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

by Cornelius Ryan

  Everywhere now, Berlin’s defenders were being forced into the ruins of the central districts. To slow down the Russians, 120 of the city’s 248 bridges were blown. So little dynamite was left throughout General Weidling’s command that aviation bombs had to be used instead. Fanatics destroyed additional installations, often without checking into the consequences. SS men blew up a four-mile tunnel running under an arm of the river Spree and the Landwehr Canal. The tunnel happened to be a railway link, and thousands of civilians were sheltering there. As water began to flood into the area, there was a mad scramble along the tracks toward higher ground. The tunnel was not only jammed with standees; four hospital trains of wounded were also there. As Elfriede Wassermann and her husband Erich, who had come down from the Anhalter bunker, tried to push through, Elfriede heard the wounded in the trains screaming, “Get us out! Get us out! We’ll drown!” Nobody stopped. The water was almost up to Elfriede’s waist. Erich, hobbling along on his crutches, was even worse off. Fighting and yelling, people pushed and trampled one another as they tried to get to safety. Elfriede was almost in despair, but Erich kept yelling, “Keep going! Keep going! We’re almost there. We’ll make it.” They did. How many others made it Elfriede never knew.

  By April 28 the Russians had closed in on the center of the city. The ring grew tighter and tighter. Desperate battles were being fought along the edges of Charlottenburg, Mitte and Friedrichshain. There was a narrow route still open toward Spandau. Weidling’s few experienced troops were trying to hold that lane open for a last-minute breakout. Casualties were enormous. The streets were littered with dead. Because of the shelling people were unable to get out of the shelters to help friends and relatives who lay wounded nearby; many had been caught when they went to stand in line for water at Berlin’s old-fashioned street pumps. Soldiers were not much better off. Walking wounded who could make it to dressing stations were lucky. Those unable to walk often lay where they fell and bled to death.

  Home Guardsman Kurt Bohg, who had lost most of one heel, crawled and hobbled for miles. At last he could go no farther. He lay in a street yelling for help. But the few people who dared risk the shelling to leave their shelters were too busy trying to save their own lives.

  Bohg, lying in a gutter, saw a Lutheran nun running from doorway to doorway. “Sister, Sister.” he called. “Can you help me?” The nun stopped. “Can you crawl as far as the congregation house next to the church?” she asked. “It’s just five minutes from here. I’ll help you when I get there.” Somehow he made it. All the doors were open. He crawled into the hallway, then into an anteroom and finally collapsed. When he came to he was lying almost in a spreading pool of blood. Slowly he raised his eyes to see where it was coming from. He looked across the room which led out onto a garden. The door was open: wedged in it, crumpled and looking at him with soft eyes, was a black and white Holstein cow. The animal was bleeding copiously from the mouth. Man and beast stared at each other in dumb compassion.

  As the Russians isolated the city’s center. Weidling’s forces were compressed more and more. Supplies ran out. In response to his desperate appeals for air drops, he received six tons of supplies and exactly sixteen panzer rocket-shells.

  Incredibly, amid the inferno of the battle, a plane suddenly swept in and landed on the East-West Axis—the broad highway running from the river Havel on the west to the Unter den Linden on the east. It was a small Fieseler Storch, and in it were General Ritter von Greim and a well-known aviatrix named Hanna Reitsch. The plane had been blasted by anti-aircraft fire, and gasoline was pouring from its wing tanks. Von Greim, who was at the controls, had been wounded in the foot just before touching down. Hanna had grabbed the stick and throttle and made a perfect landing. The two fliers had been summoned to the Reichskanzlei by Hitler; when they arrived he promptly made Von Greim a field marshal, replacing the “traitorous” Goering as head of the now nonexistent Luftwaffe.

  The Führerbunker was already being shelled, but it was comparatively safe for the time being. One other island of security remained in the center of the city. Rising up from the zoological gardens were the twin flak towers. The 132-foot-high G Tower was jammed with people: nobody knew exactly how many. Dr. Walter Hagedorn, the Luftwaffe physician, estimated that there were as many as thirty thousand—plus troops. There were people sitting or standing on the stairways, landings, on every floor. There was no room to move. Red Cross workers like 19-year-old Ursula Stalla did all they could to alleviate the sufferings of the civilians. She would never forget the sickening combination of odors—“perspiration, smelly clothes, babies’ diapers, all mixed with the smell of disinfectants from the hospital.” After days in the bunker many people were approaching insanity. Some had committed suicide. Two old ladies sitting side by side on the first-floor landing had taken poison at some time, but no one could tell when: because of the jam of people around them they had sat bolt upright in death, apparently for days, before they were noticed.

  Dr. Hagedorn had been operating on casualties in his small hospital almost incessantly for five days. His problem was to bury the dead. Men simply could not get out because of the shelling. “In between lulls,” he later recalled, “we tried to take out the bodies and the amputated limbs for burial, but it was almost impossible.” At this moment, with shells smashing the bunker’s impenetrable walls from all sides and shrapnel spraying the steel shutters over the windows, Hagedorn had five hundred dead and fifteen hundred wounded, plus an unknown number of half-demented people. There were also suicides everywhere, but because of the crush they could not even be counted. Still, the doctor remembered, there were people in the bunker saying, “We can stick it out until either Wenck or the Americans get here.”

  Below the tower lay the vast wasteland of the zoo. The slaughter among the animals had been horrible. Birds flew in all directions every time a shell landed. The lions had been shot. Rosa the hippo had been killed in her pool by a shell. Schwarz the bird-keeper was in despair; somehow the Abu Markub, the rare stork which had been in his bathroom, had escaped. And now Director Lutz Heck had been ordered by the flak tower commander to destroy the baboon; the animal’s cage had been damaged and there was some danger that the beast might escape.

  Heck, rifle in hand, made his way to the monkey cages. The baboon, an old friend, was sitting hunched by the bars of the cage. Heck raised the rifle and put the muzzle close to the animal’s head. The baboon gently pushed it aside. Heck, appalled, again raised the rifle. Again the baboon pushed the muzzle to one side. Heck, sickened and shaken, tried once more. The baboon looked at him dumbly. Then Heck pulled the trigger.

  While the battle continued, another savage onslaught was going on. It was grim and personal. The hordes of Russian troops coming up behind the disciplined front-line veterans now demanded the rights due the conquerors: the women of the conquered.

  Ursula Köster was sleeping in a Zehlendorf cellar with her parents, her 6-year-old twin daughters, Ingrid and Gisela, and her 7-month-old boy Bernd, when four Russian soldiers beat in the door with their rifle butts. They searched the shelter; finding an empty suitcase, they dumped jars of canned fruits, fountain pens, pencils, watches and Ursula’s wallet into it. One Russian found a bottle of French perfume. He opened it, sniffed, and poured the contents of the bottle on his clothes. A second Russian shoved Ursula’s parents and the children at gunpoint into a smaller room of the cellar. Then, one after another, all four assaulted her.

  Around six the following morning the battered Ursula was nursing her baby when two other soldiers came into the cellar. With the baby in her arms, she tried to dodge past and out the doorway. She was too weak. One of the soldiers took the baby from her and put him in his carriage. The second man looked at her and grinned. Both were filthy; their clothes were gritty, and they carried knives in their boots and wore fur caps. One man’s shirttail was hanging out of his pants. Each of them raped her. When they had gone, Ursula grabbed all the blankets she could find, picked up her baby, collec
ted her little girls, and ran into a garden housing complex across the street. There she found a bathtub which had been thrown or blasted out of one of the houses. Turning it upside down, Ursula crawled in with her children.

  In Hermsdorf, 18-year-old Juliane Bochnik dived under the sofa at the back of the cellar when she heard the Russians approaching. She heard her father, a linguist who spoke Russian, protesting at the intrusion. The soldiers were demanding to know where Juliane was, and her father was shouting, “I’ll report you to the Commissar!” At gunpoint her father was taken out into the street. Juliane lay very still, hoping the Russians would go away. She had blackened her face and blond hair in order to make herself look older; still, she was not taking any chances. She stayed under the sofa.

  In the adjoining cellar were two old people. Suddenly Juliane heard one of them shouting in a terrified voice. “She’s there! There! Under the sofa.” Juliane, dragged from her hiding place, stood quaking with fear. There was some talk among the Russians, then all but one left. “He was a young officer,” she later related, “and, as far as I could tell in the light of his flashlight, rather neat-looking and clean-cut.” He made motions whose meaning was unmistakable. She shrank back; he advanced. Smiling, he “gently but forcefully” began to remove Juliane’s clothes. She struggled. “It was not easy for him,” Juliane remembers. “He had a flashlight in one hand and, with typical Russian mistrust, he was keeping an eye to the rear to guard against a surprise attack.”

  Gradually, in spite of her efforts, he disrobed Juliane. She tried to plead, but she couldn’t speak Russian. At last she began crying and fell to her knees, begging to be left alone. The young Russian just looked at her. Juliane stopped crying, got hold of herself and tried another tack; she began talking firmly and politely. “I told him that this was all wrong,” she recalls. “I said people don’t act this way.” The Russian began to look annoyed. Then, with nearly all her clothes removed, the girl broke down again. “I simply don’t love you!” she cried. “There’s no point to this! I simply don’t love you!” Suddenly the Russian said, “Ahhh,” in a disgusted voice and dashed out of the cellar.

  The next morning Juliane and another girl fled to a convent run by the Dominican nuns; they were hidden there under the eaves of the roof for the next four weeks. Juliane later learned that her friend Rosie Hoffman and Rosie’s mother, who had sworn to kill themselves if the Russians came, had both been raped. They had taken poison.*

  Gerd Buchwald, a teacher, saw that Soviet troops were running wild in his district of Reinickendorf. His apartment was completely ransacked by women soldiers of the Red Army who seemed “to be drawn like a magnet by my wife’s clothes. They took what they wanted and left.” He burned what remained, and took his pistol apart and hid it in the garden. That evening a group of Russian men appeared. They were all drunk. “Frau! Frau!” they shouted at Buchwald. He greeted them with a friendly smile. “I had a two-day growth of beard and unkempt hair, so maybe my story worked because I looked older. I drew myself up, spread my hands and said, ‘Frau kaput.’” Apparently they understood: his wife was dead. While Buchwald stretched on his sofa they looked around, took a pair of his suspenders and then disappeared. After they had left Buchwald bolted the door. Moving the sofa, he helped his wife Elsa from the three- by three-foot hole he had dug in the concrete floor. She spent every night there for the next few weeks.

  Dr. Gerhard Jacobi, pastor of the Kaiser Wilhelm Church, hid his wife successfully too. Although in his cellar many women were taken out and raped, he succeeded in hiding his wife by the adroit use of a blanket. He slept on the outside of a narrow chaise longue, his wife lying sideways on the inside. Her feet were at his head. Covered completely by a heavy blanket she was almost invisible.

  In Wilmersdorf, Ilse Antz, her younger sister Anneliese, and her mother, who had initially formed favorable impressions of the Red Army, were not bothered for some time. Then one night just before dawn Anneliese was dragged out of the bed she shared with her mother. She was carried screaming upstairs to an apartment, and there she was brutally assaulted by a Soviet officer. When the Russian was finished he stroked her hair and said, “Good German.” He asked her not to tell anyone that a Russian officer had raped her. The next day a soldier appeared with a parcel of food addressed to her.

  Shortly thereafter another trooper forced his attentions on Ilse. He entered with a pistol in each hand. “I sat up in bed wondering which one he was going to kill me with, the left or right,” she remembers. In the cold of the cellar, Ilse was wearing several sweaters and ski pants. He pounced on her and began ripping her sweaters off. Then he suddenly said, puzzled, “Are you a German soldier?” Ilse says, “I was not surprised. I was so thin from hunger I hardly looked like a woman.” But the Russian quickly discovered his error. She was raped. As the Red Army man left, he said: “That’s what the Germans did in Russia.” After a time he returned—and, to her amazement, stayed by the side of her bed and protected her for the remainder of the night against other lusting Red soldiers.

  After that, the Antz family experienced repeated savagery. At one point they were taken out and placed against a wall to be shot. At another, Ilse was raped again. They began to think about suicide. “Had we had poison, I for one would certainly have taken my life,” Ilse recalls.

  As the Russians raped and plundered, suicides took place everywhere. In the Pankow district alone, 215 suicides were recorded within three weeks, most of them women. Fathers Josef Michalke and Alfons Matzker, Jesuits in Charlottenburg’s St. Canisius Church, realized just how far women had been driven by the Russian ferocity when they saw a mother and two children taken from the Havel River. The woman had tied two shopping bags filled full of bricks to her arms and, grasping a baby under each arm, had jumped in.

  One of Father Michalke’s parishioners, Hannelore von Cmuda, a 17-year-old girl, was repeatedly raped by a mob of drunken Red Army men; when they were finished they shot the girl three times. Critically injured, but not dead, she was brought around to the parish house in a baby carriage, the only available transportation. Father Michalke was not there at that moment, and the girl had disappeared when he returned. For the next twenty-four hours he searched for Hannelore; finally he found her in St. Hildegard’s Hospital. He administered the last sacraments and sat by her bedside during all the next night, telling her not to worry. Hannelore survived. (A year later, she and her mother were killed by a truck.)

  Margarete Promeist was in charge of an air raid shelter. “For two days and two nights,” she recalls, “wave after wave of Russians came into my shelter plundering and raping. Women were killed if they refused. Some were shot and killed anyway. In one room alone I found the bodies of six or seven women, all lying in the position in which they were raped, their heads battered in.” Margarete herself was assaulted, despite her protestations to the young man that “I am much too old for you.” She saw three Russians grab a nurse and hold her while a fourth raped her.

  Hitler Youth Klaus Küster, now in civilian clothes, was engaged in conversation by two Soviet officers sitting in a jeep. One of them spoke German, and he was so talkative that Küster screwed up his courage and asked an undiplomatic question. “Is it true,” asked Küster, “that Russian soldiers rape and plunder as the newspapers say?” The officer expansively offered him a pack of cigarettes and said, “I give you my word of honor as an officer that the Soviet soldier will not lay a hand on anyone. All that was written in those papers are lies.”

  The next day Küster saw three Russians grab a woman on General-Barby-Strasse and drag her into a hallway. One soldier gestured Küster back with a machine pistol, a second held the screaming woman and the third raped her. Then Küster saw the rapist coming out of the doorway. He was very drunk and tears were streaming down his face. He shouted, “Ja bolshoi swinja.” Küster asked one of the Russians what the phrase meant. The man laughed and said in German: “It means, ‘am a big pig.’”

  In a shelter in Kreuzberg where Mar
gareta Probst was staying, a fanatical Nazi named Möller had holed up in a locked room. The Russians learned where he was and tried to break down the door. Möller called out: “Give me a moment. I’ll shoot myself.” Again the Russians tried to force the door. Möller called out: “Wait! The gun has jammed.” Then there was a shot.

  During the next few hours the shelter was overrun with Russians looking for girls. Margareta, like many another woman, had tried to make herself as unattractive as possible. She had hidden her long blond hair under a cap, donned dark glasses, smeared her face with iodine and put a large adhesive plaster on her cheek. She was not molested. But plenty of others were. “The girls were simply rounded up and taken to the apartments upstairs,” she recalls. “We could hear their screams all night—the sound even penetrated down to the cellars.” Later an 80-year-old woman told Margareta that two soldiers had stuffed butter into her mouth to muffle her screams while a number of others assaulted her in turn.

  Dora Janssen and the widow of her husband’s batman, who earlier had thought they had got off easy, did not do so well now. In their shelter the widow, Inge, was brutally assaulted by a soldier who claimed that his mother had been taken to Berlin by force after German troops attacked Russia, and had never been seen since. Dora was spared; she said she had tuberculosis, and found that the Russians seemed thoroughly afraid of that. But Inge was raped a second time, and injured so badly that she was unable to walk. Dora ran out to the street, found a man who looked like an officer and told him what had happened. He looked at Dora coolly and said, “The Germans were worse than this in Russia. This is simply revenge.”