Sternfeld was overjoyed when he saw the first troops in the Tempelhof district. They were orderly and peaceful, and to Leo they were liberators. The Russian battalion commander asked if they might have a room in Leo’s house to hold a celebration. “You can have anything I’ve got,” Leo told him. He had already lost half his house when the nearby post office had blown up some days before, but there were three rooms left. “You can have the one with the ceiling,” Leo assured the Russian. In return, he, his family and some friends were invited to the party. The Russians arrived, bringing baskets of food and drink. “It seemed to me at one time,” Leo said, “as if the entire Russian Army joined the party.” The Russians drank enormous quantities of vodka. Then, to the accompaniment of an accordion, the battalion commander, an opera star in private life, began to sing. Leo sat enthralled. For the first time in years, he felt free.
Joachim Lipschitz came out of hiding in the Krügers’ cellar in Karlshorst to meet the Red Army troopers. Speaking in the slow, halting Russian he had taught himself in his months underground, he tried to explain who he was and to express his gratitude for liberation. To his amazement the Russians howled with laughter. Slapping him boisterously on the back, they said that they, too, were happy, but they added, choking again with laughter, that he spoke terrible Russian. Joachim didn’t mind. For him and for Eleanore Krüger the long wait was over. They would be the first couple married when the battle ended. As soon as they received their marriage certificate, it would represent, as Eleanore was to put it, “our own personal victory over the Nazis. We had won and nothing could hurt us any more.”*
Everywhere, as areas were overrun, the Jews came out of hiding. Some, however, were still so fearful that they remained in their secret places long after the danger from the Nazis was past. Twenty-year-old Hans Rosenthal was to stay in his six-by five-foot cubicle in Lichtenberg until May—a total of twenty-eight months in hiding. In some areas, Jews were freed and then faced with the prospect of having to go underground again when the Russians were thrown back in temporary but violent and widely scattered counterattacks.
The Weltlingers in Pankow had one of the strangest experiences of all. They were liberated early. The Russian officer who entered their hiding place in the Möhrings’ apartment would always be remembered by Siegmund as “the personification of Michael the archangel.” When he saw them, the officer called out in poor German, “Russki no barbarian. We good to you.” At one time he had been a student in Berlin.
Then suddenly there was a tense moment. The officer and his men searched the entire apartment house—and found six revolvers. To the assembled occupants, the Russian announced that he had found them hidden with discarded uniforms. Everyone was ordered out of the house and lined up against a wall. Siegmund stepped forward and said, “I’m a Jew.” The young officer smiled, shook his head, made a motion as though cutting his throat and said, “No more Jews alive.” Over and over Siegmund repeated that he was a Jew. He looked at the others lined up against the wall. A few weeks earlier, many of these people would have turned him in had they known his whereabouts. Yet Siegmund now said in a clear, loud voice: “These are good people. All of them have sheltered us in this house. I ask you not to harm them. These weapons were thrown away by the Volkssturm.”
His statement saved the lives of all the tenants. Germans and Russians began hugging each other. “We were drunk,” Siegmund said, “with happiness and joy.” The Soviet officer immediately brought food and drink for the Weltlingers and stood anxiously watching them, and urging them to eat. Both Weltlingers nearly became ill from the food because they were not used to anything so rich. “Immediately,” Siegmund said, “people became very kind to us. We were given an empty flat, food and clothing, and for the first time we were able to stand in the fresh air and walk a street.”
But then the Russians were thrown out of the area by an SS attack—and the same residents Weltlinger had saved the day before suddenly became hostile again. “It was,” said Weltlinger, “unbelievable.” The next day the Russians retook the area and once more they were liberated, but by a different Soviet unit—and this time the Russians would not believe that Weltlinger was a Jew. All the men in his building were loaded onto a truck and driven away for questioning. As Siegmund said good-bye to his wife he wondered if all this deprivation, all this hiding was now going to have a senseless end. They were taken to the northeastern suburbs and one by one were questioned in a cellar. Weltlinger was brought into the room and placed beneath a bright light. Sitting in the darkness were some officers at a long table. Once again Weltlinger insisted that he was a Jew who had been in hiding for more than two years. Then a woman’s voice came out of the darkness: “Prove to me you are a Jew.” “How?” She asked him to recite the Hebrew profession of faith.
In the silence of the room Siegmund looked at the shadowy faces sitting in the darkness before him. Then, covering his head with his right hand, his voice filled with emotion, he said one of the most ancient of all prayers, the Sh’mah Yisroël. In Hebrew he slowly intoned :
Hear, O Israel!
The Lord our God,
The Lord is One.
Then the woman spoke again. “Go,” she said. “You are a Jew and a good man.” She, too, was Jewish, she said. The next day Siegmund was reunited with his wife. “No words,” he said, “can describe how we felt when we met again.” Hand in hand, they walked in the sunshine, “free and as happy as children.”
If Mother Superior Cunegundes felt any fear it did not show on her round, peaceful face. The battle was raging all about Haus Dahlem. The building shook every time the tanks fired, and even in the sandbagged cellar the concussion could be felt. But Mother Superior Cunegundes no longer paid any attention to the rattle of the machine guns and the scream of the shells. She was praying in the little dining room now turned into a chapel when the firing lifted; for a moment the noise of battle seemed to fade. Still Mother Superior Cunegundes remained on her knees. One of the Sisters came into the chapel and whispered to the Mother Superior: “The Russians. They are here.”
Mother Superior Cunegundes calmly blessed herself, genuflected, and quickly followed the Sister out of the chapel. The Soviet troops had first approached the home from the rear, through the gardens. They had appeared at the kitchen windows, grinning and pointing their guns at the nuns and lay sisters. Now, ten troopers led by a young lieutenant waited on the Mother Superior. Lena, the cook, a Ukrainian, was hurriedly sent for to act as interpreter. The officer, noted the Mother Superior, “looked very smart, and his behavior was excellent.”
He asked about Haus Dahlem. Mother Superior Cunegundes explained that it was a maternity home, hospital and orphanage. Lena added that there were only “nuns and babies” there. The lieutenant seemed to understand. “Are there any soldiers or weapons here?” he asked. Mother Superior Cunegundes said: “No. Of course not. There is nothing like that in this building.” Some of the soldiers now began to demand watches and jewelry. The lieutenant spoke sharply, and the men pulled back, abashed.
The Mother Superior then told the young officer that Haus Dahlem needed some guarantee of protection because of the children, the expectant mothers and the Sisters. The lieutenant shrugged: he was a fighting man, and all he was interested in was clearing out the enemy and moving up.
As the Russians left the building, some of the soldiers stopped to look at the great statue of St. Michael, “God’s fighting knight against all evil.” They walked around the statue, touching the sculptured folds of the gown and looking up into the face. The lieutenant said good-bye to the Mother Superior. Something seemed to be troubling him. For just a moment he gazed at his men looking at the statue. Then he said to Mother Superior Cunegundes:
“These are good, disciplined and decent soldiers. But I must tell you. The men who are following us, the ones coming up behind, are pigs.”
There was no stopping the tide of the Russian advance. Desperate orders flashed out from the deranged man in the Führer-bu
nker as the remains of both the Reich and its capital were dissected by the invaders. Commands were superseded by counter-commands. Then counter-commands were canceled and new orders issued. Weidling’s Chief of Staff, Lieutenant Colonel von Dufving, summed it up: “Confusion led to chaos; order led to counterorder; and finally everything led to disorder.”
The German command system had all but collapsed. As the Western Allies and the Russians drew closer together, the OKW, charged with handling the western front, became hopelessly entangled with the OKH, which controlled the eastern front. General Erich Dethleffsen, OKH Assistant Chief of Staff, got a desperate call from the commander of Dresden as Koniev’s tanks, heading west to link up with the Americans, approached the city. He was told to put everything he had on the east bank of the Elbe, which runs through the city. Ten minutes later the OKW ordered the Dresden commander to put his forces on the west bank.
It was the same all over. Communications hardly existed any more. The OKW headquarters, now established in Rheinsberg, about fifty miles northeast of Berlin, was dependent for its communications on a single transmitting antenna attached to a barrage balloon. In Berlin, those of Hitler’s orders that could not be telephoned were radioed via the communications complex in the smaller of the two Zoo flak towers. Luftwaffe Lieutenant Gerda Niedieck, sitting at her teleprinter and deciphering machines in the vast telecommunications room in L Tower, noted that most of Hitler’s messages at this time had one theme: frantic queries for information—usually about armies that no longer existed. Over and over, the radio teletype machines clacked out his messages. “What is Wenck’s position?” “Where is Steiner?” “Where is Wenck?” Sometimes it was just too much for 24-year-old Gerda. Sometimes she just wept silently at her teleprinter as she sent out Hitler’s messages and his threats, and his orders that the dying nation was to fight to the last German.
At last, after six years of war, the headquarters of the OKH and the OKW—whose armies had once been separated by three thousand miles—were pulled together in a unified command. The officials of the combined OKH-OKW were promptly addressed by Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel. “Our troops,” he said with great assurance, “are not only willing to fight, they are completely able to fight.” He paced the floor of the new headquarters, under the watchful eyes of General Alfred Jodl, OKW Operations Chief, and General Erich Dethleffsen, OKH Assistant Chief of Staff. Keitel had painted the same bright picture for Hitler on the twenty-fourth, just before the Führer had ordered his top officers to leave the capital so they could conduct operations for the relief of Berlin from outside the city. That had been Dethleffsen’s last visit to the underground world of the Führerbunker. When he arrived he had found utter confusion. There was no guard at the entrance. To his amazement he had found some twenty workers sheltering behind the bunker door: they had been ordered, because of the artillery fire, to “dig a trench from the parking area to the entrance,” but they could not work because of the shelling. As he went down the stairs he found that there were no guards in the anteroom either. No one searched his briefcase or “checked to see if he was carrying weapons.” His impression was one of “complete disintegration.”
In the little hall outside Hitler’s small briefing room “stood empty glasses and half-full bottles.” It seemed to him that “the soldierly principle of remaining calm, and thus preventing a panic situation from developing, had been completely disregarded.” Everyone was nervous and irritable—except the women. “The secretaries, the female personnel … Eva Braun and Frau Goebbels and her children … were amiable and friendly and shamed many of the men by their example.”
Keitel’s report to Hitler had been short. “In rosy words,” Dethleffsen remembered, “he reported on the mood of Wenck’s Twelfth Army and the prospects for the relief of Berlin.” Dethleffsen had found it hard to judge “how much Keitel believed his own words: perhaps his optimism was grounded only in the wish not to burden the Führer.”
But now, before the OKH-OKW leaders, away from Hitler, Keitel was talking in the same vein. As he paced the floor he said: “Our defeats are really due to a lack of courage, a lack of will in the upper and intermediate commands.” It could have been Hitler speaking. Dethleffsen thought that Keitel was a “true student of his master.” And from his glowing report of how Berlin would be relieved, it was “clear that he had not the slightest understanding of the plight of the troops.” Keitel kept talking: everything would be all right; the rapidly closing Russian ring about Berlin would be cracked; the Führer would be saved….
In Bavaria, Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering found himself in a preposterous situation: he was under house arrest by SS guards.
His Chief of Staff, General Koller, had flown to Bavaria to see Goering after Hitler’s fateful conference of April 22. On receiving Koller’s report that “Hitler has broken down” and that the Führer had said, “When it comes to negotiating the Reichmarschall can do better than I,” Goering had acted. He had sent the Führer a very carefully worded message. “My Führer,” he wired, “in view of your decision to remain in the fortress of Berlin do you agree that I take over at once the total leadership of the Reich with full freedom of action at home and abroad as your deputy, in accordance with your decree of June 29, 1941? If no reply is received by ten o’clock tonight I shall take it for granted that you have lost your freedom of action, and shall act for the best interests of our country and people….”
Goering received a fast reply—one undoubtedly inspired by his arch rival, the ambitious Martin Bormann. Hitler fired off a message accusing Goering of treason and announced that he would be executed unless he immediately resigned. On the evening of April 25, Berlin radio solemnly reported that “Reichsmarschall Goering’s heart condition has now reached an acute state. Therefore he has requested that he be released from command of the Air Force and all the duties connected with it…. The Führer has granted this request….” Goering told his wife, Emmy, that he thought the whole business was ridiculous; that in the end he would have to do the negotiating anyway. She later told Baroness von Schirach that Goering was wondering “what uniform he should wear when he first met Eisenhower.”
While Berlin burned and the Reich died, the one man Hitler never suspected of treachery had already surpassed Goering’s grab for power.
In Washington on the afternoon of April 25, General John Edwin Hull, the U. S. Army’s Acting Chief of Staff for Operations, was called into the Pentagon office of General George C. Marshall, the Chief of Staff. Marshall told him that President Truman was en route from the White House to the Pentagon to talk with Winston Churchill on the scrambler telephone. A German offer to negotiate had been received via Count Folke Bernadotte, head of the Swedish Red Cross. The peace feeler came from no less a person than the man Hitler called Der treue Heinrich—Heinrich Himmler.
Himmler’s secret proposals were supposed to be en route in a coded message from the American Ambassador in Sweden. Marshall told Hull to get the phone room set up and to find out right away from the State Department if the text of the message had arrived. “I phoned Dean Acheson at State,” Hull said, “who told me that he knew nothing about any cable containing Himmler’s proposals. Actually, the message was then coming in to the State Department, but nobody had yet seen it.”
Then President Truman arrived, and at 3:10 P.M. American time he spoke to the Prime Minister from the Pentagon phone room. “When he got on the phone,” recalls Hull, “the President did not even know what the German proposal was.” Churchill, according to Hull, “started off by saying, ‘What do you think of the message?’ The President replied, ‘It is just coming in now.’”
Churchill then read the version which he had received from the British Ambassador to Sweden, Sir Victor Mallet. Himmler, he told Truman, wished to meet with General Eisenhower and capitulate. The SS chief reported that Hitler was desperately ill, that he might even be dead already, and in any case would be within a few days. It was clear that Himmler wished to capitulate—but only
to the Western Allies, not to the Russians. “What happens,” Bernadotte had asked Himmler, “if the Western Allies refuse your offer?” Himmler replied: “Then I shall take command on the eastern front and die in battle.” Hull, listening on another phone, then heard Churchill say, “Well, what do you think?”
The new American President, only thirteen days in office, answered without hesitation. “We cannot accept it,” he said. “It would be dishonorable, because we have an agreement with the Russians not to accept a separate peace.”
Churchill promptly agreed. As he was later to put it, “I told him [Truman] that we were convinced the surrender should be unconditional and simultaneous to the three major powers.” When both Churchill and Truman informed Stalin of the Himmler proposal and their response to it, the Generalissimo thanked them both, and in similar replies promised that the Red Army would “maintain its pressure on Berlin in the interests of our common cause.”
Lieutenant Albert Kotzebue of the U. S. 69th Division, sitting in his jeep, saw the farm from far away and he thought it was much too quiet. He got out and moved up ahead of his 26-man patrol so he could approach the house alone.
This whole countryside near the Elbe had been strangely silent. Villages had white flags of surrender flying, but there was no movement; the villagers were staying behind doors. Kotzebue had talked to several burgomasters and it was always the same story: the Russians were coming, and they were sure to be killed and their women raped.
Warily Kotzebue went to the front of the house. The door was half open. He stood to one side and pushed it wide with his rifle. It swung back with a creaking noise, and Kotzebue stared. Sitting around the dining table were the farmer, his wife and their three children. It was a peaceful, homelike scene—except that they were all dead. They must have been terribly afraid, for they had all taken poison.
The Last Battle: The Classic History of the Battle for Berlin Page 44
