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

by Cornelius Ryan

  Elena Majewski, 17, and Vera Ungnad, 19, also saw both the good and the bad sides of the Russians. When the looting and raping began in the Tiergarten area, a young Russian soldier actually slept outside their cellar door to make sure that his fellow countrymen did not come in. The day after he left, seven or eight Red Army men entered the girls’ house and demanded that they attend a party the Russians were giving next door. The girls had no alternative but to accept; in any case, they saw no real reason to be afraid at first. The place where the party was being held turned out to be a bedroom and there were about thirty soldiers in the room, but everything seemed innocuous enough. Beds had been shoved against the wall to make room for a long table on which silver candelabra, linens and glassware had been placed. A young blond officer was playing English records on a phonograph. He smiled at the girls and said, “Eat and drink your fill.” Elena sat down at the table, but Vera suddenly wanted to leave. It was somehow clear that this was not the innocent party it had appeared to be.

  She tried to walk out. One soldier after another prevented her, grinning. Then one Russian told her, “With thirty soldiers you kaput; with me you not kaput.” Now there was no doubt in Vera’s mind about the reason for the party. But she agreed to go with the single soldier: one man was better than thirty, if only because it was easier to escape from one. She knew every cranny of the neighborhood; if she could get away they would never find her. But the soldier was taking no chances. He grabbed her by the hair and dragged her, twisting, screaming and clawing, toward an empty room. Somewhere along the way she tore loose and managed to trip him. Then, kicking off her high-heeled shoes for greater speed, she ran barefoot through the backyards over splintered glass and rubble until she came to a ruin in the Putlitzstrasse. There she frantically dug a hole in the dirt, pulled a discarded water pail over her head and resolved to stay there until she died.

  Elena was still at the party. She was uneasy, but she was also hungry. On the table were mounds of caviar, loaves of white bread, chocolate and chunks of beef which the Russians were eating raw. They were also downing water glasses filled with vodka, and getting progressively drunker. Finally Elena saw her chance. She quietly rose from the table and walked out; to her delight no one followed her. But in the next room a fierce-looking soldier with a handlebar moustache grabbed her and dragged her into a small anteroom. He threw her down and ripped open her one-piece coveralls. She fainted. Much later, she came to her senses, pushed the drunk and sleeping man off her and painfully crawled out of the house. Like Vera, Elena hid. In a nearby house she found refuge behind a large cook stove.

  Young Rudolf Reschke, the boy who had beheaded the Hitler doll, was on hand to save his mother from molestation. A Russian who tried to drag Frau Reschke off found himself involved in a tug-of-war with Rudolf and his sister Christa. The more the soldier pulled at their mother’s arm, the harder Rudolf and Christa hung onto her skirts, screaming, and crying, “Mummy! Mummy!” The Russian gave up.

  Some women saved themselves from rape simply by fighting back so fiercely that the Soviet soldiers stopped trying and looked elsewhere. Jolenta Koch was tricked into entering an empty house by a Russian who led her to believe someone in it was wounded. Inside was another Red Army man who grabbed her and tried to throw her onto a bed. She put up such resistance that both men were glad to see her go.

  One of her neighbors, a woman named Schulz, was not so lucky. Mrs. Schulz was raped at gunpoint before the eyes of her helpless husband and 15-year-old son; as soon as the Russians had left, the half-crazed husband shot his wife, his son and himself to death.

  At Haus Dahlem, Mother Superior Cunegundes heard that one mother of three small children had been dragged from her family and raped through an entire night. In the morning the woman was released; she rushed back to her youngsters—only to find that her own mother and brother had hanged all three children and then themselves. The woman thereupon slashed her wrists and died.

  The nuns at Haus Dahlem were now working steadily around the clock. They had been overwhelmed by refugees, and by Russian bestiality. One Russian, attempting to rape the home’s Ukrainian cook, Lena, was so infuriated when Mother Superior Cunegundes intervened that he pulled out his pistol and fired at her. Fortunately, he was too drunk to shoot straight. Other soldiers entered the maternity wards and, despite all the nuns could do, repeatedly raped pregnant women and those who had recently given birth. “Their screaming,” related one nun, “went on day and night.” In the neighborhood, Mother Superior Cunegundes said, rape victims included women of seventy and little girls of ten and twelve.

  She was helpless to prevent the attacks. But she called together the nuns and the other women in the building and reiterated Father Happich’s words to them. “There is also something else,” she continued, “and that is the help of Our Blessed Lord. Despite everything, He keeps St. Michael here. Do not be afraid.” There was no other solace she could give them.

  In Wilmersdorf, Allied spy Carl Wiberg and his chief, Hennings Jessen-Schmidt, who had successfully identified themselves to the Russians, were actually talking to a Russian colonel outside Wiberg’s house when another Red Army officer tried to rape Wiberg’s fiancée Inge in the basement. Hearing her screaming, Wiberg rushed inside; neighbors shouted that the man had taken the girl into another room and locked the door. Wiberg and the Russian colonel smashed the door open. Inge’s clothes were torn; the officer’s were undone. The colonel grabbed the other officer and, yelling, “Amerikanski! Amerikanski!” marched him outside, pistol-whipping him unmercifully. Then he stood the officer against a wall to shoot him. Wiberg rushed between the two men and begged the colonel to save the man’s life. “You just can’t shoot a man like this,” he said. The colonel finally relented, and the officer was led off under arrest.

  Certainly the most ironic sexual assault of this entire period of rape and plunder occurred in the village of Prieros, just beyond the southern outskirts of the city. The village had been bypassed by Koniev’s advancing troops, and for some time it was not occupied. Finally the soldiers arrived. Among the Germans they found were two women living in a wooden packing case. Else Kloptsch and her friend Hildegard Radusch, “the man of the house,” had almost starved to death waiting for this moment. Hildegard had dedicated her whole life to furthering Marxism: the arrival of the Russians meant the realization of a dream. When the Soviet troops entered the village one of their first acts was the brutal rape of Communist Hildegard Radusch.*

  The Russians had gone wild. In the International Red Cross warehouses in Babelsberg near Potsdam, where British prisoners of war worked, drunken and trigger-happy Red Army soldiers destroyed thousands of parcels containing drugs, medical supplies and various dietary foods for sick soldiers. “They came in,” recalls Corporal John Aherne, “went into one of the cellars, saw the huge pile of parcels and just tommy-gunned the lot. Liquids of all sorts poured out of the shattered parcels. It was unbelievable.”

  Next to the warehouses were the big UFA film studios. Alexander Korab, a foreign student in Berlin, watched as hundreds of intoxicated soldiers who had broken into the costume department appeared in the streets wearing”all sorts of fantastic costumes, from Spanish doublets with white ruff collars to Napoleonic uniforms and hats, to crinoline skirts. They began to dance in the streets to the accompaniment of accordions, and they fired their guns in the air—all while the battle was still raging.”

  Thousands of Red Army troops appeared never to have been in a big city before. They unscrewed light bulbs, and carefully packed them to take home, under the impression that they contained light and could be made to work anywhere. Water faucets were yanked out of walls for the same reason. Bathroom plumbing was a mystery to many; they sometimes used toilets to wash and peel potatoes, but they could find no use at all for bathtubs. Thousands of them were simply thrown out of windows. Since the soldiers didn’t know what bathrooms were for, and couldn’t find outhouses, they left excrement and urine everywhere. Some Russians
made an effort: Gerd Buchwald discovered that “about a dozen of my wife’s canning jars were filled with urine, the glass covers neatly screwed back into place.”

  In the Schering chemical plant in Charlottenburg, Dr. Georg Henneberg was horror-stricken to find that the Russians had broken into his test laboratories and were playing catch with laboratory eggs that had been infected with typhus bacteria. The frantic Henneberg finally found a Russian colonel who ordered the soldiers out of the building and locked it up.

  Amidst all the senseless plundering and brutality the battle still raged. At the center of the fighting, almost forgotten by the hard-pressed defenders and the harassed people, were the Führerbunker and its occupants.

  Life in the bunker had taken on an aimless, dreamlike quality. “Those who remained,” Gertrud Junge, Hitler’s secretary, later related, “continually expected some sort of decision, but nothing happened. Maps were spread out on tables, all doors were open, nobody could sleep any more, nobody knew the date or time. Hitler could not bear to be alone; he kept walking up and down through the small rooms and talking with everybody who remained. He spoke of his imminent death and of the end which was coming.

  “In the meantime, the Goebbels family had moved into the bunker, and the Goebbels children were playing and singing songs for ‘Uncle Adolf.’”

  No one seemed to have any doubt now that Hitler intended to commit suicide; he talked about it often. Everyone also appeared fully aware that Magda and Joseph Goebbels planned to take their lives—and those of their six children, Helga, Holde, Hilde, Heide, Hedda and Helmuth. The only ones who did not seem to know were the children themselves. They told Erwin Jakubek, a waiter in the bunker, that they were going on a long flight out of Berlin. Helga, the eldest, said: “We are going to get an injection to prevent air sickness.”

  Frau Goebbels, who had an inflamed tooth, sent for Dr. Helmut Kunz, a dentist working in the big hospital bunker under the Chancellery. He extracted the molar, and afterward she said: “The children must not fall into the hands of the Russians alive. If worse comes to worst and we cannot get out, you will have to help me.”

  Eva Braun, hearing of the job Kunz had done on Magda’s teeth, suggested that maybe he could help her with some tooth problems, too. Then, suddenly remembering, she said to him: “Oh, but I’ve forgotten. What’s the sense? In a few hours it will be all over!”

  Eva intended to use poison. She displayed a cyanide capsule and said, “It’s so simple—you just bite into this and it’s all over.” Dr. Ludwig Stumpfegger, one of Hitler’s doctors who happened to be present, said, “But how do you know it will work? How do you know there is poison in it?” That startled everybody, and one of the capsules was immediately tried out on Hitler’s dog Blondi. Stumpfegger, said Kunz, broke a capsule in the dog’s mouth with a pair of tongs; the animal died instantly.

  The final blow for Hitler was unwittingly delivered on the afternoon of April 29 by a man sitting at a typewriter some eight thousand miles away, in the city of San Francisco. The man was Paul Scott Rankine, a Reuters correspondent who was in the city to cover the founding conference of the United Nations organization. That day he heard from the head of the British Information Services, Jack Winocour—who, in turn, had it straight from British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden—that Himmler had made an offer of surrender to the Western Allies. Rankine sent out the story, and within minutes it was being broadcast all over the world.

  It was this story that gave Hitler his first inkling of Himmler’s perfidy. The news reached him during the early evening, while he was holding a conference with Weidling, Krebs, Burgdorf, Goebbels and the latter’s assistant Werner Naumann. According to Weidling’s account, “Naumann was called to the phone and a few moments later returned. He told us that in a broadcast from Radio Stockholm, it had been reported that Reichsführer SS Himmler had begun negotiations with the Anglo-American High Command.”

  Hitler tottered to his feet, his face ashen. He “looked at Dr. Goebbels for a long time,” said Weidling, “then he mumbled something in a low voice which no one could understand.” He seemed stupefied. “I saw Hitler later,” Gertrud Junge said. “He was pale, hollow-eyed and looked as if he had lost everything.” He had. “We will certainly have to shed tears this evening,” Eva Braun told Gertrud and another of Hitler’s secretaries.

  Himmler’s liaison officer at the Führerbunker, SS Gruppenführer Hermann Fegelein, who was married to Eva Braun’s sister, was immediately suspected of complicity in Himmler’s treason. Fegelein had disappeared from the bunker a few days before; a search had been made, and he had been found at home wearing civilian clothes and preparing to leave Berlin. He had been returned to the bunker and kept under arrest. Now Hitler concluded that Fegelein’s planned departure from Berlin was tied in with Himmler’s defection. According to SS Colonel Otto Günsche, “Fegelein was court-martialed and shot during the night of the twenty-eighth-twenty-ninth. His sister-in-law refused to intercede on his behalf.”

  It apparently was clear to Hitler now that the end was near. By dawn he had dictated his personal and political testament, leaving the reins of government in the hands of Admiral Karl Doenitz as President and Joseph Goebbels as Reichschancellor. He also married Eva Braun. “After the ceremony,” recalls Gertrud Junge, “Hitler and his new bride sat for an hour with the Goebbels, Generals Krebs and Burgdorf, Dr. Naumann and Luftwaffe Colonel Nicolaus von Below.” Gertrud Junge stayed with the group for only fifteen minutes, just long enough to “express her best wishes to the newlyweds.” She says that “Hitler talked about the end of National Socialism, which he now thought could not be resurrected easily, and said, ‘Death for me only means freedom from worries and a very difficult life. I have been deceived by my best friends and I have experienced treason.’”

  That same day Hitler got more bad news: Mussolini and his mistress had been captured by partisans, executed and hung up by the heels. That night Hitler bade farewell to everyone in the bunker. The following day, with Russian tanks barely half a mile away, he decided that the moment had come. He lunched, with his two secretaries and his vegetarian cook; waiter Erwin Jakubek remembered that the last meal was “spaghetti with a light sauce.” Hitler made more farewells after lunch; to Gertrud Junge he said: “Now it has gone so far, it is finished. Good-bye.” Eva Braun embraced the secretary and said: “Give my greetings to Munich and take my fur coat as a memory—I always liked well-dressed people.” Then they disappeared into their quarters.

  Colonel Otto Günsche took up his stand outside the door of the anteroom leading to Hitler’s suite. “It was the most difficult thing I have ever had to do,” he later recalled. “It was about three-thirty or three-forty. I tried to do away with my feelings. I knew that he had to commit suicide. There was no other way out.”

  As he waited, there was a brief anticlimax. A distraught Magda Goebbels suddenly came rushing up to him demanding to see the Führer. Günsche, unable to dissuade her, knocked on Hitler’s door. “The Führer was standing in the study. Eva was not in the room, but there was a tap running in the bathroom so I assume she was there. He was very annoyed at me for intruding. I asked him if he wanted to see Frau Goebbels. ‘I don’t want to speak to her any more,’ he said. I left.

  “Five minutes later I heard a shot.

  “Bormann went in first. Then I followed the valet Linge. Hitler was sitting in a chair. Eva was lying on the couch. She had taken off her shoes and placed them neatly together at one end of the couch. Hitler’s face was covered with blood. There were two guns. One was a Walther PPK. It was Hitler’s. The other was a smaller pistol he always carried in his pocket. Eva wore a blue dress with white collar and cuffs. Her eyes were wide open. There was a strong stench of cyanide. The smell was so strong that I thought my clothes would smell for days—but this may have been my imagination.

  “Bormann didn’t say anything, but I immediately went into the conference room where Goebbels, Burgdorf and others that I cannot now remember were sitting.
I said, ‘The Führer is dead.’”

  A short while later, both bodies were wrapped in blankets and placed in a shallow depression outside the bunker entrance, near an abandoned cement mixer. Gasoline was poured over them and set ablaze. Erich Kempka, Hitler’s chauffeur, found that even after the bodies had been set on fire “we were imprisoned by the very presence of Hitler again.” The bunker’s air intakes picked up the smell of the burning bodies and sucked it into the rooms. “We could not get away from it,” recalled Kempka. “It smelled like burning bacon.”

  By nightfall the new Chancellor, Joseph Goebbels, had made his first major decision since assuming office: he had decided to try to negotiate the capitulation of the city—on his own terms. A radio message was sent out on the Soviet frequency, asking for a meeting. Soon afterward the Russians responded; they agreed to accept emissaries, and specified a place where German officers might pass through their lines.

  Shortly before midnight, Lieutenant General Hans Krebs and Weidling’s Chief of Staff, Theodor von Dufving (who had just been made a full colonel), crossed through the ruins, accompanied by an interpreter and two soldiers, and entered the Soviet lines. They were met by soldiers who asked to see their credentials and tried to remove their pistols. Krebs, who spoke excellent Russian, said stiffly: “A courageous opponent is allowed to keep his weapons during negotiations.” The Russians, abashed, permitted them to retain their sidearms.

  They were taken by car to an apartment house in Tempelhof, and were shown into a small dining room. Its furnishings still showed traces of civilian occupancy—a long table, a large wardrobe against one wall, some chairs, and on another wall a lithograph of Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper.” There were also several field telephones in the room. To Krebs and Von Dufving the place seemed filled with senior officers. There were no greetings and the Russians did not introduce themselves. Krebs had no way of knowing, therefore, that the man sitting opposite him was the renowned Colonel General Vasili Ivanovich Chuikov, defender of Stalingrad and commander of the Eighth Guards Army. Nor could he know that the other Russian “officers” consisted of two war correspondents, Chuikov’s aide (who was also his brother-in-law) and two interpreters.* The fact was that Chuikov had been caught by surprise by the sudden request for talks and had not been able to assemble his full staff.