Konev's forces had begun their attack on April 16 with none of the problems Zhukov faced. Artificial fog was laid during a prolonged and thunderous artillery attack. Under its shelter a swarm of small boats crossed the Neisse, some of them towing the assault bridges for the infantry. In just fifteen minutes the broad river barricade was crossed and small bridgeheads were established. In two hours pontoon bridges capable of carrying thirty-ton loads were in place. In four hours bridges for sixty-ton loads had been constructed. In all, 133 crossings were set up within hours of the attack. Konev's forces pushed the German defenders back more than eight miles on the first day. In three days they swept west and north-west. On April 17 tanks drove across the Spree through water three feet deep. By April 18 they were almost thirty miles beyond it, approaching Berlin.26
Unlike Zhukov, Konev found that he could fight the battle on the approach to Berlin like the battles in the Ukraine and Poland: a rapid penetration of defensive lines, then the swift deployment of the following armour. Stalin could see the contrast. He rebuked Zhukov for ordering his tanks to support the infantry attack, and he rewarded Konev by ordering him to rush for the capital. Over the next two days 3rd and 4th Guards Tank Armies pushed on without halting, a remarkable sixty miles. On April 21 they were in Berlin. Rybalko's 3rd Guards Tank Army seized the German army's main headquarters at Zossen, leaving stranded German commanders to improvise as best they could. Konev pointed his two tank armies north towards the heart of the city and the Reichstag building, which housed the German Parliament. It was at this point that Zhukov's forces at last caught up. Over the next three days the two forces fought for control of the southern areas of the city. On April 25, uncertain exactly where Zhukov's forces were, Konev ordered a final heavy assault across the centre to the Tiergarten and the Reichstag. As his forces began firing it soon became clear that in front of them were not German troops but Soviet. Chuikov had spent the previous day driving west to cut across the line of Konev's advance. Both armies arrived at the Landwehr Canal, which shielded the Tiergarten, but Chuikov was in position first and it was here that Zhukov and Rybalko clashed. Konev telephoned Rybalko and ordered him to stop and turn west to clear the rest of the city. There were strong protests, but in the end Rybalko complied. In his memoirs Konev displayed no rancour, but it is easy to sense that his disappointment was as deep as Rybalko's.27 The plum was to fall to Zhukov.
On the morning of April 29 Chuikov's 8th Guards Army prepared to storm the Tiergarten from the south. From the north another of Zhukov's armies, General Kuznetsov's 3rd Shock Army, crossed the river Spree, moving in the same direction. 8th Guards had just 400 yards to cross, but they were filled with tall government and party buildings and crammed with the last remnants of the army and militia defending the Führer. In their midst was the Reich Chancellery, in whose cavernous basement Hitler sat contemplating the utter, irretrievable collapse of his fantastic dreams of empire. To the north stood the broad classical façade of the Reichstag building. It was this edifice, rather than Hitler's battered Chancellery, that was chosen by the Soviet side as the symbolic heart of the Nazi empire, though its credentials were more democratic than those of most of its surroundings. The troops were told that whoever raised the standard of victory above the Reichstag building would be decorated a Hero of the Soviet Union.
The night before the final assault Chuikov again could not sleep. He chain-smoked from the tension. During the night of April 29 isolated assault groups crossed to the far side of the canal and secured a bridge. Their orders were to capture a major building which could be used as a stepping-off point for the final storming of the centre. They made slow progress against suicidal resistance. But the Reichstag was not to be their prize either. From the north General Pereveretkin's 150th Rifle Division reached the building first. At one o'clock on April 30 artillery opened up. Under covering fire a small group of Soviet infantrymen crawled forward holding one of nine red banners handed out to the closest troops. They burst through the central entrance to the Reichstag and in grim hand-to-hand fighting secured the first floor. Thousands of German soldiers occupied the upper floors and the basement. At about two-thirty the banner was waved from a second-floor window. It took another eight hours for the Soviet assault force to clear enough of the upper levels to reach the roof. Fighting with hand grenades and machine-guns, 300 soldiers succeeded in holding at bay a much larger German force until two Soviet sergeants, Yegerov and Kantariya, finally succeeded, at ten minutes to eleven, in hoisting the banner from the Reichstag. The scene, later photographed from an airplane, became one of the most famous images of the war.28
That same day Hitler took his own life. All around him the centre of Berlin was covered by a pall of dust and smoke, dark grey and stifling. On every side fires blazed out of control. The air was torn by an endless roar of artillery and rocket fire, and the shriller notes of machine-guns. The Reich Chancellery, built as a vast monument to the new German empire in the 1930s, was a ruined shell, its marble floors and pillars splintered and shattered. In the bunker, which Hitler had occupied since late March, surrounded by security men and secretaries and a handful of the party faithful, the mood swung from deep depression to desperate optimism with each report from the front line. Since communications were poor, Hitler conjured up in his mind whole armies of Siegfrieds battling through to free the capital from the Soviet dragon. In his more sombre moments the truth was unbearably real. On April 20, as he said farewell to one of his secretaries, who was to take the last flight out of the city, he announced: ‘It is all over.’29
He had no intention of surrendering his capital and entering captivity. In the last weeks he turned against his own people for their failure to sustain his glorious ambition. In lengthy monologues, faithfully recorded by his secretary, Martin Bormann, he explored the long path he had taken from the heady days of Munich and Poland to the field of Armageddon in Berlin. He blamed the Jews as usual, but this time he also blamed the German people for not being worthy of the trust he had put in them. He hailed the Slavic peoples, whose resilience and fighting power had brought them to the gates of Berlin, as the new master race. Germany would have to wait.30 Goebbels echoed his master's voice when he told those of his staff who were still in the bunker that the war was lost and that the German people ‘deserved the fate that will now descend upon them’.31 On April 29, with all hope gone, Hitler ordered his commanders never to surrender the city. He refused to flee. Instead he played out the final act according to the script. ‘I must now obey the dictates of Fate. Even if I could save myself, I would not do so.’32
Late in the evening of the 28th he called a typist into the conference room in the bunker. The map table, usually covered with materials, was empty. He stood in front of it and dictated to her his last political testament. After a further diatribe against the Jews for bringing the peoples of Europe so low, he announced that he would choose death in Berlin. From his sacrifice, and that of millions of other Germans, would come the seed of National Socialism's rebirth. He announced a new German government to succeed him, to be led by Admiral Karl Doenitz, head of the German navy.33 He then declared in a second, personal, testament that he would marry his long-time mistress, Eva Braun, before dying. The ceremony was performed just before midnight. Hitler had a final meal at lunchtime the following day with his cook and two secretaries, though there must certainly have been little point in eating. Then he solemnly shook hands with the population of the bunker, and retired with his new wife to his private rooms. At half past three, while Soviet soldiers battled for the upper floors of the Reichstag, and Soviet tanks ground down the roads around the Chancellery, Eva Braun took poison and Hitler shot himself in the head.34
That evening the German garrison sent out an emissary under a white flag to open negotiations. At half past three in the morning of May 1, the chief festival day of the socialist calendar, General Hans Krebs, the last German army chief of staff appointed by Hitler, arrived at Chuikov's headquarters. He reported Hitler'
s suicide and then tried to insist that he would negotiate only with the Soviet leadership. He refused to order a military surrender. Chuikov telephoned Zhukov, who said that anything other than unconditional surrender was out of the question. Zhukov then telephoned Stalin, to be told that he was asleep. He got the orderly to wake him up and gave him the still uncorroborated report of Hitler's death. ‘Now he's done it, the bastard,’ replied Stalin. ‘Too bad he could not have been taken alive.’35 He issued orders for nothing less than full surrender, then went back to sleep. Krebs held out stubbornly for an armistice, to be negotiated with the new German government detailed in Hitler's final testament. He hinted at ‘a peace advantageous to you and to us‘, though what advantage the beaten German army expected was not spelled out. When Chuikov pressed him for a full surrender he replied, ‘We will fight on to the last.’36 They fell to small talk. By five o'clock in the morning the two men were exhausted. They sat together in unlikely companionship, conqueror and vanquished, sipping cognac and eating sandwiches.
The issue could not be resolved that morning. After almost twelve hours Krebs left, and the Soviet order went out to finish the conquest of Berlin. A heavy artillery and rocket barrage smothered the government quarter and the zoological gardens, and Soviet forces moved methodically from block to block clearing out the last defenders. At four o'clock Krebs sent back a reply, countersigned by Goebbels, rejecting surrender. The war began again. At six-thirty in the evening every Soviet gun and rocket launcher erupted in a vast display of firepower, and the German garrison was reduced to small pockets of resistance. During the night Chuikov was roused twice from much-needed sleep. At one-thirty arrived news that the garrison commander, to prevent further slaughter, wanted to surrender. At six in the morning of May 2 the German defenders laid down their arms. Shortly beforehand a delegation of civilians, headed by Goebbels's deputy, Hans Fritzsche, made their way to see Chuikov, to say that Goebbels had killed himself, Krebs had disappeared (as it turned out, also to commit suicide) and that they were willing to surrender. Within the hour Zhukov confirmed that Soviet hostilities would cease. By midday the struggle was over. The final shots were fired by German soldiers who could not be reached by radio or telephone. When Chuikov went out into the street he was struck by the silence, which rang in his ears after the tumult of battle. In his memoirs he recalled the heady thoughts spurred by the sudden coming of peace to Berlin: ‘the flame of world war was quenched there, whence it arose.’37
The war was, however, not yet over. While the fight for Berlin was reaching its height, Allied forces from east and west converged on the Elbe river. On April 25, at Torgau, the two sides first made contact. Over the next week the whole line of the Elbe was occupied. Further to the south 600,000 German troops entered Czechoslovakia, where they continued a fruitless resistance. They were pursued by Konev's 1st Ukrainian Front, which had to swing south again, after its efforts in Berlin, to complete one more task. The fighting in the south was not finally over until May 11, two days after the day officially declared in Moscow to be the end of the European war.38
The war ended as untidily as had the conflict in Berlin. Chuikov and Zhukov both felt that the war was over with the fall of Hitler's capital. Zhukov toured the Reichstag and the Chancellery as the conqueror of Berlin. He was eager to find the body of Hitler, but on his visit to the bunker only the bodies of Goebbels, his wife and their six children were identified. He began to have doubts about the truth of Hitler's suicide. On May 3 Pravda carried on its front page an article which declared that Hitler was not in Berlin: ‘If he fled, we shall unearth him, wherever he tries to hide.’ An opinion poll published soon afterwards showed that most Muscovites shared this scepticism and thought Hitler was in hiding.39 At his headquarters Stalin ordered a top-level security officer to Berlin to hunt for Hitler. A popular fear began to develop, which Stalin may well have shared, that a living Hitler might ignite the dying embers of resistance if he should reappear.
The Chancellery was a burning shell in early May, difficult to search effectively. On May 2 a detachment of Soviet troops had found a body which seemed to resemble Hitler's, but the worn clothes indicated a man of lesser station. According to a Soviet report not released until 1968, Ivan Klimenko, a colonel in Smersh, discovered two bodies on May 4, one male, one female, in a small crater at the back of the Chancellery. Both were burned beyond recognition. They were wrapped in sheets and reburied, since it was thought that Hitler would not simply have been dumped in the garden. But the following day Klimenko returned, disinterred the remains and took them for autopsies. The dental work was examined by one of Hitler's dentists and the identity of both Hitler and Eva Braun was confirmed. The report concluded that Hitler had died of cyanide poisoning; there was no heroic suicide by handgun, the report continued, despite all the evidence collected by the British at the end of the war that Hitler did indeed shoot himself (and despite the portion of skull with a bullet-hole through it, alleged to be Hitler's, that was kept sealed away in Moscow for almost fifty years).40 Though Stalin must have known of the report shortly after it was produced, he continued to pretend that he had no knowledge of Hitler's whereabouts. Not even Zhukov was told. No details were officially released until fifteen years after Stalin's own death.
The reasons for Stalin's silence can only be guessed at, though the official explanation, that Stalin wanted to ‘hold it in reserve’ in case the evidence were needed to unmask an impostor, is not entirely unbelievable.41 Hitler's jawbone and the portion of skull were kept in a box in Moscow, where they were finally made public, along with his cap, Iron Cross and personal effects, only after the Soviet Union had collapsed, in 1991. The rest of his burned body took a different trail. Under the code name Operation Myth, Smersh undertook an intensive investigation in 1945 and 1946 into the fate of Hitler. They were satisfied that the body they found was that of the Führer. His remains, and those of Eva Braun and the Goebbels family, packed in empty ammunition boxes, travelled in the baggage of the Smersh unit until February 1946, when they were buried beside the garage of a house in Klausenerstrasse, Magdeburg, on a Soviet military base. In April 1970, under orders from the head of the KGB, Yuri Andropov, the bodies were disinterred and the mummified remains were burned again, pulverized, and scattered in a nearby river. The Soviet authorities wanted to avoid any chance that Hitler's burial site could become a place of pilgrimage for neo-Nazis.42
While the hunt went on for Hitler, alive or dead, in the first week of May 1945, the question of a general German surrender became paramount. The conquest of Berlin did not mean the end of a German government. Admiral Doenitz, Hitler's anointed successor, and other ministers had fled to Flensburg in north Germany. Negotiations with the Western Allies brought about the decision to surrender to Eisenhower, not to the Soviet authorities. On the morning of May 7 General Jodl, Hitler's chief of operations, was authorized by Doenitz to sign an act of unconditional surrender. The ceremony was a modest one. At twenty to three in the morning, in a small schoolhouse in Reims, which Eisenhower had made his headquarters, in the presence of the American General Walter Bedell Smith, a gaggle of Allied service chiefs and seventeen selected newsmen, Jodl signed the surrender with a gold-plated pen. Smith, Eisenhower's chief of staff, then signed with a different pen of solid gold, followed by a Soviet representative, General Susloparov, and the French General Sevez. The unfortunate Susloparov was caught unprepared. He had been posted to Eisen-hower’s headquarters in April as an observer and had no specific instructions from Moscow. If he did not sign he risked a German surrender with no apparent Soviet participation; if he signed he risked Stalin's fury for acting without permission. In the end he signed with a caveat that would allow Moscow to repeat the ceremony. Shortly after the signing a directive arrived for him from the Stavka telling him to sign nothing.43
The ceremony in Reims was galling for Stalin, who saw himself as the senior ally, and, with justice, regarded the Soviet war effort as the real source of victory over Germany. To co
mpound the insult he received a letter from the head of the American military mission in Moscow asking him to co-ordinate the Soviet declaration of the German surrender with the Americans and the British on the 8 May. He called his military staff and senior ministers together to the Kremlin. He was in an angry mood, pacing the carpet back and forth. He accused his Western allies of stitching up a ‘shady deal’ with the beaten enemy. He would not recognize the surrender in Reims: ‘The surrender must be arranged as a most important historical fact, and accepted not on the territory of the conquerors but at the place where the fascist aggression sprang from: in Berlin.’44 He pressed his allies to accept a second ceremony in the German capital which would demonstrate to the world the important part the Soviet people and their leader had played in the downfall of Hitler. He telephoned Zhukov with instructions to act on his behalf and to find a building still standing in which to stage the surrender.
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