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

by Cornelius Ryan

  As Pemsel left Berlin, he felt that fate and the weather had been exceptionally kind to him. It was clear that the city could not be defended. Passing a hodgepodge of tree trunks, steel spikes and cone-shaped concrete blocks that would be used as anti-tank obstacles, he shook his head in disbelief. Still farther along, the car sped by elderly Home Guardsmen slowly digging trenches. As he left the city behind, Pemsel later recounted, “I thanked God for allowing this bitter chalice to pass from me.”

  At his headquarters on the Hohenzollerndamm, the city’s Commandant, General Reymann, stood before a huge wall map of Berlin looking at the defense lines marked on it and wondering, as he afterward put it, “what in God’s name I was supposed to do.” Reymann had hardly slept for the past three days and he was bone-weary. Since morning he had taken countless telephone calls, attended several meetings, visited sections of the perimeter defense lines and issued a batch of orders