to die anyway, so they might as well die fighting,” acknowledged Lieutenant Pavel Nikiforov, a Soviet reconnaissance officer. The Red Army would not have stood at the gates of Berlin in April 1945 but for its ferocious fighting spirit. Yet the dreadful casualties of the last battles might have been greatly diminished had not the Germans fought with the courage of despair. The Stavka seemed belatedly to recognize this, by an order of 20 April calling for “a change of attitude towards prisoners and civilians. We should treat Germans better. Bad treatment of Germans makes them fight more stubbornly and refuse to surrender. This is an unfavourable situation for us.” Yet it was far, far too late to alter the mindset of six million men, fostered over four years of merciless struggle.

Zhukov’s and Konev’s assaults across the Oder began in darkness early on 16 April. Forty-two thousand Russian guns launched a massive bombardment, which they would sustain through days to come. More than seven million shells had been stockpiled. There was little scope for deception when there was no leaf on the trees and the ground was too waterlogged to dig deep. Every German knew full well where the Russians were heading, as Stalin’s forces began to close upon Berlin across an arc of advance that extended 235 miles. Soviet aircraft launched the first of 6,500 bombing and strafing sorties against German positions beyond artillery range. As flares of every hue shot into the sky to give the signal, the night crossing of the river began. The Russians switched on huge searchlights to illuminate the assault. The Germans, unsurprisingly, opened furious fire at the lights. “I shall never forgive Zhukov for that folly,” said Major Yury Ryakhovsky. “Everyone warned him what would happen, and begged him not to use the lights. But he kept saying stubbornly again and again: ‘I have told Stalin that we shall use them.’ ” The searchlights were manned by women. Ryakhovsky looked in revulsion upon the crews’ mangled bodies as they lay around the searchlight mountings.

Only the privileged among the men making the assault crossing possessed boats. The rest were expected to fend for themselves. Most crossed the wintry river, on which great chunks of broken ice still drifted, on primitive rafts. Lieutenant Vasily Filimonenko, an artillery forward observation officer, paddled across near Seelow with his five-man signals team clinging to a precarious wooden contraption contrived from doors and fence posts. “I never thought I’d make it,” said the gunner. His party was close to foundering when some engineers in a boat took them in tow. Intense German fire was whipping over the water. Flares and flames lit up the darkness. The ruins of shattered boats were drifting everywhere. Mortar and artillery rounds were falling among sappers struggling to build a bridge. Filimonenko saw one section of pontoons blasted high into the air by a direct hit. Yet the work went on. The gunner officer was in the water for half an hour before he crawled up the western bank shivering uncontrollably. He had lost one signaller wounded. They had managed to keep their sacred radio dry. They began to report the compass bearings of German muzzle-flashes back to their own guns.

It has been insufficiently recognized in the West that Zhukov’s assault across the Oder was a shambles. It was an operation worthy of the worst days of the Red Army, not of its final triumph. The Soviet archives bulge with after-action reports revealing the rage and frustration of many of those who took part, and who witnessed the reckless sacrifice of life. The preparatory bombardment fell largely upon forward positions evacuated by the Germans, and made little impression on their main defences. Many men who had fought at the Vistula crossing compared the effects of the Oder artillery preparation very unfavourably with the devastation achieved four months earlier. The Russian assault met accurate German artillery and mortar fire, especially from batteries at Frankfurt-on-Oder. There were violent complaints from the infantry about tanks lagging behind or becoming snarled in massive traffic jams behind the advance. A Sergeant Safronov reported seeing Soviet armour advancing over their own infantry positions, crushing men under the tracks. Captain Shimkov of the 68th Guards Brigade described how a mass of tanks and self-propelled guns became entangled in a gully, from which they shot blindly towards the enemy “because we had no experience of night firing. We were aiming by instinct.” Untrained replacements proved woefully incompetent—one unit reported three machine-guns jammed, because their Moldavian crews had no idea how to clear them. After the battle, political officers compiled an unedifying list of officers deemed to have behaved with cowardice or incompetence.

Worst of all, some Soviet minefields had not been properly cleared by the engineers. Hundreds of men died before they had even advanced beyond their own positions. Eight out of the 89th Regiment’s twenty-two tanks were wrecked on Russian mines. The 347th Infantry Division alone lost thirty men killed. A subsequent report declared furiously: “The divisional engineer Lieutenant- Colonel Lomov, a Party Member, and a brigade commander, Colonel Lebedev, also a Party Member, were too busy drinking before the attack to do their jobs properly. Colonel Lomov was too drunk even to report to the divisional commander.” It was in the light of behaviour such as this that Zhukov issued an order on 17 April cancelling the issue of vodka to several formations until further notice.

As daylight grew on the western bank, a pall of dust and smoke hung over the blasted German defences. Flocks of displaced birds wheeled in the sky. Men strove to save their eardrums amid the relentless thunder of the bombardment, now ranging on targets deeper into the German positions. Zhukov’s initial optimism at the success of the crossing was replaced by dismay, as his forces battered in vain at the enemy’s main line. “The further we got, the tougher the resistance became,” said Vasily Filimonenko. The strongest German defences, on the Seelow Heights, lay well beyond the reach of the Russians’ preliminary bombardment. Even after Zhukov’s men had secured bridgeheads, established their pontoons and pushed the first tanks forward, they found themselves making little progress. They struggled in the German minefields, for the Red Army was chronically short of mine detectors. The ground was miserably soft and treacherous for armoured vehicles, which bogged down in scores. The defenders were resolute. Zhukov found himself engaged in the most bitter fighting his armies had known since 1943.

ON THE AFTERNOON of 16 April, nineteen-year-old Helga Braunschweig, who worked in a Berlin telegraph office, was foraging for potatoes in the countryside east of Berlin with her friend Regina. The S-Bahn proved so badly damaged that they were obliged to abandon the train and walk. They were soon stopped at a military police roadblock, where the Kettenhunden said: “There’s nothing for you up that way, girls.” They wangled a lift in a truck up a side road and found themselves in Wehrmacht positions on a hill. They lingered to chat and flirt with the soldiers, even as they listened to the thunder of the guns and watched the relentless flashes in the distance as the afternoon light faded. The soldiers, summoned to action, hastily clambered into their trucks, gathering up the girls, and drove towards the Seelow Heights. Eventually they stopped, pointed the girls towards a house where they could buy potatoes, and left them in the road. Helga and her friend filled their bags, then lingered watching the horizon flickering with flame, gripped by a sense of disbelief. Berlin had been awaiting the Red Army for so long that, now it was coming, they could not grasp what it meant.

When at last they reached home, a cottage on the north-eastern outskirts of the city, Helga’s mother was almost prostrate with worry about their absence, but very grateful for the potatoes. The women stayed in the cottage through the days that followed, as a flood of refugees streamed westwards. Most of their neighbours left. An SS patrol asked why they were not fleeing: “Don’t you know that the Russians are raping all German women?” Helga’s mother shrugged: “That’s just Goebbels’ propaganda.” Her daughter said: “We simply didn’t know about what had been happening in the east.” Her boyfriend Wolfgang, a Luftwaffe wireless-operator, had contrived his own deft exit from the war by persuading the crew of his aircraft on a sortie one day to divert their course to Sweden, where they were interned, and Wolfgang later married a Swedish girl. Her father was a prisoner of the British. Like every Berliner, she had found the experience of the air raids terrifying and deeply debilitating. Now, perversely and naively, as the Russians advanced she felt: “Thank God they’re coming at last. All this will soon be over.”

BY THE AFTERNOON of 16 April, Stalin was displaying audible impatience with Zhukov’s progress. “So you’ve underestimated the enemy on the Berlin axis,” he said irritably, when the marshal reported by telephone. “Things are going better for Konev.” The 1st Ukrainian Front had pushed ahead from its bridgeheads and was now swinging north towards the German capital. Zhukov reacted to Stalin’s jibes with characteristic ruthlessness. He ordered formation commanders personally to lead the attacks on the Seelow defences, and warned that further failures would be rewarded with instant dismissal. He took the drastic step of committing armoured divisions even before his infantry had achieved a breakthrough. There was no tactical subtlety here, no signs of a great captain manoeuvring forces with imagination. This was merely a clumsy battering ram, thrusting repeatedly and at fearsome cost against the German defences, as Zhukov vented his own frustrations in the lives of his men. “The worst performances have been those of Sixty-ninth Army, First and Second Guards Tank Armies,” he declared furiously, in a circular to all commanders. “These forces possess colossal strength, yet for two days have been fighting unskilfully and indecisively. Army commanders are not watching what is going on—they are skulking six miles behind the front.” He ordered that all army commanders should move their command posts to corps headquarters, and likewise that every corps commander should now direct operations from a divisional or brigade HQ. “Any commander who shows himself unable to fulfil his task will be replaced by an abler and braver man,” railed the marshal on 18 April. “Tanks and infantry cannot expect the artillery to kill all the Germans! Show no mercy. Keep moving day and night!” The commander of Ninth Guards Tank Army was lacerated for weakness, formally reprimanded and told: “By nightfall on 19 April, you will secure the Freudenberg area at any cost.”

The egos of two ferociously ambitious marshals were committed. They were taunted and goaded to a frenzy of rivalry by their master in Moscow, ever willing to exploit any human frailty to achieve his purposes. Whatever is said of Montgomery’s vanity, he would never have killed men to satisfy it. On the outskirts of Berlin, however, Russians were dying in their thousands to satisfy an urgency that was not tactical but entirely vainglorious. Zhukov dispatched some patrols not to find Germans but to discover how far Konev’s men had got. Konev, in his turn, incited his tank leaders: “Marshal Zhukov’s troops are now within six miles of the eastern outskirts of Berlin. I order you to be the first to break into the city tonight!”

Russian dead lay heaped in front of the defences, in a fashion that echoed the worst horrors of the earlier world war. Wounded men were untended for hours on the battlefield, as the scanty Soviet medical services were overwhelmed. The dead lay unburied for days. Zhukov’s headquarters ordered prisoners and civilians to be conscripted to remove them, lest epidemic disease be added to the horrors of battle. There were repeated friendly-fire incidents, as Soviet aircraft attacked or shelled their own units in the confusion. This difficulty was soon to worsen, as artillery fire from Konev’s and Zhukov’s armies began to cross the other’s lines. Command and control faltered and even broke down, as Soviet commanders lost sight of their own men.

By sheer weight of fire and numbers, the Red Army ground down the exhausted defenders. German ammunition supplies began to fail. By the evening of 19 April, 1st Belorussian Front had broken through all the German outer defences and was closing on Berlin. Next day, Zhukov’s artillery began to fire on the city. The capture of the Seelow Heights had cost the Germans 12,000 dead, the Russians 30,000. In the north, Rokossovsky’s armies were pressing the German forces on the lower Oder. Konev reached the Spree and overran OKH headquarters at Zossen. His men found the teleprinters still rattling out messages from the surviving fragments of Hitler’s armies. The triumphant Konev begged Moscow to allow him to turn his two tank armies northwards, towards the capital. Stalin acceded.

Zhukov was now seriously alarmed that his rival marshal would defeat him in the race for Berlin. “In the course of three days the infantry have advanced 16 miles,” he signalled one of his armoured commanders, “and all this time the tanks have been dragging along behind them.” His officers were enraged to learn that the advance of some formations was being held up as men turned aside to loot. Some of the worst offenders in support units were transferred on the spot to rifle companies. Late on 20 April, Zhukov urged the commanders of his two Guards Tank Armies to the fulfilment of “a historic task: to break into Berlin first and to raise the banner of victory.” Soviet tank brigades entered the outskirts of Hitler’s capital next evening, the 21st. Zhukov urged them on, using the very goad Stalin had applied to himself and Konev: “Due to the slowness of our advance, the Allies are approaching Berlin and will soon take it.” Yet in built-up areas Soviet tanks found themselves as vulnerable to teenagers with fausts as their counterparts in Eisenhower’s armies. Zhukov pushed forward “fighting reconnaissance groups”—his penal companies, though these had been reduced to strengths of fifteen or twenty men in sacrificial actions at the Oder.

Even when the Russians began to bombard the streets, for many Berliners the need to find food overcame fear. They continued to queue at local shops as shells fell around them. “In Wilmersdorf, the local situation became acute about April 20th, a Friday,” wrote a Berlin housewife. “On the weekend, the firing came nearer and the streets grew very empty, except for women doggedly queueing for food, and occasional German tanks seeking or avoiding Russian outposts. On Monday, the ticket collector from our railway station got killed in a cigarette queue. On Tuesday morning, a shell swept over the bridge just as I was crossing it, and destroyed a baker’s shop with some of the people in it.” Germany’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs signalled its foreign missions: “Owing to the gravity of the situation and especially to administrative difficulties, the greater part of the Ministry has been moved to other quarters.” Missions were asked to confine their future transmissions to matters of urgent importance.

From the evening of 21 April onwards, Zhukov’s tanks were inching forward street by street, paying a price for every intersection. All-arms attack groups composed of tanks, infantry and assault guns worked in tandem, each supported by its own engineer and flamethrower platoons. The guns were responsible for blasting away buildings identified as centres of resistance. Then it was the business of infantry to occupy the debris and mop up. In the streets of Berlin, it was impossible to prevail by firepower alone. German soldiers holding positions in thick rubble were impregnable to anything save a direct hit. Progress could be made only by close-quarters fighting. Casualties on both sides were dreadful. “The first really wounded man I saw,” wrote a German housewife manning a Red Cross shelter, “was a boy who came straight from the street running, running, with the whole lower half of his face blown away, a bloody gap, no organ of speech left to scream, and his eyes still fully aware and sick with horror.”

Rokossovsky’s men of 2nd Belorussian Front were now pushing towards Berlin from the north. In the south, Konev lashed his own men on. “Third Guards Tank Army is conducting itself like a tape worm,” he signalled on 20 April: “one brigade is fighting and all the rest are creeping along behind.” Its commander was ordered to attack on a broader front. “Your formation has systematically disobeyed orders,” he told the leader of XXXVIII Corps on 21 April. “You seem afraid to attack. You overestimate the power of the enemy, and underrate your own. You treat every patch of woodland as a major obstacle. If you cannot do better than this, I shall have you sacked.” Zhukov echoed this brutal refrain: “I keep being told that operations are appallingly badly organized, that units are not properly deployed for street fighting,” he told his spearhead leaders on 22 April. “Fight around the clock—use searchlights!”

There was now a serious risk that Konev’s and Zhukov’s men would find themselves killing each other. Tanks of 1st Ukrainian Front were fighting their way into the southern suburbs of Berlin, after advancing more than a hundred miles from the Neisse in six days. To avert a collision, on 22 April Stalin imposed demarcation lines. Konev was ordered to advance towards the Anhalter railway station, halting some 150 yards short of the Reichstag and Hitler’s bunker. It would, after all, become Zhukov’s privilege, dearly bought by his soldiers, to seize the symbolic bastions of the Third Reich. This was bitterly resented by Konev’s officers. When one of them at last met Chuikov, Zhukov’s man, he protested that Chuikov was encroaching on 1st Ukrainian Front’s patch: “We’re advancing here!” Chuikov shrugged indifferently: “Sorry, I’ve got my own orders.” Thus did the cacophony of clashing egos compete with that of gunfire on the streets of Berlin.

The filth, stench and gloom in the shelters grew worse by the hour, as water supplies collapsed. Generators provided power only for a few hours, if at all. One of the largest shelters, the Anhalter Bahnhof next to the main station, housed 12,000 people in conditions so hideously cramped that they were unable to move, even to relieve themselves, for days on end. Even fetching water was a deadly business, when the station was among the principal targets for Soviet guns. At a local street shelter in a residential area, in one corner a woman fortunate enough to possess supplies brewed coffee or “stretched the soup,” as she called it. In another, people were urinating or defecating, because it was unthinkable to face the hell in the streets above to address the demands of nature. One of those tending the wounded in a Red Cross shelter was the British wife of a Berliner. On the evening of 27 April, an SS major arrived at the head of several hundred men, demanding to take over the shelter, evict its wretched occupants and create a defensive position. She argued desperately with him, all the time terrified that someone would cry out: “She’s English!” At last, he went away. Soon afterwards one of her charges, a Ukrainian girl, went into labour amid the relentless shelling above. The baby was born at five past eight on the morning of 28 April, It was christened Piotr, and laid in an office filing tray. Then an elderly local gardener came in, with six holes in his back, “one as big as your hand.” As they strove to dress his wounds, he told his story. He and his wife had sheltered from the barrage in the garden shed on their allotment, until a near-miss blew the entire structure away, tore his clothes to rags and inflicted hideous shrapnel wounds. His wife died on the spot from a heart attack. The man clutched his only undamaged possession, a red and purple bowtie. “I love that tie,” he said, gazing wonderingly upon it as the world collapsed. “But I must give it away, now that I am in mourning.” Bullets sometimes whipped for thousands of yards across empty air until somewhere in the city, far from immediate fighting, they found a billet in flesh or masonry. A woman sitting up in the bed where she had taken refuge beside her husband, with no sense of imminent peril, was killed by a round fired a mile or more away, which ricocheted off the wall. A pall of dust and smoke shrouded the whole city, as street by street the battle seeped into its remotest recesses.

Hitler raved on 23 April: “The enemy knows I am here. That could provide the best opportunity for us to lead him into a trap here . . . Everyone must work honestly!” The Army Chief of Staff, Hans Krebs, said: “I believe we still have four days.” Hitler said: “In four days, the thing will have been decided.” By 25 April, Berlin was entirely encircled. A total of 464,000 Soviet troops, supported by 12,700 guns, 1,500 tanks and 21,000 Katyusha mountings, were deployed for the last act. By 27 April, the German perimeter had shrunk to an area some ten miles long by three wide, from which billowing clouds of smoke rose into the sky. Berliners now called their city the Reichsscheiterhaufen—“funeral pyre of the Reich.” Zhukov’s men achieved an important tactical triumph for their commander by forestalling Konev’s tanks to reach the Landwehr Canal, in front of the Tiergarten. The 1st Ukrainian Front swung west, to clear the further side of the city, to the intense disappointment of Konev and his officers. Zhukov was left alone to complete the destruction of the last few acres of ruined streets, monuments and public buildings which remained to Hitler’s empire.

Some 45,000 German soldiers maintained the defence, along with 40,000 Volkssturm and 3,000 children of the Hitler Jugend. Foremost among this forlorn hope were men of foreign SS units gathered around the bunker, the government buildings of the Wilhelmstrasse, the Reich Chancellery. Balts, Frenchmen, Scandinavians and Walloons wearing Himmler’s runes on their tunics knew that they were a legion of the dead, beyond hope of mercy. Their will to resist was reinforced by SS squads which roamed the streets hanging from the lampposts every man who sought to quit. The defenders of Berlin knew that they must fight and die, or hang and die.

Hitler spent a sleepless night on 26 April, amid the relentless shelling and bombing. He told his military conference next morning: “Today I will lie down a little more at ease, and I only want to be awakened if a Russian tank is standing in front of my room, so I have time to make my preparations.” The first of these, of course, was his marriage to Eva Braun. An NKVD team sent to Berlin with the explicit mission of searching for Hitler or his corpse arrived in the city on 29 April with little expectation that they would have work to do. The Russians were convinced that Hitler would flee before the Red Army reached his bunker—indeed, that he had probably already done so. As the Russian team drove in darkness to the Red Army’s tactical headquarters through the shattered streets, the first thought of their interpreter Yelena Kogan was that the anti-tank ditches looked exactly like the ones tens of thousands of Russians, including herself, had dug around Moscow three years earlier. “The whole scene was apocalyptic,” she said, “relentless gunfire, searchlights probing the sky, burning and collapsing buildings caught in their beams.” At Army headquarters, the NKVD group sat down patiently to await the outcome of the battle. The only seat Yelena could find was a petrol can, on which she passed many of the hours that followed.

The first flimsy news of Hitler reached the Russians in unexpected fashion. A prisoner was brought in—a civilian ventilation engineer. He said that he had been called to the bunker to repair a fault in its air-circulation system. The man was sullen, numb, monosyllabic. Patiently, they questioned him. “There was a wedding yesterday,” he declared suddenly. “The Führer married Eva Braun.” They looked at him as if he was mad. How could there be a wedding, in the heart of Berlin, in these last days? The NKVD team did not believe a word of it.

Even in the midst of this climactic battle alcoholic excess, the curse of the Red Army, provoked grotesque incidents. Zhukov’s military prosecutor recorded an episode on 27 April, when the commander of LXXXV Tank Corps became drunk and ordered German women to be brought to him, whom he raped. When Russian soldiers approached his headquarters, he mistook them for Germans and ordered a self-propelled gun to open fire, killing four men and wounding six. The court-martial case against him had to be dropped, allegedly for “lack of proof.” From the top, real efforts were being made to stem the manic indiscipline threatening military operations, yet among the fighting formations such matters were still not arousing concern. Zhukov’s headquarters reported that “commanders are taking serious steps to stop ‘improper behaviour,’ but some still delude themselves that the situation is under control.” The Red Army’s rampage in Berlin began long before the battle was over.

Private Bruno Bochum was one of those German soldiers who possessed no stomach for a hero’s death. He was crewing a 105mm gun emplaced in a tank turret by Tegel airfield on the north-west side of Berlin. “It was crazy! There was no real command.” Their gun possessed only ten rounds of ammunition. They fired it once, at a low-flying aircraft strafing the runway. On 26 April, a Russian tank clattered past the rear of their position, laden with tommy-gunners. The Germans could have fired at it, but decided that discretion was the better part of survival. The gun crew agreed to scatter and make for a rendezvous in the Grünewald, the woodland west of the city. Bochum set off with one comrade through empty streets, moving in a series of sprints and cautious halts, listening to the artillery fire. They reached the Olympic Stadium, where they found many other stragglers, and lay down exhausted to sleep on its stepped tiers. At first light next day, they set off again. After desultory encounters with Russian patrols, they chanced upon a Wehrmacht headquarters. Bochum was taken before a general, whom he found reading the Roman author Livy amid a mounting artillery barrage. The general questioned him about his personal service; presented him on the spot with the Iron Cross, Second Class; and entrusted him with command of thirty-six men on the south of their modest perimeter.

Bochum thought: “What on earth is the point of this foolishness now?” But, like so many German soldiers for so many years past, he did what he was told. They started digging. Then Bochum fell asleep. When he woke next morning, only two men of his command remained, to defend a frontage of 600 yards. There was small-arms fire on all sides—the Russians were well beyond them. A Katyusha salvo landed close by. A fragment of shrapnel embedded itself in Bochum’s purse, and another opened his neck. He found somebody to bandage his wound, then returned to find his two-man command still in their positions. “Throw away your weapons,” he told them. “It’s over.”

The difficulty now was to find someone to whom he might surrender. He met a Russian riding an American Harley-Davidson motorcycle who refused to notice him. He walked cautiously onwards until he rounded a corner and saw a T-34, its crew standing around it, obviously extremely drunk. He took out the white handkerchief he had carried since 6 June 1944 for this very situation, and advanced with his hands high in the air, clutching his symbol of surrender. He was amazed when the first Russian he reached embraced him warmly before taking his watch. “Woniakaputt!” announced the Russian joyously. “The war’s over!” This statement was, of course, premature. But it sufficed for these Red soldiers that their own part was done. Bochum was taken into a headquarters where another Russian presented him with a box of cigars, and led him to an officer frying chicken. He was briskly interrogated by a Jewish soldier who spoke perfect German. Then he was pushed into a room full of officer prisoners, where he spent the night. As Bochum joined a long, long column of PoWs being escorted to imprisonment next morning, he merely felt profound relief that his own war was over, that he had survived. “I had my first good rest for weeks, free of fear.”

Johannes and Regina Krakowitz seldom left the basement of their apartment building at Gohenstrasse 5, in the eastern part of Berlin, after 20 April, Hitler’s birthday. There were perhaps fifty occupants, united in misery and fear. It was their good fortune that there was a butcher’s shop on the ground floor. Once during the battle, miraculously the shop had meat. The basement-dwellers risked everything to join the queue. Though one man was injured by shrapnel, they got something to eat, and thought themselves lucky. At moments of desperate need, the Krakowitzes climbed upstairs to their flat to use the lavatory or wash, for as long as water remained available. Otherwise, “we sat in that cellar as if we were paralysed.” There were too few chairs, so they took it in turns to sit down. There was Frau Bloch and her son, the Krakowitzes’ neighbours. The boy was twenty, and no one could imagine how he had escaped military service. Herr Wendt, who owned a little soap shop, was there—a small man with a comically larger wife. They played gin rummy hour after hour, day after day. Herr Scalimper, a dairy owner, had been drafted unwillingly to join his Volkssturm unit, but his wife and mother were in the cellar, sharing the terrors. When the occupants talked at all, which was seldom, they discussed banal matters, such as what commodities it was possible to buy with ration stamps. The thunder of gunfire and explosions came closer every hour, until someone came down to say that the Russians were at the Prenzlauerallee S-Bahn station, just 200 yards away. That afternoon, 29 April, Hitler and Eva Braun killed themselves in the Führerbunker. Their bodies were burned by Otto Günsche, the SS adjutant.

Everywhere across the city, human flotsam was suing for mercy, some less deserving than others. A deputation of diplomats from the Japanese embassy, whose nation was still not at war with Russia, appeared at Soviet headquarters to demand protection, and the return of its looted property, including three cars. A cluster of Ukrainian women saw a Volkssturm man raise a white sheet, only to be killed by his own commander. A Wehrmacht officer emerged from a tunnel to negotiate the safe passage of 1,100 civilians sheltering in the darkness. When he had seen them delivered into the custody of Soviet submachine gunners, he announced that he was returning to his own soldiers, in fulfilment of his military oath. A Soviet officer drew a pistol and shot him down.

On the morning of 30 April, a refugee in the basement of the Krakowitzes’ apartment building braved the journey upstairs to listen to a radio. The man returned to declare solemnly, yet in a voice somehow drained of emotion, that the Russians occupied their street. Regina Krakowitz thought simply: “Thank God there will be no more bombing and shelling.” Slowly and cautiously, they crept up from their shelter to find that the battle was dying out. Frau Krakowitz was not raped, for which she was forever grateful. “We came through it pretty lucky,” she said laconically. Others did not. Margrit Hug was marched by three Russians from the cellar in which she had been cowering for a week and taken to a chemist’s cellar: “Was pushed to the ground, some clothes torn off me,” she wrote in her diary. “[They] took it in turns to hold the torch. I am not 18.”

All that day of 30 April, Russian troops fought yard by yard towards the Reichstag and Kroll Opera House, against a storm of German fire. Smoke and dust rendered it hard to see more than a few hundred yards across the battlefield. So many men fell attempting to cross open ground that the Russians sometimes despaired of making the final breakthrough. More and more tanks and self-propelled guns were brought forward. Perhaps 10,000 German defenders remained within their perimeter. It seemed so hard to kill men dug into positions of masonry and rubble. Late that evening, at desperate risk two men of 756th Regiment, Mikhail Yegorov and Meliton Kantaria, climbed into the dome of the pitted and blasted Reichstag and hoisted the Red victory banner. In the early hours of 1 May, General Krebs, who had succeeded Guderian as Army Chief of Staff, went forward to the Russian lines and attempted to parley with the commander of Eighth Guards Army, the former defender of Stalingrad, about surrender terms. Absurdly, the German appeared to delude himself that, now Hitler was gone, the Allies would be willing to negotiate with a successor regime. After consultations with Stalin and Zhukov, Krebs was brutally informed that only total capitulation was acceptable. He returned to his headquarters. That evening the Russians launched a devastating new barrage against the remaining German perimeter. Next morning, the commander of LVI Pan-zer Corps requested a ceasefire. At 1500 on the afternoon of 2 May, the Rus-sian guns fell silent. Some 125,000 Berliners had died in the battle. Krebs killed himself.

“The Germans who fought to the last weren’t the old men—they were surrendering in their thousands, generals and soldiers together,” said Major Yury Ryakhovsky. “It was the young ones who went on and on.” In Berlin on 30 April, he was told of a twelve-year-old German boy who had destroyed twelve Soviet tanks with Panzerfausts. “We had never really understood just what the fausts could do. There were piles of them everywhere. Boys were firing at T-34s from a range of two or three metres. You could get nowhere in a straight line—you had to zig-zag everywhere, to and fro across the streets.”

“It seemed so strange, when the end was so close, that these young boys were resisting so fiercely,” said Lieutenant Vasily Filimonenko. When at last it was all over, he watched enemy soldiers advancing nervously from their positions to surrender, crying “Hitler kaputt! Hitler kaputt!”—the Wehrmacht’s mantra of renunciation. The Russian officer remembered earlier days, when even in captivity the arrogance of Hitler’s soldiers was undimmed. They would tell their captors sneeringly: “You’re all for it, you know.”

When Yury Ryakhovsky reached the ruins of the Reichstag, he could not bring himself to emulate thousands of Russian soldiers who had already scrawled their names on the walls. “I disliked the idea of behaving like a tourist. We were not there as tourists, I thought.” But when Captain Vasily Krylov saw his cousin Nikolai’s signature among the mass of graffiti, he wrote beneath it: “I was here, too.” Krylov said: “I felt great satisfaction, looking on Berlin. Our vengeance had come. Even when I saw Dresden, I thought: this, also, was right.” Filimonenko cherished the end in Hitler’s capital as the greatest moment of his life: “Ever since 1941, I had always dreamed of surviving to walk into Berlin.” Of a hundred men with whom he had completed his artillery training course in 1940, just three survived to celebrate victory.

Between 16 April and 8 May, the fronts of Zhukov, Konev and Rokossovsky lost 352,425 men, by far the heaviest casualty toll of the battle for Germany.* ⁹ More than 100,000 of these men were dead. The capture of Berlin displayed outstanding generalship by Konev, not by Zhukov. In his yearning for glory and in his desperation to satisfy Stalin, 1st Belorussian Front’s commander battered the enemy into submission through human sacrifice, not manoeuvre. Stalin and the Red Army gained their symbolic triumph, in a fashion and at a cost that no Western ally could envy. Hitler had desired that his own death should be wreathed in the sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of lesser mortals. Zhukov indulged him, making the battle for Berlin a clash of two prehistoric animals, butting and writhing for mastery in a welter of blood, until the lesser beast at last succumbed to its wounds and toppled among the ruins.

A Berlin housewife emerged from her shelter at midday on 2 May, for the first time since 25 April. Firing was still audible in the distance.

It was raining, and felt very cold. Our legs felt very queer, walking in the street. Berlin as far as the eye could see was a smoking, smouldering ruin. Dead men lay on the ground, and the living clambered over them carrying bedding and household articles. We went back to the shelter to fetch our things, and a mother and child from the Ukraine. Her house had gone, and I was going to nurse her at home. At the entrance was a Russian lieutenant. He said: “Now the war is over.” We said: “Thank God.”

The mother of Margrit and Karla Hug, both of whom had been repeatedly raped, took a different view. “Mutti decided she did not want any more humiliation and shame for Karla and me,” Margrit wrote in her diary for 1 May, and took us to the flat where we each drank four cups of Cinzano (after the chemist failed to persuade Mutti that it was not the time to end our lives). I said goodbye to friends and to Franzel, my brother . . . On the roof, we sat at the edge feet dangling down. Our house has six storeys. Mutti sat behind us, saying, “Jump, girls, jump.” I wondered why I did not fall. I wanted to, feeling very drowsy. I saw Vati [her father] standing down below, looking up, shouting: “Don’t do it!” The roof of the next house was burning. Bits of burning tar landed on Karla’s dress. She cried and moved on to a safer place. A neighbour appeared, and persuaded Mutti not to make us jump.

Yet many, many did kill themselves.

“Nothing is left of Berlin but memories,” Lieutenant Gennady Ivanov, one of the more reflective officers in the Red Army, wrote to his parents. “I would never have believed that a great city could be reduced to mere rubble. It seems so strange, after four years of gunfire, now to hear not a single shot around us.” It is impossible to dispute the truth of one of Goebbels’s last pronouncements before the murder of his children and his own suicide alongside his wife: “The earth will shake as we leave the scene.”