The Last Battle: The Classic History of the Battle for Berlin

by Cornelius Ryan

  The manpower situation in Berlin had become so critical that the Nazis openly flouted the Geneva Convention, using prisoners of war as well as foreign workers for essential war work. Because Russia was not a signatory to the Convention, Red Army prisoners were used in any manner that the Germans saw fit. There was now, in fact, little distinction between prisoners of war and foreign workers. As conditions deteriorated day by day, prisoners were being used to build air raid bunkers, to help rebuild bombed military quarters and even to shovel coal in industrial power plants. Now, the only difference between the two groups was that the foreign workers had greater freedom—and even that depended on the area and the type of work.

  Foreign nationals lived in “cities” of wooden barracks-like buildings near to, or located on, factory premises; they ate in community mess halls and wore identifying badges. Some concerns closed their eyes to regulations and allowed their foreign workers to live outside the compounds, in Berlin itself. Many were free to move about the city, go to movies or other places of entertainment, provided they observed the strict curfew.*

  Some guards, seeing the writing on the wall, were relaxing their attitude. Many foreign workers—and sometimes even the prisoners of war—found they could occasionally dodge a day’s work. One guard, in charge of twenty-five Frenchmen who journeyed to work in the city by subway every day, was now so amenable that he no longer bothered to count the prisoners getting off the train. He did not care how many got “lost” on the trip—so long as everyone was at the Potsdamer Platz subway station by 6 P.M. for the journey back to camp.

  Not all the foreign workers were so lucky. Thousands were closely restricted, with virtually no freedom at all. This was particularly true in municipal or government plants. Frenchmen working for the gas utility company in Marienfelde in South Berlin had few privileges and were poorly fed in comparison with workers at private plants. Still, they were better off than their Russian counterparts. One Frenchman, André Bourdeau, wrote in his diary that the chief guard, Fesler, “never sends anybody to a concentration camp,” and on a Sunday, to supplement the rations, “allows us to go into the fields to pick a potato or two.” Bourdeau was glad he was not from the east: the Russian compound, he wrote, was “terribly overcrowded, with men, women and children all jammed together … their food, most of the time, inedible.” Elsewhere, in some privately run plants, Russian workers fared as well as those from the west.

  Curiously, western workers all over Berlin noted a change in the Russians, almost with each passing day. In the Schering chemical plant in Charlottenburg, the Russians, who might be expected to be elated at the course of events, were, on the contrary, greatly depressed. The Ukrainian and Belorussian women, in particular, seemed uneasy about the possible capture of the city by their compatriots.

  On their arrival, two and three years before, the women had been dressed in simple peasant style. Gradually they had changed, becoming more sophisticated in dress and manner. Many had begun using cosmetics for the first time. Hair and dress styles had altered noticeably: the Russian girls copied the French or German women around them. Now others noticed that the Russian girls almost overnight had reverted to peasant dress again. Many workers thought that they anticipated some sort of reprisals from the Red Army—even though they had been shipped out of Russia against their will. Apparently the women expected to be punished because they had become too western.

  Among the western workers morale was high all over Berlin. At the Alkett plant in Ruhleben, where 2,500 French, Belgian, Polish and Dutch nationals worked on the production of tanks, everyone except the German guards was planning for the future. The French workers, in particular, were elated. They spent their evenings talking about the enormous meals they would have the moment they set foot in France, and singing popular songs: Maurice Chevalier’s “Ma Pomme” and “Prospère” were among the favorites.

  Jean Boutin, 20-year-old machinist from Paris, felt especially cheerful; he knew he was playing some part in the Germans’ downfall. Boutin and some Dutch workers had been sabotaging tank parts for years. The German foreman had repeatedly threatened to ship saboteurs off to concentration camps, but he never did—and there was a very good reason: the manpower shortage was so acute that the plant was almost totally dependent on the foreign workers. Jean thought the situation was pretty amusing. Each ball-bearing part he worked on was supposed to be finished in fifty-four minutes. He tried never to turn in a finished machined piece in under twenty-four hours—and that was usually defective. At Alkett the forced laborers had one simple rule: every unusable part they could sneak by the foreman brought victory and the capture of Berlin another step closer. So far no one had ever been caught.

  *There was another category of laborer—the voluntary foreign worker. Thousands of Europeans—some were ardent Nazi sympathizers, some believed they were helping to fight Bolshevism, while the great majority were cynical opportunists—had answered German newspaper advertisements offering highly paid jobs in the Reich. These were allowed to live quite freely near their places of employment.

  6

  INEVITABLY, despite the constant bombing, despite the specter of the Red Army on the Oder, despite the very shrinking of Germany itself as the Allies pressed in from east and west, there were those who doggedly refused even to consider the possibilities of catastrophe. They were the fanatical Nazis. Most of them seemed to accept the hardships they were undergoing as a kind of purgatory—as a tempering and refining of their devotion to Nazism and its aims. Once they had demonstrated their loyalty, everything would surely be all right; they were convinced not only that Berlin would never fall, but that victory for the Third Reich was certain.

  The Nazis occupied a peculiar place in the life of the city. Berliners had never fully accepted Hitler or his evangelism. They had always been both too sophisticated and too international in outlook. In fact, the Berliner’s caustic humor, political cynicism and almost complete lack of enthusiasm for the Führer and his new order had long plagued the Nazi Party. Whenever torchlight parades or other Nazi demonstrations to impress the world were held in Berlin, thousands of storm troopers had to be shipped in from Munich to beef up the crowds of marchers. “They look better in the newsreels than we do,” wisecracked the Berliners, “and they also have bigger feet!”

  Try as he might, Hitler was never able to capture the hearts of the Berliners. Long before the city was demolished by Allied bombs, a frustrated and angry Hitler was already planning to rebuild Berlin and shape it to the Nazi image. He even intended to change its name to Germania, for he had never forgotten that in every free election in the thirties Berliners had rejected him. In the critical balloting of 1932 when Hitler was sure he would unseat Hindenburg, Berlin gave him its lowest vote of all—only 23 per cent. Now, the fanatics among the citizenry were determined to make Berlin, the least Nazi city in Germany, the last Festung (fortress) of Nazism. Although they were in the minority, they were still in control.

  Thousands of the fanatics were teen-agers and, like most of their generation, they knew only one god—Hitler. From childhood on they had been saturated with the aims and ideology of National Socialism. Many more had also been trained to defend and perpetuate the cause, using an array of weapons ranging from rifles to bazooka-like tank destroyers, called Panzerfäuste. Klaus Küster was typical of the teen-age group. A member of the Hitler Youth (there were more than one thousand of them in Berlin), his specialty was knocking out tanks at a range of less than sixty yards. Klaus was not yet sixteen.

  The most dedicated military automatons of all were the members of the SS. They were so convinced of ultimate victory and so devoted to Hitler that to other Germans their mental attitude almost defied comprehension. Their fanaticism was so strong that it sometimes seemed to have penetrated the subconscious. Dr. Ferdinand Sauerbruch, in Charité Hospital, working on the anesthetized form of a seriously wounded SS man just in from the Oder front, was suddenly, momentarily frozen. In the stillness of the operating theater
, from the depths of his anesthesia, the SS man began to speak. Quietly and distinctly he repeated over and over, “Heil Hitler! … Heil Hitler! … Heil Hitler!”

  Although these were the real extremists, there were hundreds of thousands of civilians almost as bad. Some were walking caricatures of what the free world thought the fanatical Nazi to be. One of them was 47-year-old Gotthard Carl. Although Gotthard was only a minor civil servant, an accountant on temporary service to the Luftwaffe, he wore the dashing blue air force uniform with all the pride and arrogance of an ace fighter pilot. As he entered his apartment in the late afternoon, he clicked his heels sharply together, shot his right arm out and shouted, “Heil Hitler.” This performance had been going on for years.

  His wife, Gerda, was thoroughly bored with her husband’s fanaticism, but she was worried, and anxious to discuss with him some sort of plan for their survival. The Russians, she pointed out, were getting very close to Berlin. Gotthard cut her off. “Rumors!” he fumed, “rumors! Deliberately put out by the enemy.” In Gotthard’s disoriented Nazi world everything was going along as planned. Hitler’s victory was certain. The Russians were not at the gates of Berlin.

  Then there were the enthusiastic and impressionable—those who had never considered defeat possible—like Erna Schultze. The 41-year-old secretary in the headquarters of the Oberkommando der Kriegsmarine (Navy High Command) had just realized her life’s ambition: she had been made an admiral’s secretary and this was her first day on the job.

  Shell House, where the headquarters was located, had been badly bombed in the previous forty-eight hours. Still, the dust and wreckage did not bother Erna—neither was she perturbed by the order that had just reached her desk. It stated that all Geheime Kommandosache (Top Secret) files were to be burned. But Erna was saddened on this first day of her new job to be told at closing time that she and the other employees were to take “indefinite leave” and that their pay checks would be forwarded.

  Still Erna remained unshaken. Her faith was so strong that she even refused to believe the official communiqués when defeats were reported. Morale was good throughout Berlin, she believed, and it was only a question of time before the Reich triumphed. Even now, as she left the building, Erna was quite certain that within a few days the Navy would call her back.

  There were others so trusting and so involved with the upper clique of the Nazi hierarchy that they thought little of the war or its consequences. Caught up in the heady atmosphere and glamor of their privileged positions, they felt not only secure, but in their blind devotion to Hitler, totally protected. Such a person was attractive, blue-eyed Käthe Reiss Heusermann.

  At 213 Kurfürstendamm the blond and vivacious 35-year-old Käthe was immersed in her work as assistant to Professor Hugo J. Blaschke, the Nazi leaders’ top dentist. Blaschke, because he had served Hitler and his court since 1934, had been honored with the military rank of SS Brigadeführer (Brigadier General) and placed in charge of the dental staff of the Berlin SS Medical Center. An ardent Nazi, Blaschke had parlayed his association with Hitler into the largest and most lucrative private practice in Berlin. Now he was preparing to parlay it a step farther. Unlike Käthe, he could clearly see the writing on the wall—and he planned to leave Berlin at the earliest opportunity. If he remained, his SS rank and position might prove embarrassing: under the Russians, today’s prominence might well become tomorrow’s liability.

  Käthe was almost completely oblivious of the situation. She was much too busy. From early morning until late at night she was on the move, assisting Blaschke at various clinics and headquarters or at his private surgery on the Kurfürstendamm. Competent and well liked, Käthe was so completely trusted by the Nazi elite that she had attended nearly all of Hitler’s entourage—and once, the Führer himself.

  That occasion had been the highlight of her career. In November, 1944, she and Blaschke had been urgently summoned to the Führer’s headquarters in Rastenburg, East Prussia. There they had found Hitler in acute pain. “His face, particularly the right cheek was terribly swollen,” she later recalled. “His teeth were extremely bad. In all he had three bridges. He had only eight upper teeth of his own and even these were backed by gold fillings. A bridge completed his upper dental work and it was held securely in place by the existing teeth. One of them, the wisdom tooth on the right side, was badly infected.”

  Blaschke took one look at the tooth and told Hitler that it had to come out, there was no way he could save it. Blaschke explained that he would need to remove two teeth—a false tooth at the rear of the bridge as well as the infected one next to it. That meant cutting through the porcelain and gold bridge at a point in front of the false tooth, a procedure that called for a considerable amount of drilling and sawing. Then, after making the final extraction, at some later date he would either make an entirely new bridge or reanchor the old one.

  Blaschke was nervous about the operation: it was intricate and there was no telling how Hitler would behave. Complicating matters even further was the Führer’s dislike of anesthetics. He told Blaschke, Käthe remembered, that he would accept “only the bare minimum.” Both Blaschke and Käthe knew he would suffer excruciating pain; furthermore the operation might last as long as thirty to forty-five minutes. But there was nothing they could do about it.

  Blaschke gave Hitler an injection in the upper jaw and the operation began. Käthe stood by the Führer’s side with one hand pulling back his cheek, the other holding a mirror. Swiftly Blaschke’s rasping drill bored into the bridge. Then he changed the bit and began sawing. Hitler sat motionless—“as though frozen,” she recalled. Finally Blaschke cleared the tooth and quickly made the extraction. “Throughout,” Käthe said later, “Hitler neither moved nor uttered a single word. It was an extraordinary performance. We wondered how he stood the pain.”

  That had been five months ago; as yet nothing had been done about the Führer’s dangling bridge. Outside of Hitler’s immediate circle, few knew the details of the operation. One of the cardinal rules for those who worked for the Führer was that everything about him, especially his illnesses, remain top secret.

  Käthe was good at keeping secrets. For example, she knew that a special denture was being constructed for the Reich’s acknowledged, but unwed first lady. Blaschke intended to fit the gold bridge next time she was in Berlin. Hitler‚s mistress, Eva Braun, certainly needed it.

  Finally, Käthe knew one of the most closely guarded secrets of all. It was her responsibility to send a complete set of dental tools and supplies everywhere the Führer went. Moreover, she was preparing a new bridge with gold crowns for one of Hitler’s four secretaries: short, stout, 45-year-old Johanna Wolf. Soon Käthe would fit “Wolfie’s” new bridge, over in the surgical room of the Reichskanzlei. She had been traveling back and forth between Blaschke’s surgery and the Reichskanzlei almost daily for the last nine weeks. Adolf Hitler had been there since January 16.

  THE CIVILIANS

  The wagon with the two horses, Lisa and Hans. “Each day now Poganowska watched for certain signs that helped keep him from losing heart.”

  Milkman Richard Poganowska, photographed in 1945.

  Unless otherwise credited, all photographs are from the author’s private collection.

  Robert and Ingeborg Kolb in 1945.

  The Kolbs’ house in Spandau. “The war will pass us by,” Robert told Ingeborg. The first sign that it would not was when an army field kitchen pulled up in front of their door.

  Dr. Arthur Leckscheidt, Evangelical pastor of the gutted Melanchthon Church. “… eyes filled with tears, he played his farewell. As bombs burst all over Kreuzberg people sheltering in adjacent shelters heard the organ pealing out the ancient hymn, ‘From Deepest Need I Cry to Thee.’”

  Carl Johann Wiberg. “… this Swede who was more German than the Germans was also an Allied spy.”

  Mother Superior Cunegundes, head of the Haus Dahlem, the orphanage and maternity home run by the Mission Sisters of the Sacred Hea
rt. “How do you tell sixty nuns and lay sisters that they are in danger of being raped?”

  Erna Saenger (center) with her daughters-in-law and grandchildren, in 1945. “To believe faithfully means to be stupid and blind … we’ll stay in Berlin. If everyone left like the neighbors the enemy would have what he wants.”

  Juliane Bochnik in 1945. “The first pair of Russian boots I see, I’m going to commit suicide,” a friend confided to her.

  Pia van Hoeven, who waited for the end in “a resplendent shelter, complete with Oriental rugs….”

  Hildegard Radusch, left, and her friend Else Kloptsch. Hildegard, a Communist, was on the Nazi “Wanted” list, and eagerly awaited the arrival of the Red Army.

  Bruno Zarzycki (second from left), with the Russians who entered his village. “He suffered so badly from ulcers he could hardly eat, but the day the Red Army arrived his ulcers would disappear; he knew it.”

  THE PRISONERS

  Herbert Kosney.

  Kurt Kosney.

  Captain Helmuth Cords, who, like Herbert Kosney, awaited execution for his complicity in the July 20th plot against Hitler.

  Cords with his fiancée, Jutta Sorge, also imprisoned. Cords was released in the last days of the war, and married Jutta.