CHAPTER 25
BY the beginning of 1945 the accumulation of Germany’s reverses had produced disintegration. It is surprising that the war lasted into May. Even in the previous summer Montgomery had believed that Berlin could be reached before the end of 1944, and on the other front Chuikov, the defender of Stalingrad and ultimately the conqueror of Berlin, chafed at his superiors for not allowing him to make straight for the city at the beginning of the new year. Hitler no longer had an army capable of sustaining the fight, he had so little fuel that his soldiers had standing orders to siphon off the fuel in a disabled tank before abandoning it, he scarcely had an air force at all, his anti-aircraft units were manned by a mixture of regulars, prisoners of war and teenagers down to sixteen, and his secret weapons had not worked the miracles that were expected of them.
After 1942 the Luftwaffe had performed one function brilliantly at the cost of relinquishing all others. It had created a fighter defence of Germany which defeated American and British strategic bombing until the final phase of cumulative disintegration was reached. But otherwise – apart from limited local successes, as when it drove the British out of the Dodecanese in 1943 – it ceased to count in one theatre after another. Its formations were outnumbered, its airfields bombed and its new types and new weapons failed it. In 1943 the Do. 217 was equipped with a 1,000 lb. radio-controlled glider bomb (Hs. 293 – first used against the Italian fleet as it escaped from Italy to Malta upon the Italian surrender) and also with a 3,000 lb. radio-controlled anti-personnel bomb (FX), but these were primitive prototypes of things to come and neither was successful. The He. 177 four-engined bomber appeared in 1943, but in small numbers only and after Germany’s chance to affect the issue by heavy bombing had passed; the Luftwaffe was never able to drop the super-bombs which were dropped by its enemies on German cities (the heaviest bomb used against Germany was 22,000 lbs.).
The Me. 262 jet fighter and the Me. 163 rocket-propelled fighter appeared towards the end of 1944, but by then it was too late. Both these aircraft were the successors of earlier models which had flown before the war began and in both Germany was the pioneer, but their champions had been unable to persuade Hitler or Goering to adopt them because it was assumed that the war would be finished and won without them. The Me. 262 was, however, put into series production half way through the war (1,294 were made) because Hitler mistakenly supposed that this 500 m.p.h. fighter could be usefully converted into a bomber.
During 1942–3 the Luftwaffe had been called upon to fight on four fronts. It was not strong enough to do so. Its own bomber offensive was defeated, it failed to succour the German armies in the east or in the Mediterranean, and it was squeezed out of the Battle of the High Seas. The Russian campaigns acted like a magnet and a churn. Great numbers of aircraft were drawn into battles in which the Luftwaffe was gradually ground out of existence. In 1944 a new front was added in the west. This was the last straw. The destruction of the Luftwaffe was accelerated by a training crisis, a fuel crisis and a breakdown in its intelligence. By 1945 it was out of the fight.
Germany did not manage to produce the Second World War’s most startling new weapon – the nuclear bomb. In the aftermath of defeat some German writers and scientists sought to ascribe this failure to the reluctance of German science to place so terrifying a weapon in the hands of so terrifying a man as Hitler, but the truth seems to be that the Germans failed to produce nuclear weapons because they took a wrong turning. They did, however, produce at the end of the war special weapons which, had they been brought into service earlier, might have had a considerable effect. These were the V weapons, V standing for Vergeltung or retribution. With them Hitler hoped to flatten London and force Britain to capitulate by the end of 1943, while Churchill was so alarmed that he considered using gas in retaliation.
There were three V weapons. The V 1 was a jet-propelled pilotless aircraft twenty-five feet long with a ceiling of 2,000– 3,000 feet, a range of 200–250 miles, a speed of 470 m.p.h. and a one-ton warhead. It cost only £125 and consumed in flight only 150 gallons of low-grade fuel. Beginning in June 1944 2,448 of these weapons hit Antwerp, 2,419 London (out of 10,492 aimed at it) and 3,132 hit other parts of England. The V 2 was a rocket. It was fifty feet long and six feet in circumference and carried a one-ton warhead. It rose into the air for fifty to seventy-five miles and could reach a speed of 3,600 m.p.h. Its range was 220 miles. Its motor, controlled from the ground, was cut at the crucial moment, thus setting it on course. It was impossible to intercept and arrived without warning since it travelled faster than sound. The V 2 was therefore a more terrifying weapon than the V 1, but each V 2 cost about £6,000, exclusive of research and development costs. Again Antwerp was the chief sufferer, receiving 1,265 hits. London received 517 and other parts of England 537.
The V 3 was a long-range gun. One weapon of this kind – originally there were to be two – was installed at Mimoyecques, near Calais. It had twenty-five barrels, each of them 416 feet long, entirely embedded in limestone and concrete, and the whole weapon was serviced and controlled by an extremely elaborate underground network. Its construction absorbed 1,000 tons of steel. It was to fire one shell on London every twelve seconds, but although the site was well prepared the components did not start arriving until early in June 1944. Allied bombing first severed its electricity supply and then scored a direct hit with a heavy bomb. In any case trials in the Baltic had not been completed when the site at Mimoyecques was overrun by the allied armies.
Development and production of the V 1 and V 2 were held up by rivalries between the army, which was in charge of the V 2, and the Luftwaffe, which was responsible for the V 1. These jealousies were accentuated when the SS tried to get control of the whole programme and at one point in March 1944 arrested the brilliant young researcher Werner von Braun and other key scientists. Allied Intelligence had wind of these inventions from November 1939 when the Oslo ‘Report’, a comprehensive report on German war science, was received in London from an agent or well-wisher (who is still anonymous). A year later Peenemünde was identified as the experimental area for these weapons by an agent who appears to have been in or near German military intelligence under Admiral Canaris. No further clues became available for over two years but early in 1943 prisoners of war (including two generals) were overheard talking about Peenemünde and photographic reconnaissance began to disclose some of the test station’s activities. In August of the same year Peenemünde was bombed for the first time and Ultra began to provide information about the nature and capabilities of the V 1 and V 2. Ultra put an end to a debate about whether Hitler was counting on a pilotless aircraft or a rocket by showing that he meant to have both but conflict and confusion persisted on the allied side, particularly over the size of the warheads which the new weapons might carry. These doubts arose chiefly from ignorance about the fuel used, there being a correlation between bulk of fuel, range and size of warhead. In London these differences caused some of the bitterest quarrelling of the war because Lord Cherwell – who was not only an exceptionally stubborn and often ill-mannered man who allowed scientific disagreement to invade personal relations, but who also resented the fact that the coordination of intelligence about Hitler’s secret weapons had been assigned to a committee under Duncan Sandys, Churchill’s son-in-law, whom he did not like – pooh-poohed the existence of any threat from rockets or pilotless aircraft.
The first V 2 was launched at the experimental station on Peenemünde in the Baltic in October 1942 after three earlier failures, and a first V 1 a few weeks later. Attempts were made to cripple the programme by bombing Peenemünde and other places where parts of the apparatus were being manufactured but most of these targets were at long range. On the night of 17–18 August 1943 600 bombers of Bomber Command attacked Peenemünde in three waves in the hope of interrupting research and killing key scientists. As a result of a successful feint towards Berlin the first and second waves suffered only slight losses in spite of a full moon, but fighter attacks on the third wave brought the total loss to forty-one aircraft. At Peenemünde 732 people, mostly non-Germans, were killed, some projects were abandoned or moved elsewhere, but work on the V 1 and V 2 was only interrupted for a short time. The attack on Peenemünde itself and related industrial targets was supplemented from December 1943 by attacks on sites along the north coast of France which had been identified by photographic and other intelligence as launching sites for the V 1. There were about a hundred of these sites known, from their appearance, as ski sites. These attacks were moderately successful but they were countered by swift repair and then by a German ruse. The Germans pretended to be repairing the sites when they were in fact abandoning them, using them as dummies and constructing new sites by a new method which enabled them to build a site in a matter of days. This deception was not discovered until May 1944 and during the first half of the year the allies wasted more bombs on these abandoned sites than the Germans had aimed at London during the eight months of the 1940–41 blitz.
The German failure to bring the V 1 and V 2 into operation before the summer and autumn of 1944 respectively, by which time allied armies were approaching, was largely due to teething troubles. British estimates of the production and effects of these new weapons were unduly pessimistic. Plans were made to evacuate the population and the government from London on the assumption that V 1s would arrive at the rate of 45,000 a month, and that the V 2s, arriving at the rate of one an hour and carrying a ten-ton warhead, would cause 108,000 casualties a month. At the beginning of the war the German production targets for the V 1 and the V 2 were 3,000 and 900 a month. In 1944 the former target was raised to 8,000. This figure was never reached but the earlier one was passed in 1945. Altogether 32,000 V 1s were produced. Production of the V 2 rose from fifty in January 1944 to 253 in April when it fell back because priority was given to the V 1. It picked up again later in the year, was steady at around 630–60 in the last four months and reached 690 in January 1945. Nearly 6,000 were produced in all. These figures were creditable to the Germans and would, timing apart, have been alarming for the British.
Hitler’s plan of attack on England was to fire a salvo of V 1s at dawn and dusk every day with intermediate single launchings every twenty to thirty minutes, but when the attack began on 12 June from fifty-five sites it was a rushed fiasco. On the first day ten V 1s were launched, of which four arrived. Appreciable damage was caused to rail traffic, factories, hospitals and housing, mostly south of the Thames. There was then a pause of three days but in the ensuing two weeks 2,000 were launched. At first spotter aircraft gave warnings but the number of V 1s destroyed was small. Anti-aircraft guns in the London area had to cease firing after the first two days because they were bringing the V 1s down in the city. Batteries were re-deployed along the south coast and, with the help of radar and proximity fuses, gradually succeeded in hitting half and then three quarters of their incoming targets. Some V 1s were destroyed by aircraft. The attack on London was suspended in September (Antwerp and Brussels came under fire a few weeks later) but it was followed by the V 2 attack.
There was still much doubt about the potency of this weapon. In June parts of a V 2 fired from Peenemünde had come down in Sweden and valuable information about it had come into allied possession. Another came down in Poland without exploding; it was hidden, dismantled and secretly conveyed to England. But there were still controversies about the size of the warhead; estimates varied between ten tons and one ton (the latter being correct). On 6 September two V 2s were aimed at Paris but the firings were a failure. On that day Duncan Sandys announced in London that ‘except possibly for a few last shots, the Battle of London is over’. Two days later the first V 2s struck London. They were fired from Holland. The worst aspect of the attack was the number of men, women and children who were blinded by flying glass before they knew that anything had struck. In spite of doctors working round the clock on delicate eye operations many lost their sight for life. There was also severe material damage, but the firing sites were already threatened and had to be removed as the British armies approached them. The weight of the attack was diverted to Antwerp which was more seriously damaged than London and did not get relief until March 1945.
There has been a tendency to laugh at Hitler’s V weapons. This is partly because it seemed in 1944 the best thing to do. But the weapons were not negligible and would have been extremely dangerous if they had been available earlier. In the first two weeks the V 1s killed 1,600 people, seriously injured another 4,500 and damaged 200,000 houses; the casualty rate in England in June 1944 was as heavy as it had been in September 1940, although the weight of attack measured in tons of explosives was much lighter. Over the whole period of the V 1 and V 2 attacks 29,400 houses were completely destroyed in London and over a quarter of a million damaged. It may be argued that Hitler could have used to better purpose the 200,000 persons engaged in the development and production of the V 2 – he might, for example, have got more from their brains and their labour if they had worked on defensive projects – but against this must be set not only the chance that the V weapons might have been ready sooner, but also the hard facts that the British had to increase their fighter, anti-aircraft and balloon defences, suffer appreciable material damage and divert a significant air effort to Peenemünde and the launching sites. The V weapons failed but their failure does not prove that they were ridiculous. They were the forerunners of much that has been developed since the war. They may not have been the weapons that Hitler hoped for to settle the result of the war, but if their appearance had not been delayed by allied bombing by a few months, they could hardly have failed to affect its course.
The V weapons were Hitler’s last offensive expedients. After their failure he continued to produce expedients but they were defensive. In October 1944 he called into existence a new force, the Volkssturm, a Home Guard of last resort under Himmler’s command and consisting of all available men between the ages of sixteen and sixty. The Werewolves, another desperate expedient, were to constitute armed bands operating like marauding partisans after the defeat of Germany. The Alpine redoubt, where Hitler said he would make his last stand, was even more phantasmal. It never existed, it had no men in it or prepared defences, and the Führer himself did not go there.
The first front to go was the Italian. Early in 1945 senior SS figures in Italy made approaches to Swiss contacts and indirectly to the head of the American intelligence services in Switzerland, Allen W. Dulles. These S S officers wanted to negotiate a separate surrender to the western allies of the entire Italian front. Dulles was not interested in a partial surrender, but he was concerned to keep the discussions alive in the hope that they would contribute to a total and unconditional surrender on all fronts. In March the German Supreme Commander in Italy, Kesselring, the Luftwaffe commander, Pohl, and Hitler’s Ambassador in Italy, Rudolf Rahn who was in command of Mussolini and his government, were all brought into the discussions. Although they thought at first that they were discussing a negotiated and partial surrender, they quickly came to realize that what was in train was capitulation on all fronts and that the western allies would neither accept any vestige of Nazism in a new German government nor envisage any split between themselves and the Russians. The Russians, however, who knew that Himmler was trying to do a deal with the west via Stockholm, not unnaturally assumed (as for a while did some in the west) that the talks initiated by the SS in Switzerland were part of an anti-Russian venture. After a delay caused by the transfer of Kesselring to the western front and the need to initiate his successor, Vietinghoff, a surrender of all the German forces in Italy was made on 1 May by the army and air commanders acting on their own authority. It was botched by a farcical succession of arrests and counter-arrests among the Germans themselves but clinched when the news of Hitler’s suicide reached Italy on the next day.
On the main fronts the German armies were overwhelmed by superior numbers and material. After the retreats of 1944 Hitler hoped to hold the line of the Vistula in the east (where Himmler was appointed to command an Army Group) and the Rhine in the west. The Russians, opening a new campaign in mid-January, crossed the Vistula, turned northwards to the sea to envelop the German forces in East Prussia and overran Pomerania and Silesia up to the Oder and Neisse rivers which they reached at the beginning of February. In the south they captured Budapest on the 12th. In the west German commanders tried vainly to obey Hitler’s orders to give no ground and transport neither men nor material eastward across the Rhine. They were weakened by the transfer of a Panzer division to the east after the failure of the Ardennes offensive. This German armour, which was to defend the Hungarian oilfields, was believed to be routed through Dresden but when Ultra revealed the division’s orders this belief was found to be wrong. The mistake was pointed out to the British and American bomber headquarters concerned; the latter expressed willingness to cancel the raid if the other would do so too but the former saw no reason to alter its plans. The presumed passage of the German armour through Dresden was only an ostensible reason for the operation. Equally dubious is the plea that the raid was executed in aid of the advancing Russians. There was no Russian request for a raid on Dresden although the western allies had been asked to attack Leipzig (a request which was taken to be a pointer to Stalin’s plans for his line of advance on Berlin, about which he gave his allies no direct information). Dresden, so far barely damaged, was chosen because it was big, famous and crowded, so that its destruction might stampede the enemy towards surrender. So on 13 and 14 February one of Europe’s most splendid cities was recklessly destroyed. Industrial targets were barely hit and the rail services were put out of action for only three days. The number of people killed has been estimated at 135,000, although the true figure may be half or even less than that huge total. The slaughter was in any case immense, most of it by burning people to death in buildings or in the streets. All this destruction was done in two night raids lasting an hour each, and a third raid of ten minutes at midday on the next day. One thousand two hundred and twenty-three aircraft dropped bombs. They faced no opposition.
On 7 March an American unit, seeing to its surprise that a bridge at Remagen, south of Bonn, had not been destroyed, crossed the Rhine and in the next weeks large forces followed at several points. Three of the western armies hoped and believed that they were on their way to Berlin. In addition there existed a plan for airborne attacks on key points in Berlin by a force of 20,000 paratroopers. But in the event the western allies made no attempt to reach the German capital. The reasons for this abnegation were two: Eisenhower’s strategic decisions and the existence of an agreed division of Germany into separate administrative zones, with Berlin inside the Russian zone.
The zonal agreement grew out of administrative planning which had not been intended to have – but did have – political consequences. At their conference in Teheran in November 1943 Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin agreed to create a European Advisory Commission which, sitting in London, would produce preliminary plans for the occupation of Germany. This Commission inherited a plan prepared in London by the Anglo-American planning staff which subsequently became part of Eisenhower’s headquarters. This plan divided Germany into three zones – a British one in the north-west, an American in the south-west and a Russian in the east: Berlin was inside the Russian zone. Roosevelt had indicated to his own officials before Teheran that he did not like the arrangements proposed for the American and British zones and wanted them the other way round. But the dispositions had evolved logically from the planning for Overlord which always put the American armies on the right of the allied forces and the British (and Canadian) armies on the left, and in addition Roosevelt’s reservations and objections got lost in Washington and were not conveyed to the American member of the European Advisory Commission until too late. A separate American proposal for a corridor linking Berlin with the north-western zone also got overlooked. The Russians were well satisfied with an arrangement which gave them 40 per cent of Germany and its capital (subject though the capital would itself be to tripartite division and control), while the western allies, who continued to be afraid that Stalin might run out of the European war or refuse to join the war against Japan, were loath to suggest amendments of any kind. The plan was therefore adopted by the Commission in March 1944 and confirmed at Yalta in February 1945.
It was not meant to settle anything more than immediate military and administrative matters. The future of Germany in a larger sense was left vague. Germany was tabula rasa with no agreement about what to inscribe there. At Casablanca Roosevelt had enunciated his demand for unconditional surrender and Churchill had fallen in with a design which was at once bold in outline and entirely imprecise in everything else. Stalin too endorsed unconditional surrender later in the war. Churchill was disposed to curb and isolate Prussia, thus implying decentralization or perhaps partition, but he gave relatively little attention during the war to post-war problems. At Quebec Roosevelt and Churchill, to the horror of their principal political advisers, Hull and Eden, endorsed the Morgenthau plan for constraining Germany by converting it from an industrial to an agricultural economy, but this vision quickly evaporated. At Teheran the three leaders were in favour of some kind of partition, which Churchill opposed at Yalta and the new trio all rejected at Potsdam. Events, not plans, eventually reshaped Germany.
It did not, however, follow that western forces were not to advance to Berlin or anywhere else so long as the war lasted. The plan only bound them to observe fixed lines of demarcation when the war was over and the occupation had begun. Stalin expected the Americans and British to race him for Berlin and the western allies had strong motives for doing so as they speculated about the future of an alliance which was about to pass from military cooperation to political manoeuvre.
Montgomery’s and Bradley’s Army Groups both crossed the Rhine in the third week of March. Montgomery, commanding Canadian, British and American armies – the last was the Ninth US Army under General William H. Simpson which had been subordinated to him during the Ardennes offensive – was heading across northern Germany for Berlin; Bradley with three US armies under command was heading across central Germany. Further south the American-French Army Group under Devers was making equally rapid progress. A few days earlier Hitler had signed the first of a number of orders for the total destruction of everything. On the 28th the Russians made their first air attacks on Berlin. At this time Eisenhower, to the dismay of his subordinates and still more of Churchill, took his eyes off Berlin. Although there were no longer any meaningful German armies in the field Eisenhower clung to the view that his task was to seek out and destroy the enemy’s forces rather than seize his capital and he held to this resolve even after the US Ninth Army crossed the Elbe on 12 April. He instructed Bradley, reinforced by the re-allocation to him of Ninth Army at Montgomery’s expense, to push eastward towards Erfurt, Leipzig and Dresden – on a line, that is, running well south of Berlin, which he declared to be irrelevant, and through Saxony, which was. He now adopted the policy of the concentrated thrust which Montgomery had urged upon him in the previous summer but he had chosen the wrong thrust. Further, in an unprecedented message to Stalin – which was probably dictated by anxiety to avoid an unpleasant clash between American and Russian forces and partly also by a genuine belief in the importance and practicability of post-war Russo-American cooperation – he disclosed his intention not to go for Berlin and gave Stalin a detailed account of the allied order of battle. Stalin was so surprised that he thought the message was a trick, did not send the equivalent information on Russian plans and dispositions which Eisenhower had asked for, and immediately accelerated his own measures to take Berlin. Churchill was not only surprised but appalled at this assumption of politico-strategic authority and by the revelation that the Supreme Commander had so little notion of the political importance of Berlin. To his own Army Group commanders Eisenhower remained for a time vague, so that when the first Anglo-American crossings of the Elbe were made the troops were still under the impression that they were on the last lap to Berlin. On 15 April, however, Simpson received a precise order to go no further. He was expecting to be in Berlin two days later. Thus it was at Torgau on the Elbe, on 25 April, that Americans and Russians first exchanged salutations.
Farther south too the Americans, spurting across Germany to Czechoslovakia, were reined back by punctilio. A line of demarcation had been agreed on 30 April. On 4 May, with German resistance vanishing, Eisenhower asked Moscow to let him keep up his momentum. He was only fifty miles from Prague and in a position to reach it before the Russians. Stalin, who had conceded to Eisenhower the right to advance as far as Pilsen, was not prepared to see him advance farther, and when Bradley offered at a meeting with Konev on the 5th to cooperate in the taking of Prague Konev declined. On that day Prague rose against the Germans. But the Americans neither advanced to their assistance nor felt able to send supplies by air. Eisenhower and Truman felt that they had done their best; Truman had already told Eisenhower at the end of April that he was ‘loath to hazard American lives’ for what he described as ‘political purposes’, and neither leader saw much point in taking a city which would then be immediately turned over to the Russians. Konev began to move towards Prague from Saxony to the north-west on the 6th and Malinovski and Eremenko from the south-east and east respectively a day later. The first Russians entered Prague on the 9th. But by then the 30,000 insurgents had been overpowered by the Germans and 8,000 of them killed.
For his main central thrust in 1945 Stalin had grouped his armies in three fronts under the overall direction of his Supreme Headquarters in Moscow. These fronts were commanded, from north to south, by Rokossovski, Zhukov and Konev. D-day, originally fixed at 20 January, was advanced to the 12th at the request of the western leaders when hard pressed in the Ardennes. Rokossovski was directed north of Warsaw to Danzig and then westward. Zhukov, who relinquished his senior staff appointment in Moscow in order to become the captor of Berlin, struck straight towards the German capital from south of Warsaw. Konev, moving further south through Silesia, also had Berlin in his sights. The last barrier of any consequence was the river Oder, especially the fortress of Küstrin (which, bypassed, did not surrender until the end of March) at the junction of the Oder with the Warthe due east of Berlin. Chuikov’s Eighth Guards Army reached the Oder on 1 February and began to cross the next day. Chuikov wanted to press on despite logistic difficulties and the risks, which he rightly discounted, of a last German stand. But Stalin, like Eisenhower, was wary. He ordered Zhukov to consolidate on the Oder and turn northwards into Pomerania and clean it up. Stalin overestimated German strength in Pomerania as well as the opposition lying between Zhukov and Konev and Berlin. Chuikov fumed against the restraints imposed on him and after the war he complained that Zhukov had failed in his duty by not urging a more adventurous strategy on the overcautious Stalin. He was probably right since Guderian had already expressed the opinion at the end of January that Berlin would fall in a few days and Hitler was sending such reinforcements as he could muster not to eastern Germany but to Hungary. But Stalin may have had a political motive when he reined Zhukov in. By doing so he enabled Konev to draw up. The two Marshals were rivals and it suited Stalin to promote competion between them and let them both share the glory of taking Berlin rather than let one of them garner too many laurels singlehanded.
Stalin’s delaying has also been explained in other terms. It can be argued that in the opening weeks of 1945 he was anxious not to take Berlin too soon. Chuikov crossed the Oder on the eve of the Yalta conference and Stalin had no wish to disrupt the conference or the Grand Alliance. Berlin was doomed, its fate only a matter of time, and it was more important for him to safeguard the ravaged USSR against western hostility than to deliver the coup de grâce to Germany in one week rather than another. So long as Roosevelt lived Stalin probably felt that the American President’s determination to remain on good terms with the USSR was a cardinal factor in his own foreign policies, but Stalin knew enough about western democracy to understand that Roosevelt was not the sole maker of policy and that there were significant anti-communist and anti-Russian forces in the United States and Great Britain. To take Berlin, assuming that he could have done so, while his western allies were still on the wrong side of the Rhine involved ending the war in a way which would have given him so dominant a position in Germany as to alarm the western powers and even revive visions of an anti-Russian alliance between them and the still not totally inconsiderable remnants of German military power. A dominant position in Germany could be more of a hazard than an asset so long as the war-weary USSR had not the strength to sustain it against a western coalition, and although Stalin banked on Roosevelt’s determination to withdraw from Europe, he must also have recalled that Churchill had in 1919 not only supported western intervention in the USSR but had advocated the use of the German army to effect it. Whether such fanciful calculations did or did not pass through Stalin’s mind remains unknown. The final onslaught was in fact delayed until April.
It was then mounted at short notice and, in the belief of Stalin’s Marshals, under the impression that Montgomery had been ordered to get to Berlin before them. At a conference on 3 April Zhukov and Konev told Stalin that they could beat Montgomery and were told to produce their plans in forty-eight hours. Stalin drew a line on a map from east to west, dividing their zones of operations but stopping fifty miles east of Berlin with the implication that beyond that point the leading Marshal might be free to move on the German capital by any route he chose. The attack was launched on 16 April with 2.5 million men, 6,250 tanks and 7,500 aircraft against one million men, 1,500 tanks and 3,300 aircraft. Prolonged resistance by the Germans was impossible and by the 22nd the Russians were fighting in the streets of the capital. Konev’s men had a slight lead over Zhukov’s and there was some confusion as the two Fronts converged, but the suburbs were gradually reduced and in the early hours of 1 May General Krebs, Hitler’s last Army Chief of Staff, acting under instructions from Goebbels and Bormann, sought out Chuikov to ask for an armistice. He told Chuikov that Hitler was dead and that he had come to negotiate with the Russians on behalf of a new German government which had been formed in compliance with Hitler’s will and in which neither Goering, Ribbentrop nor Himmler had any part. Chuikov telephoned Zhukov. He was told that Stalin refused to negotiate. The Germans must surrender unconditionally on all fronts. Shortly after midday Krebs went back to the centre of Berlin where he shot himself. The next day, 2 May, the commander of the garrison capitulated.
Hitler had been dead two days. He spent the last weeks of his life underground in Berlin. By the Chancellery in the middle of the city was a complex of heavily protected underground shelters arranged in two floors. Hitler and his mistress Eva Braun had a set of rooms in what was called the Führer’s Bunker at the deeper level. With them were Goebbels, his wife and five children, a doctor, a cook, a valet, a couple of secretaries and an Alsatian bitch which had just pupped. Nearby, in similar shelters, were Bormann, Artur Axmann, the Hitler Youth leader, and an assortment of adjutants, guards and so on. Other people came and went. Ten days before his end Hitler emerged from his delusion that the war could still be won and told Keitel that he accepted the fact of defeat and would shoot himself. He told Speer the same thing the next day. But from time to time hope still flickered and every day the increasingly senseless conferences took place in the war room. Goering had gone south but he quickly learned of Hitler’s decision and sent him a signal proposing that he should immediately take over as though Hitler was dead. Since Goering was officially Hitler’s successor there was nothing very odd about this proposal but it infuriated Hitler who ordered Goering’s arrest and dismissed him from his command of the Luftwaffe.
A few days later Hitler was still further incensed on learning that Himmler, at a personal meeting with the Swedish Count Folke Bernadotte, had taken it upon himself to propose capitulation. (Since he proposed to capitulate in the west but not in the east the western allies rejected his advances.) Hitler ordered Himmler’s arrest and had his SS adjutant, Hermann Fegelein, who was in the Bunker, shot there and then. That same night, 28–9 April, he married Eva Braun. After the ceremony and a wedding meal Hitler retired to write his two last documents. His will dealt with personal matters. It contained nothing particularly unusual except the gift of his pictures to found a picture gallery in Linz. His political testament, a much longer document, rehearsed all his old attacks on the Jewish race and reaffirmed his belief in the German need for Lebensraum in the east. Next to the Jews he blamed the German officer corps for all that had gone wrong. Having dismissed Goering and Himmler, he appointed Doenitz President and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces and Goebbels Chancellor. He also appointed a number of other Ministers and a new Commander-in-Chief of the Army to succeed himself. On the afternoon of the 30th Hitler said his good-byes. He then poisoned the dog and Eva and shot (or possibly poisoned) himself. Their bodies were burned outside in accordance with instructions which had already been given. That night the surviving inhabitants of the Bunker made their escapes, but not the Goebbels family. After the failure of the Krebs mission to Chuikov Goebbels gave poison to his children and either shot or poisoned his wife and himself – the second Chancellor of the Third Reich.
Doenitz, its President for a week, was also its undertaker. On 2 May he sent Admiral Wilhelm Friedeburg to Montgomery to negotiate a surrender in the west. Montgomery refused to negotiate. On 7 May representatives of all three of the Reich’s fighting services arrived at Eisenhower’s headquarters at Reims and there, in the presence of senior American, Russian, British and French officers (but not of Eisenhower himself) surrendered unconditionally to the western and Russian commands. After the formal act there was a brief encounter between Jodl and Eisenhower at which Eisenhower asked Jodl whether he fully comprehended what had been done and Jodl said he had. On the next day, towards midnight, and again in the presence of senior officers of the four principal victors, the act of surrender was ratified at Russian headquarters in the German capital, Berlin.