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

by Cornelius Ryan

  A short time later, the OKH Chief, General Hans Krebs, rang up. “Well, we all have good reason to feel satisfied,” he told Heinrici smoothly. Heinrici conceded the point. “Considering the size of the attack we have not lost much ground,” he said. Krebs would have preferred a more optimistic response, and he said as much, but Heinrici did not make it. “I have learned,” he told Krebs dryly, “never to praise the day until the twilight comes.”

  In the darkness, Private Willy Feldheim grasped his bulky Panzerfaust more firmly. He did not know for certain where he was, but he had heard that this line of foxholes covering the three roads in the Klosterdorf area was about eighteen miles from the front.

  A little while ago, waiting for the Russian tanks to come up the road, Willy had felt a sense of great adventure. He had thought about what it would be like when he saw the first tank and could finally fire the anti-tank gun for the first time. The three companies holding the crossroads had been told to let the tanks get as close as possible before firing. Willy’s instructor had said that a sixty-yard range was about right. He wondered how soon they would come.

  Crouched in the damp foxhole, Willy thought about the days when he was a bugler. He remembered in particular one brilliant, sunshiny day in 1943 when Hitler spoke in Olympic Stadium and Willy had been among the massed buglers who had sounded the fanfare at the Führer’s entrance. He would never forget the leader’s words to the assembled Hitler Youth: “You are the guarantee of the future….” And the crowds had yelled “Führer Befiehl! Führer Befiehl!” It had been the most memorable day of Willy’s life. On that afternoon he had known beyond doubt that the Reich had the best army, the best weapons, the best generals and, above all, the greatest leader in the world.

  The dream was gone in the sudden flash that illuminated the night sky. Willy peered out toward the front and now he heard again the low rumbling of the guns he had momentarily forgotten, and he felt the cold. His stomach began to ache and he wanted to cry. Fifteen-year-old Willy Feldheim was badly scared, and all the noble aims and the stirring words could not help him now.

  The drum beat was almost imperceptible. Softly the tubas answered. The muffled drum roll came again. Low and ominously the tubas replied. Then the massed basses came alive and the awesome grandeur of Die Götterdämmerung rolled out from the Berlin Philharmonic. The mood in the darkness of Beethoven Hall seemed as tragic as the music. The only illumination came from the lights on the orchestra’s music stands. It was cold in the hall and people were wearing overcoats. Dr. Von Westermann sat in a box with his wife and brother. Nearby was the sister of the conductor Robert Heger, with three friends. And in his usual seat in the orchestra section was Reichsminister Albert Speer.

  Immediately after playing the Beethoven Violin Concerto, Taschner, his family and the daughter of Georg Diburtz had left the hall. They were now on their way to safety—but they were the only ones. Speer had kept his promise. His car was waiting. He had even sent his adjutant to escort the little group safely to their destination. Now the architect of Hitler’s monstrous war-making industrial machine listened to the tempest of music as it told of the evildoing of the gods, of Siegfried on his funeral bed of fire, of Brünnhilde on horseback ascending the pyre to join him in death. Then, with cymbals crashing and drums rolling, the orchestra thundered to its climax: the terrible holocaust that destroyed Valhalla. And as the mournful majestic music filled the auditorium, those who listened felt a sorrow too deep for tears.*

  *Many soldiers joined the Party on the Oder, for reasons which were not always political. Unlike American or British forces, the Red Army had no system of registration of identification discs or “dog tags”; families of Red Army men killed or wounded in action were rarely officially informed. But if a Communist soldier became a casualty, the Party notified his family or next of kin.

  *Zhukov told General Eisenhower and the press in June, 1945, that he opened the attack with 22,000 guns of all calibers. His original plan called for 11,000 cannon, but whether he had acquired that many by the time of the attack is not known. While Russian accounts give a variety of figures, ranging from twenty to forty thousand guns, most military experts believe that Zhukov had at least seven to eight thousand field pieces and probably the same again in guns of lesser caliber.

  *Ϭ Koniev was echoing Stalin’s own suspicions. In early April Stalin had cabled Roosevelt that an agreement had been reached at Berne with the Germans whereby they would “open the front to the Anglo-American troops and let them move east, while the British and Americans have promised, in exchange, to ease the armistice terms for the Germans…. The Germans on the Western Front have in fact ceased the war … [while] … they continue the war against Russia, the Ally of Britain and the U.S.A. …” Roosevelt answered that he was astonished at the allegation “that I have entered into an agreement with the enemy without first obtaining your full agreement…. Frankly I cannot avoid a feeling of bitter resentment toward your informers, whoever they are, for such vile misrepresentations of my actions or those of my trusted subordinates.” Stalin and his marshals remained unconvinced. Even today, the latest U.S.S.R. Ministry of Defense history, The Great Fatherland War of the Soviet Union 1941-45, says that “to avoid permitting the Red Army from seizing Berlin … the Hitlerites … were prepared to surrender the capital to the Americans or to the English. Our Allies also counted on seizing … [it] … in spite of existing agreements … consigning Berlin to the operational zone of the Soviet Army….” The fact is, of course, that no such agreement ever existed.

  ** Koniev did not learn about the incident until twenty years later when he read of it in General Pukhov’s memoirs.

  *Vienna was captured by the Red Army on April 13.

  *Hitler was obviously referring to President Roosevelt.

  *There are probably as many accounts of the last concert as there are survivors of the orchestra. Some tell one story, others another. There are differences of opinion about the date, the program and even the performers. Those who knew nothing of Speer’s plan refuse to believe that any such scheme existed. The version which appears here is based on Dr. Von Westennann’s account and records, with subsidiary information from Gerhard Taschner.

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  ALMOST NOTHING of the once mighty Third Reich remained. Crushed from both sides, on the map it resembled an hourglass: the North Sea and the Baltic formed the top, and Bavaria, parts of Czechoslovakia, Austria and northern Italy—which Germany now occupied—made up the lower half. Across the narrow neck between these areas, only about ninety miles separated the Americans and the Russians. Fighting was still heavy in the north and, to a lesser degree, in the south. In the center General William Simpson’s U. S. Ninth Army was simply holding its positions along the Elbe, mopping up pockets of resistance bypassed during the dash for the river and repulsing occasional sharp counterattacks against its bridgeheads. There was one sore spot for the Ninth: Magdeburg. Again and again its commander had refused to surrender. Now Simpson had had enough: he called in bombers and leveled more than one third of the city. Then he sent in his troops.

  On the afternoon of the seventeenth, as units of the 30th Infantry and 2nd Armored divisions began the attack, General Bradley joined Simpson at his headquarters. The phone rang. Simpson picked it up, listened for a moment and then, putting his hand over the receiver, said to Bradley, “It looks as if we may get the bridge in Magdeburg after all. What’ll we do then, Brad?”

  Bradley knew only too well what Simpson wanted him to say: that the Autobahn bridge was the most direct and fastest route to Berlin. But he shook his head. “Hell’s bells,” he replied. “We don’t want any more bridgeheads on the Elbe. If you get it you’ll have to throw a battalion across it, I guess. But let’s hope the other fellows blow it up before you’re stuck with it.”

  Bradley’s instructions from SHAEF were clear; he could offer Simpson no hope of moving forward. The orders read: “Take the necessary action to avoid offensive action in forc
e, including the formation of new bridgeheads east of the Elbe-Mulde line….” Simpson’s forces were to remain as a threat to Berlin, but that was all.

  Minutes later a second call settled the issue. As he put down the phone, Simpson told Bradley: “No need to worry any longer. The Krauts just blew it up.”

  The blowing of the bridge brought to an end the dream of “Big Simp” Simpson, who had wanted to take his mighty Ninth Army into Berlin, the city which the Supreme Commander had once described as “clearly the main prize.”

  In the hamlets north of Boizenburg on the Elbe, the householders were startled by a distant wailing. The strange sound grew louder, and soon an astonishing apparition came in sight. Down the road tramped two Scottish bagpipers, their pipes skirling. Behind them came Warrant Officer “Dixie” Deans’s POWs, twelve thousand strong, marching in columns under a light German guard. The prisoners’ uniforms were in tatters. Their few belongings were bundled and slung on their backs. They were emaciated, cold and hungry, but their heads were high. The determined Deans had seen to that. “When you pass through the villages,” he told the men, “spruce up even if it hurts, and show these bloody supermen exactly who won this war.”

  Dixie’s own transport was an ancient bicycle that threatened to fall apart at any moment. A patch covered a large swelling on the front tire. But, bumpy as the ride was, Dixie was thankful for the mobility. He rode continuously from column to column, watching over his men and observing the German guards that marched on either side of each column. Every road was filled with POWs. There were nearly two thousand to a column, and although Deans tried resolutely to cover the entire area, it was an exhausting job. After almost ten days of seemingly aimless marching, Deans’s men were in bad shape. There were a few German supply trucks in the procession, but for the most part the men were living off the countryside. The German Commandant, Colonel Ostmann, appeared almost embarrassed by the meandering march and the shortage of food, but he told Deans, “There is just nothing I can do.” Dixie believed him. “I don’t think he has a clue from one day to the next where the devil we’re going,” Deans told fellow R.A.F. Warrant Officer Ronald Mogg.

  The POWs had wandered like nomads since leaving Fallingbostel. Now they were heading for the town of Gresse, where trucks with Red Cross food parcels were said to await them. Deans hoped that they would halt there and go no farther. He told Ostmann that the march was useless, for the British would soon overrun them. Deans hoped he was right. From what the men were able to pick up on the precious secret radios they had carried out of the camp, the Allied news was good. Mogg, a shorthand expert, took down the BBC news twice a day. Whenever they could plug into an outlet, the radio in the gramophone was used; during the march they relied on the battery-operated receiver. One of the German guards, Ostmann’s interpreter, Corporal “Charlie” Gumbach, thought Sergeant John Bristow was foolish to carry the heavy, old-fashioned gramophone on his back. “Why don’t you drop it somewhere?” the German suggested. “I’ve grown attached to it, Charlie,” said Bristow seriously. “And anyway, the chaps would never forgive me if we didn’t have music in the evenings.” Bristow looked at the German suspiciously. “Don’t you like to dance, Charlie?” he asked. Gumbach shrugged helplessly; all these British were madmen.

  As Deans’s column swung down the road toward a new village the pipers hoisted their instruments into position, and the tired men in the ranks squared their shoulders and got into step. “At least,” said Ron Mogg, stepping out smartly alongside Deans on the bicycle, “we’re impressing the natives no end.”

  On the eastern front, Chuikov’s Guards and Katukov’s tankers had finally gained a foothold on the Seelow Heights by sheer weight of numbers. A little before midnight on the sixteenth, General Popiel afterward remembered, “the first three houses in the northern suburbs of the town of Seelow had been captured…. It was a bitter operation.” All through the night of the sixteenth, Red Army attacks were smashed again and again by point-blank fire from anti-aircraft guns. “The Germans didn’t even have to aim,” Popiel said. “They just fired over open sights.” Chuikov himself reached Seelow about noon on the seventeenth. He found the resistance so fierce that he pessimistically estimated it would take “one day to pierce each line of resistance between the Oder and Berlin.” Not until the night of the seventeenth were the Heights taken. It had indeed taken more than forty-eight hours to break through the first two lines. The Russians believed that there were at least three more such lines lying before Berlin.

  Popiel, trying to make his way to Katukov’s headquarters some distance from Seelow, saw that the fight had caused great confusion. Troops and tanks were everywhere, crammed into every corner, alley, street and garden. German artillery was still firing. In their effort to take the Heights, Zhukov’s troops had become disorganized; now they had to be reassembled before moving again. Zhukov, furious, and well aware of the pace Koniev was setting, demanded an all-out effort.

  During the fighting, Soviet tankers had come up with an ingenious solution to the bulky anti-tank rockets fired from Panzerfäuste. To his amazement, General Yushchuk saw that his tankers had taken every bedspring they could find from German homes. These coiled-wire contraptions were now hitched to the front of tanks to break the impact of the blunt-nosed rockets. Preceded by bedsprings, the Soviet cannon now prepared to lead the assault on the city.

  Near Cottbus, in a medieval castle overlooking the Spree, Marshal Koniev waited for his call to go through to Moscow. Somewhere a lone enemy battery was still firing. It was typical German artillery fire, Koniev thought as he listened to the carefully timed, methodical bursting of the shells. He wondered what they were firing at—perhaps the castle or the antenna of his headquarters radio station. Whatever the target, the fire was not hindering his tanks, which had been crossing the Spree since noon. By now they were miles away, smashing through a disintegrating enemy and rumbling toward Lübben, near the point where the boundary between his army and Zhukov’s ended. For Koniev, the time had come to call Stalin and ask permission to swing his tanks north toward Berlin.

  Koniev had every reason to be in high spirits. His tankers had moved with unforeseen speed, although the fighting had been brutally hard in some areas and casualties had been heavy. Earlier on this morning of the seventeenth, driving toward the front to watch the crossing of the Spree, Koniev had realized for the first time just how terrible the battle had been. His car had passed through smoldering forests and along fields cratered by artillery fire. There were, he recalled, “huge quantities of decommissioned and burned-out tanks, equipment mired in streams and swamps, heaps of twisted metal, and there were dead everywhere—all that remained of the forces that had met and battled and passed through this land.”

  Koniev had expected great difficulty crossing the Spree, which was 180 feet wide in places. By the time he reached the headquarters of General Rybalko’s Third Guards Tank Army, a few tanks had actually been ferried across, but ferrying was much too slow. The Spree line had to be forced fast. Koniev and Rybalko hurried to an area where reconnaissance patrols had reported evidence that some sort of ford existed. Although the river at this site was close to 150 feet wide, Koniev, after inspecting the terrain, decided to risk sending a tank on a trial crossing. Rybalko selected the best tank crew in his lead detachment and explained what they were to attempt. The tank plunged in. Under fire from the west bank, it began slowly to move across. The water rose up over its treads—but it got no deeper. At this one point, the river was only three and a half feet deep. One behind another, Rybalko’s tanks lumbered through the water. The German line on the Spree was cracked. Koniev’s forces moved across the river in strength and charged ahead at full speed.

  Now, in the Cottbus castle, the Marshal’s call to Moscow came through. An aide handed Koniev the radio-telephone. As he spoke he reverted to the military formality that Stalin always demanded. “This is the Commander of the First Ukrainian Front,” he said. Stalin replied, “Comrade Stalin. Go ahea
d.”

  “This is my tactical situation,” Koniev reported. “My armored forces are now twenty-three kilometers [about fourteen miles] northwest of Finsterwalde, and my infantry are on the banks of the Spree.” He paused. “I suggest that my armored formations move immediately in a northerly direction.” He carefully avoided mentioning Berlin.

  “Zhukov,” Stalin said, “is having a difficult time. He is still breaking through the defenses on the Seelow Heights. Enemy resistance there appears stiff and unyielding.” There was a brief pause. Then Stalin said, “Why not pass Zhukov’s armor through the gap created on your front and let him go for Berlin from there? Is that possible?”

  “Comrade Stalin,” Koniev said quickly, “it would take much time and cause great confusion. There is no necessity for transferring armor from the First Belorussian Front. Operations in my section are going favorably.” He took the plunge. “I have adequate forces and we are in a perfect position to turn our tank armies toward Berlin.”

  Koniev explained that he could send his forces toward the city by way of Zossen, twenty-five miles south of Berlin. “What scale map are you using?” Stalin asked suddenly. “One to two hundred thousands,” Koniev answered. There was a pause while Stalin referred to his own map. Then he said, “Are you aware that Zossen is the headquarters of the German General Staff?” Koniev said he was. There was another pause. Finally Stalin said, “Very well. I agree. Turn your tank armies toward Berlin.” The Generalissimo added that he would issue new army boundary lines, and then, abruptly, he hung up. Koniev put down his own phone, immensely satisfied.