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

by Cornelius Ryan

  Doenitz, too, was angry. “I tell you,” he snapped at Heinrici, “the crews of warships are every bit as good as your Wehrmacht troops.” For just a moment Heinrici himself flared. “Don’t you think there’s a big difference between fighting at sea and fighting on land?” he asked scathingly. “I tell you, all these men will be slaughtered at the front! Slaughtered!”

  If Heinrici’s sudden outburst shocked Hitler, he did not show it. As the others fumed, Hitler seemed to have grown icily calm. “All right,” he said. “We will place these reserve troops in the second line about eight kilometers behind the first. The front line will absorb the shock of the Russian preparatory artillery fire. Meanwhile, the reserves will grow accustomed to battle and if the Russians break through, they will then fight. To throw back the Russians if they break through, you will have to use the panzer divisions.” And he gazed at Heinrici as though awaiting agreement on what was really a very simple matter.

  Heinrici did not find it so. “You have taken away my most experienced and combat-ready armored units,” he said. “The Army Group has made a request for their return.” Enunciating each word clearly, Heinrici said: “I must have them back.”

  There was a startled movement behind him and Hitler’s adjutant, Burgdorf, whispered angrily in Heinrici’s ear. “Finish!” he ordered Heinrici. “You must finish.” Heinrici stood his ground. “My Führer,” he repeated, ignoring Burgdorf, “I must have those armored units back.”

  Hitler waved his hand almost apologetically. “I am very sorry,” he replied, “but I had to take them from you. Your panzers are needed much more by your southern neighbor. The main attack of the Russians is clearly not aimed at Berlin. There is a stronger concentration of enemy forces to the south of your front in Saxony.” Hitler waved his hand over the Russian positions on the Oder. “All of this,” he announced in an exhausted, bored voice, “is merely a support attack in order to confuse. The main thrust of the enemy will not be directed at Berlin—but there.” Dramatically, he placed a finger on Prague. “Consequently,” the Führer continued, “the Army Group Vistula should be well able to withstand the secondary attacks.”

  Heinrici stared unbelievingly at Hitler.* Then he looked at Krebs; certainly all this must seem equally irrational to the Chief of OKH. Krebs spoke up. “Based on the information we have,” he explained, “there is nothing to indicate that the Führer’s assessment of the situation is wrong.”

  Heinrici had done all he could. “My Führer,” he concluded, “I have completed everything possible to prepare for the attack. I cannot consider these 150,000 men as reserves. I also cannot do anything about the terrible losses we must surely sustain. It is my duty to make that absolutely clear. It is also my duty to tell you that I cannot guarantee that the attack can be repelled.”

  Hitler came suddenly to life. Struggling to his feet, he pounded on the table. “Faith!” he yelled. “Faith and strong belief in success will make up for all these insufficiencies! Every commander must be filled with confidence! You!” he pointed a finger at Heinrici. “You must radiate this faith! You must instill this belief in your troops!”

  Heinrici stared unflinchingly at Hitler. “My Führer,” he said, “I must repeat—it is my duty to repeat—that hope and faith alone will not win this battle.”

  Behind him a voice whispered, “Finish! Finish!”

  But Hitler was not even listening to Heinrici. “I tell you. Colonel General,” he yelled, “if you are conscious of the fact that this battle should be won, it will be won! If your troops are given the same belief—then you will achieve victory, and the greatest success of the war!”

  In the tense silence which followed, Heinrici, white-faced, gathered his papers and handed them to Eismann. The two officers took their leave of the still-silent room. Outside, in the corridor lounge, they were told that an air raid was in progress. Numbly, both men stood waiting, each in a kind of stupor, almost unaware of the continuing chatter around them.

  After a few minutes they were permitted to leave the bunker. They climbed the stairs and went out into the garden. There, for the first time since he left the conference room, Heinrici spoke. “It’s all of no use,” he said, wearily. “You might just as well try to bring the moon down to earth.” He looked up at the heavy smoke palls over the city and repeated softly to himself, “It’s all for nothing. All for nothing.”*

  The blue waters of the Chiem See, like a series of moving mirrors, reflected the great stands of pine that blanketed the foothills all the way up to the snow line. Leaning heavily on his stick, Walther Wenck gazed across the lake and beyond to the vast panoramic tumble of mountains around Berchtesgaden a few miles away. It was a scene of extraordinary beauty and peace.

  Everywhere the early flowers were out; the snow caps had begun to disappear from the high ranges and, although it was only April 6, even the air was redolent of spring. The peacefulness of his surroundings had done much to speed the convalesence of Guderian’s former Chief of Staff, at 45, the Wehrmacht’s youngest general.

  Here, in the heart of the Bavarian Alps, the war seemed a thousand miles away. Except for men recuperating from war wounds or, as in Wenck’s case, accidents, there was hardly a soldier to be seen in the entire area.

  Although still weak, Wenck was on the mend. Considering the seriousness of the accident, he was lucky to be alive. He had sustained head wounds and multiple fractures in a car wreck on February 13, and had been hospitalized for nearly six weeks. So many ribs had been smashed that he was still encased in a surgical corset from chest to thighs. The war seemed over for him, and in any case its outcome was sadly clear. He did not believe the Third Reich could survive more than a few weeks longer.

  Although Germany’s future seemed bleak, Wenck had much to be thankful for: his wife, Irmgard, and their 15-year-old twins, son Helmuth and daughter Sigried were safe, and staying with him in Bavaria. With painful slowness Wenck walked back to the picturesque little inn where they were living. As he entered the foyer, Irmgard met him with a message. Wenck was to ring Berlin immediately.

  Hitler’s adjutant, General Burgdorf, came on the line. Wenck, Burgdorf said, was to report to Hitler in Berlin the following day. “The Führer,” said Burgdorf, “has named you commander of the Twelfth Army.” Wenck was both surprised and puzzled. “The Twelfth Army?” he asked. “Which one is that?”

  “You’ll learn all about that when you get here,” Burgdorf replied.

  Wenck was still not satisfied. “I’ve never heard of a Twelfth Army,” he pressed. “The Twelfth Army,” Burgdorf said irritably, as though explaining everything, “is being organized now.” Then he hung up.

  Hours later, in uniform once more, Wenck said good-bye to his distressed wife. “Whatever you do,” he warned her, “stay in Bavaria. It’s the safest place.” Then, totally ignorant of his assignment, he set out for Berlin. Within the next twenty-one days the name of this virtually unknown general would become synonymous with hope in the mind of almost every Berliner.

  The staff was accustomed to seeing an occasional outburst of temper, but nobody had ever seen Heinrici quite like this before. The commander of the Army Group Vistula was in a towering rage. He had just received a report from Bieler, the officer in charge of the “fortress” at Frankfurt, on the young colonel’s visit to Hitler. As Heinrici had feared, the bespectacled, thin-faced officer had not measured up to Hitler’s idea of a Nordic hero. After a few inconsequential remarks, during which Frankfurt was not even mentioned, Hitler shook hands and dismissed the young officer. As soon as Bieler had left the bunker, Hitler ordered a change in the Frankfurt command. “Get someone else,” the Führer told Krebs, “Bieler is certainly no Gneisenau!”

  General Busse, whose Ninth Army included the Frankfurt garrison, had heard from Krebs of the impending change and had promptly informed Heinrici. Now, as Bieler stood beside Heinrici’s desk, the blazing Giftzwerg put in a call to Krebs. His staff watched silently. They had learned to tell the measure of Heinrici’s
temper by the way he drummed on the table top with his fingers. Now his right hand was beating out a violent tattoo. Krebs came on the phone. “Krebs,” barked Heinrici, “Colonel Bieler is here in my office. I want you to listen carefully. Bieler is to be reinstated as commander of the Frankfurt garrison. I have told this to Burgdorf and now I’m telling you. I refuse to accept any other officer. Do you understand that?” He did not wait for an answer. “Something else. Where is Bieler’s Iron Cross? He has been waiting for that decoration for months. Now he is to get it. Do you understand that?” Still Heinrici did not pause. “And now listen to me, Krebs,” he said. “If Bieler does not get his Iron Cross, if Bieler is not reinstated as commander of Frankfurt, I shall lay down my command! Do you understand that?” Heinrici, still drumming furiously, pressed on. “I expect your confirmation on this matter today! Is that clear?” And he slammed down the phone. Krebs had not uttered a word.

  On the afternoon of April 7, Colonel Eismann later recalled, “the Army Group received two teletype messages from the Führer’s headquarters. In the first, Bieler was confirmed as commander of Frankfurt; in the second the Iron Cross was bestowed upon him.”

  General Alfred Jodl, Hitler’s Chief of Operations, sat in his Dahlem office awaiting the arrival of General Wenck. The new Twelfth Army commander had just left Hitler and now it was Jodl’s job to brief Wenck on the situation on the western front. On Jodl’s desk was a sheaf of reports from Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, Commander-in-Chief, West. They painted a picture that was growing darker almost hourly. Everywhere the Anglo-Americans were breaking through.

  In theory, the Twelfth Army was to be the western shield before Berlin, holding about 125 miles of the lower Elbe and Mulde rivers to prevent an Anglo-American drive on the city. Wenck, Hitler had decided, would command an army of ten divisions, composed of panzer training corps officers, Home Guardsmen, cadet forces, various splinter groups, and the remnants of the shattered Eleventh Army in the Harz Mountains. Even if such a force could be organized in time, Jodl was skeptical that it could have much, if any, effect. And on the Elbe it might never get into action at all—although he had no intention of telling Wenck this. In his office safe, Jodl still held the captured Eclipse plan—the document detailing the moves the Anglo-Americans would make in the event of a German surrender or collapse—and the attached maps showing the agreed zones each Ally would occupy at war’s end. Jodl remained convinced that the Americans and British would halt on the Elbe—roughly the dividing line between the Anglo-American and Russian post-hostility zones of occupation. It seemed perfectly clear to him that Eisenhower was going to leave Berlin to the Russians.

  “Naturally,” ran the last paragraph of General Eisenhower’s latest cable to Churchill, “if at any moment ‘Eclipse’ conditions [a German collapse or surrender] should come about anywhere along the front we would rush forward … and Berlin would be included in our important targets.” It was as much of a commitment as the Supreme Commander was willing to make. It did not satisfy the British, and their Chiefs of Staff continued to press for a clear-cut decision. They messaged Washington urging a meeting to discuss Eisenhower’s strategy. Stalin’s cable had roused their suspicions. While the Generalissimo had stated that he planned to begin his offensive in the middle of May, said the British Chiefs, he had not indicated when he intended to launch his “secondary forces” in the direction of Berlin. Thus it still seemed to them that Berlin should be captured as soon as possible. Further, they believed it would be “appropriate for the Combined Chiefs of Staff to give Eisenhower guidance on the matter.”

  The reply from General Marshall firmly and decisively ended the discussion. “Such psychological and political advantages as would result from the possible capture of Berlin ahead of the Russians,” he said, “should not override the imperative military consideration, which in our opinion is the destruction and dismembering of the German armed forces.”

  Marshall did not entirely close the door on the possibility of taking Berlin for, “as a matter of fact, it is within the center of the impact of the main thrust.” But there was no time for the Combined Chiefs of Staff to give the problem any lengthy consideration. The speed of the Allied advance into Germany was now so fast, he said, that it outstripped the possibility of “review of operational matters by this or any other form of committee action.” And Marshall ended with an unequivocal endorsement of the Supreme Commander: “Only Eisenhower is in a position to know how to fight his battle and to exploit to the full the changing situation.”

  The harassed Eisenhower, for his part, had declared himself willing to change his plans but only if ordered to do so. On April 7 he wired Marshall, “At any time that we can seize Berlin at little cost we should, of course, do so.” But because the Russians were so close to the capital, he regarded it “as militarily unsound at this stage of the proceedings to make Berlin a major objective.” He was the first, said Eisenhower, “to admit that war is waged in pursuance of political aims, and if the Combined Chiefs of Staff should decide that the Allied effort to take Berlin outweighs purely military considerations in this theater, I would cheerfully re-adjust my plans and thinking so as to carry out such an operation.” He stressed his belief, however, that “the capture of Berlin should be left as something that we should do if feasible and practicable as we proceed on the general plan of (A) dividing the German forces … (B) anchoring our left firmly in the Lübeck area, and (C) attempting to disrupt any German effort to establish a fortress in the southern mountains.”

  He gave almost the same answer to Montgomery the following day. Monty had picked up the cudgels where Churchill and the British Chiefs left off. He asked Eisenhower for ten extra divisions to attack toward Lübeck and Berlin. Eisenhower turned him down. “As regards Berlin,” declared the Supreme Commander, “I am quite ready to admit that it has political and psychological significance, but of far greater importance will be the location of the remaining German forces in relation to Berlin. It is on them that I am going to concentrate my attention. Naturally if I can get a chance to take Berlin cheaply, I shall do so.”

  At this point Churchill decided to end the controversy before there was further deterioration of the Allied relationship. He informed President Roosevelt that he considered the affair closed. “To prove my sincerity,” he cabled the President, “I will use one of my very few Latin quotations : Amantium irae amoris integratio est.” Translated, it meant, Lovers’ quarrels are a renewal of love.

  But while the controversy over SCAF 252 and the Anglo-American objectives had been taking place behind the scenes, the men of the Anglo-American forces had been driving deeper by the hour into Germany. Nobody had told them that Berlin was no longer a major military objective.

  *Contrary to generally accepted belief, the deterioration of Hitler’s health was not the result of injuries sustained during the attempted bomb plot on his life in 1944, though it seems to have marked the beginning of a rapid debilitation. After the war, U.S. counterintelligence teams interrogated nearly every doctor who had attended Hitler. The author has read all their reports and, while none of them give a specific cause for Hitler’s palsied condition, the general opinion is that, in origin, it was partly psychogenic, and partly caused by the manner in which he lived. Hitler hardly ever slept; night and day had little distinction for him. In addition, there is abundant evidence that he was slowly being poisoned by the indiscriminate use of drugs administered to him in massive injections by his favorite physician, Professor Theodor Morell. These ranged from prescriptions containing morphia, arsenic and strychnine to various artificial stimulants and mysterious “miracle drugs” which the doctor himself compounded.

  *As Heinrici put it in an interview with the author, “Buhle was waving a large brandy flag in front of him.”

  *Heinrici was later to say: “Hitler’s statement killed me completely. I could hardly argue against it, for I did not know what the situation opposite Schöner’s group was. I did know that Hitler was completel
y wrong. All I could think of was, ‘How can anyone delude themselves to this extent?’ I realized that they were all living in a cloud-cuckoo-land (Wolkenkuckucksheim).”

  *The research for Hitler’s conference comes principally from Heinrici’s diaries, supplemented by a long (186-page) memoir from Colonel Eismann. Heinrici kept meticulous notes of everything that happened, including the exact words Hitler used. There are some differences between Heinrici’s account and that of Eismann’s but these variations were resolved by a long series of interviews with Heinrici over a three-month period in 1963.

  5

  THE RACE WAS ON. Never in the history of warfare had so many men moved so fast. The speed of the Anglo-American offensive was contagious, and all along the front the drive was taking on the proportions of a giant contest. As the armies concentrated on gaining the banks of the Elbe, to secure the bridgeheads for the last victorious dash that would end the war, every division along the north and center of the western front was determined to reach the river first. Beyond, Berlin, as always, was the final goal.

  In the British zone, the 7th Armored Division—the famed Desert Rats—had hardly paused since leaving the Rhine. Once across. Major General Louis Lyne, the 7th’s commander, had emphasized that “for all ranks, your eyes should now be firmly fixed on the river Elbe. Once we get started I do not propose to stop by day or by night till we get there … Good hunting on the next lap.” Now, even against heavy opposition, the Desert Rats were averaging upward of twenty miles a day.

  Squadron Sergeant Major Charles Hennell thought it “right and proper for the 7th to take the capital as a reward for our long and arduous efforts in the war from the Western Desert onwards.” Hennell had been with the Desert Rats since El Alamein. Sergeant Major Eric Cole had an even more compelling reason to reach Berlin. A veteran of Dunkirk, he had been driven into the sea by the Germans in 1940. Now Cole was grimly preparing to even the score. He constantly badgered the armored crews to get their mechanized equipment in tiptop running condition. Cole planned to drive the Germans in front of the 7th Armored tanks all the way back to Berlin.