by Heinz Rein
The building of this stretch of track, which had been planned a long time previously, was used as a showpiece project by the Third Reich which, when Budapester Strasse was being rechristened as Hermann-Göring-Strasse, had already led to the loss of countless lives of workers. They were buried under slipping heaps of sand, crushed by falling beams and, as not even the magnificent state funeral and the oily speech by the individual who had just risen from a Viennese homeless refuge to become Führer and Reich Chancellor could conceal, had fallen victim to the inadequate preparation and over-hasty execution of the construction work and a boundless desire for prestige. Twelve years later it was the same creatures, not this time in the brown outfit of the Party, but in the field-grey uniforms of the Waffen SS, who went to work. What had then perhaps been inadequacy and neglect, born of the inferiority complex of the parvenu, was this time a bloody crime.
In those April days the platforms and control rooms of Anhalt Station were turned into an army camp, women, children and old people stand pressed tightly together in nooks and corners or sit on small folding chairs, not this time for the few hours of an air attack, but since the beginning of the battle for Berlin. Hearts thump, eyes flicker, faces are fearful, because up above the battle rages, the cannon roar, the mortars bark, the salvoes of the machine guns rattle, shell after shell shakes the roof of the tunnel, chalk dust trickles down, masonry falls with a dull thud, clouds of dust block the entrances, the smell of gunpowder and billows of smoke roll down the steps. People wait breathlessly, each one forced back in on himself, alone in the crowd.
Then a long train from the Anhalt-Dresden line draws slowly into the station, it consists not only of a red, green and yellow S-Bahn wagon, but also black and grey railway carriages with green and yellow camouflage paint and red crosses on a white background, an ambulance train led from the open platform into the safety of the tunnel. Even though the noise of battle is swelling and the falling shells almost bury the entrance, people are still sighing with something like relief: the tunnel, the platforms are apparently particularly safe, because if an ambulance train is being brought here with a lot of wounded people tied to their beds …
Hour after hour passes, one minute drifts vaguely by like another. The noise of battle, which became less insistent for a moment, swells again, the falling shells drum like hail on the street, but the ceiling of the tunnel holds. But then the SS appear, ruthlessly clear the railway station and drive the people into the tunnels. All of a sudden a distant explosion blasts air through the tunnel like a fountain, but no one pays any attention, all eyes are facing forward.
Suddenly a cry shoots up like an arrow: ‘Water!’ The people are frozen. Water? They still don’t believe it, they look at one another, seek the same doubt in each other’s eyes, the confirmation of the improbability, the impossibility. The water is already gurgling in, glittering darkly with little crests of foam, it is still shallow, washing only over the tracks. People start moving, become a raging, shouting, roaring, pushing, shoving crowd, shouts, weeping, prayers, curses, the laughter of people who have lost their minds. Where is their rescue going to come from? Where is the way out? The exits are blocked, the fire of battle rages above, fragments of stone rain down like a sudden shower. There is only one possibility: to reach, through the tunnel, an exit on Potsdamer Platz Station, to run away from the water, be quicker than the water, to run a race against death by drowning. The tunnel gapes dark and unfathomable, but there is no other way out, the people start walking, running, stumbling over the sleepers and ballast stones, they fall, pull themselves back up again, lie where they are, are mercilessly trampled underfoot, children are pulled from their mothers’ hands, the wounded try to get out of the train, but the waves are now hurtling in like the Riders of the Apocalypse, they are no longer gurgling, they are rushing now, roiling noisily, reaching out a wet fist, engulfing everything. Another few shouts, some suffocated screams, then a ghostly silence falls upon the S-Bahn tunnel, a silence of the dead, a deadly silence, only the water gurgling, splashing and rushing, the shells sing their terrible song above the watery grave.
Women, children, old people, wounded soldiers drift restlessly like swollen blue corpses with shapelessly bloated bodies between Anhalt Station and Stettiner Station beneath the cobblestones of the city of Berlin, because the SS have blown up the tunnelling under the Landwehrkanal.
In a garden between Wilhelmstrasse and Hermann-Göring-Strasse, flanked by noble old houses whose classical façades contrast starkly with the pompous and overblown products of an inferior wave of building mania, in the middle of a patch of sparse grass there stands a rectangular greyish-green lump of concrete, to which has been added a semicircular feature resembling a wasp’s nest and topped by a cone. This lump of concrete screens off the entrance to a cave which, in line with the new German linguistic practice, is described as a bunker; it lies two storeys beneath the earth, thirty-seven steps lead twelve metres down into an absolutely bomb-proof air-raid shelter. Situated as it is in this smart neighbourhood of Prussian private houses both old and new, this is no ordinary air-raid shelter, with rough masonry walls, damp and mildewed, sloppily whitewashed, supported by a few struts cobbled from tree trunks, roughly carved benches, inadequate lighting, with no heating and bad ventilation. Neither is it a people’s bunker in which hundreds or thousands are crammed together into a very cramped space, with bare Prussian rooms, the size of a handkerchief, two bed-frames one above the other or primitive benches and narrow passageways, neither is it a makeshift shelter in draughty S-Bahn or underground stations. Far from it, this bunker is a masterpiece of the air-raid shelter architect’s art, no expense has been spared in using the most precious raw materials of Hitler’s Germany – steel and concrete – and burying them deep in the earth, safe and secure.
This bunker, which lies beneath a concrete plate three metres thick (and for which there is enough material ready to add a further metre and a half) contains a number of rooms which differ from one another in terms of their furniture, and immediately reveal that they are only at the disposal of one user (and his retinue). It is an unusual, unique bunker. First come the rooms that might justly be described as ‘spartan’ – simple and utilitarian. They are not intended for private use, but as guardrooms, a telephone exchange and a sick bay, a machine room (with 120-horsepower diesel engine), doctor’s room and pharmacy (not forgetting a kennel for the dog). Beyond this, after you pass through four heavy iron doors, a corridor leads past a kind of office to the actual private apartment, study, bedroom, boudoir, kitchen, bathroom, all furnished in a style both elegant and functional. The rooms are fitted with soft and precious rugs, the bathroom decorated with white tiles and equipped with a first-class ventilation system and electrical heating, comfortable upholstered benches, deep armchairs, lamps giving off a soft light, valuable paintings, movable tea tables, bookshelves, cosy nooks, a bar, a hairdresser’s salon with a wide range of cosmetics, a sofa bed covered with heavy silk brocade, and stylish furniture in precious foreign woods complete the furnishings of this air-raid shelter. For a son of the working people, simple and unpretentious, who – as his spokesman announced – lives with ascetic self-denial between his camp bed and his desk, and indeed for his concubine, nothing has been left out that might relieve their sober, spartan life during those hours when hate-filled enemy pilots drop steel containers full of gunpowder, called bombs, down on the city. No bothersome noise finds its way into this hermitage, not the wail of the sirens, the hum of the aircraft engines and the roar of the cannon, neither the rush and whistle of the bombs nor the crash of the explosions, the clatter of collapsing houses and the crackle of flames, nor the cries of the victims and the curses of the people.
The air-raid shelter is in the garden of the Reich Chancellery, and is the private bunker of Adolf Hitler, Führer and Chancellor of the Great German Reich, but no longer from the Atlantic to the Volga and from the Arctic Ocean to the Suez Canal, no longer even from the Maas to the Memel or the E
tsch to the Belt, from the Panke to the Havel and from the Isar to the Pegnitz. From this bunker Adolf Hitler, the Führer and general, sent by providence and chosen by fate, leads the defence of Berlin, just as two years ago he led the attack on Stalingrad and a year ago the defence of the Atlantic Wall from the Führer’s headquarters in the ‘Wolf’s Lair’ near Rastenburg. It is now that the purpose of that room that has previously been called a kind of office becomes clear: it is the briefing room. It is here that discussions have taken place since 22 April, which the Führer holds in the usual way: with his voice breaking, with a hoarse, rolling Balkan ‘r’, with the wild gestures of a ham actor, sweating and rolling his eyes, he develops his constructive plans and the others nod at his flashes of genius. The others – Reich Minister Bormann, leader of the Party Chancellery, Field Marshal Keitel, High Command of the Armed Forces, General Jodl, Chief of the Operations Staff of Armed Forces High Command, General Krebs, umpteenth General Chief of Staff of Supreme High Command by Führer’s decree, General Burgdorf, Chief Adjutant of the Wehrmacht, SS Brigade leader Mohnke, Commandant of the Reich Chancellery, and SS Colonel Fegelein, contact man with Himmler, the Reich Minister of the Interior, head of the German police, Reichsführer SS and Supreme Commander of the reserve army. The extravagance of military luminaries no longer corresponds entirely to its object, which is already expressed by the maps that decorate each room, given that Fortress Europe has shrunk first to Fortress Germany and finally to Fortress Berlin, and in spite of all rough cursing, orders screamed until the Führer’s voice broke and hysterical attacks, the Russians’ concentric advance continues, and on this 24 April even Adolf Hitler acknowledges that the magnificence of his millennial Reich has come to an end and is reduced only to the district of Berlin-Mitte. He rages once more when Bormann outlines the ultimatum contained in Göring’s letter, which reads as follows:
HQ 23.4.1945, 10.00 p.m.
Mein Führer!
Do you agree that after your decision to remain in Berlin to defend the city I now assume the leadership of the Reich in accordance with your decree of 29.6.1941 with full freedom of action both internally and externally?
If I have received no reply by 10.00 p.m., I will assume that you have lost your freedom of action. I will then take the conditions of your decree as given and act for the good of people and fatherland. You know what I feel for you in these most difficult hours of my life, and I cannot express it in words.
May God protect you and let you come here as soon as possible in spite of everything.
Your loyal servant
Hermann Göring
He curses the Reich Marshal and his Luftwaffe, expels him from the Party and shouts, ‘The whole Luftwaffe should be hanged!’, but after that he is finished and says to his loyal followers: ‘The cause is lost.’ Henceforth he is barely interested in any further news that reaches him, neither that his loyal follower, the Reich Marshal and Supreme Commander of the Luftwaffe, is trying to form an alternative government in Upper Bavaria, nor the telephone call from the Reich simpleton Joachim von Ribbentrop, who tells him in a joyfully excited voice that, according to information that has reached him from Switzerland, the conflict between the Western powers and the Bolsheviks, which he had always predicted, had now entered its acute phase. By this point Hitler has already worked himself up into a suicidal state, and reveals to his personal architect Speer that he has decided to defend Berlin to the last and, if the city should fall, commit suicide, and that he has also ordered the destruction of his corpse and the corpse of Eva Braun, ‘so that nothing recognizable remains’. But he is still riddled with suspicion, and anyone, even his closest colleagues, who enters the bunker must undergo a thorough search by SS guards.
During the early afternoon of 24 April, the newspaper Der Angriff und Berliner illustrierte Nachtausgabe is published for the penultimate time, with the headline: ‘Berlin’s heroic resistance is unparalleled’ and contains the following editorial:
The Führer Leads the Defence of the Reich Capital
The defence of the capital is being led by the Führer, who has decided to assume the task of rescuing the capital from amidst the population of Berlin. The Führer is being kept informed every hour of the situation on all battle lines in Berlin and the surrounding area. He is personally intervening in the issuing of orders at all crucial points. Many officers, NCOs and teams have been brought from the battle lines to the Führer’s command post so that they can report in person on their experiences. The Führer will be awarding decorations to particularly outstanding fighters in his command post. On all sides units are being brought to Berlin or led into the city centre so that the front line can be reinforced.
The editorial writer, Dr Otto Kriegk, says the following in the same edition:
The population of the capital, which works almost directly behind battle lines and provides all possible help, is firmly convinced of the fact that defence will be successful not in fighting on the current battle lines, but by repelling the Bolsheviks from the territory of the Reich capital. Attacks by low-flying aircraft with bombs and armaments, the impact of shells, the heavy fire of our artillery and our anti-aircraft guns have become quite natural. What the front-line soldier learned in terms of self-protection during the first battles, the men and women of Berlin have in recent days made their own. In the command posts and collective accommodation of the Volkssturm, in the quarters of the regiments and security units, plans for that which needs to be done to reinforce defence are being drawn up and executed with sober objectivity. The people of Berlin know that the defence of their city is conducted not only from within but also from without, and that to this end units have been made available which were originally being ordered in another direction. Everyone knows that the Führer is amidst the population of the Reich capital, and that the defence he has led now puts at his disposal forces that the enemy has been unable to factor into its calculation.
XIII
25 April
The battle is now getting closer to the area around Silesian Station. The impact of artillery shells is already mixed with the firing of mortars, and when the firing falls silent for several minutes, the rattle of machine guns can even be heard. The smoke and haze that lies like a thick, sticky vapour above the streets is kept down by the low-hanging clouds and forced back into the streets. The forms of civilized life are broken, the people crouching in the cellars were once used to washing and brushing their teeth every day, changing their socks and underwear at certain intervals, they were accustomed eating more or less well with a knife and fork, using running water, a gas tap and an electric switch, a bathtub and a water closet, standing behind a display counter or a workbench, sitting by a till or behind a school desk. None of that exists any more, now they sit there inactive and torpid, crammed together into a tight space, their shoulders hunched, their faces are pale green and sunken, their eyes, with red rims and deep circles, have lost their gleam, the smoke and haze that forces its way into the cellar has left a thick layer of dust on their faces as there is no water for washing, the men’s chins, cheeks and upper lips are dark with the fluff of a six-day growth, since there is neither enough water nor enough light to shave, mothers’ breasts are drying up since there is no milk, the last supplies, carefully distributed, are running out, and anyone who still owns a piece of bread or the end of a sausage eats it secretly because he doesn’t know whether his neighbour is going to tear it out of his mouth. Since there is nothing to keep people busy, no distraction, only darkness, fear and waiting, day and night merge into an endless grey. During the day, whose arrival they know about only thanks to what they are told by more daring men and women, it is impossible to do anything different from what they do during the night, which is to sit vegetating apathetically on air-raid beds, benches and boxes, deckchairs and armchairs, letting the longing for salvation rise up, the way one might stretch one’s arms towards a Fata Morgana, trying to block their noses and ears. The smaller the chance of keeping one’s distance
and concealing intimacies, or avoiding them, the more keenly every hour of troglodytic life throws up the problems of existence, the more evanescent the varnish of civilization, the more the veneer of good manners detaches itself from people, and the more furiously revulsion and nausea, envy and hatred rise to the surface. The darkness, the rank air become unbearable, but the battle is raging up above, the shells rattle down and the planes’ weapons sweep the ground like a hurricane and push every attempt to leave the cellar ruthlessly into the grave of the living corpses. Many who have had the temerity to venture outside have not returned.
Klose’s restaurant was cleared overnight by the first-aid unit, and Klose quickly used the opportunity to pull over the shutter and close the shop. So he gets the use of his restaurant back, and above all the use of his cellar, which not only offers better protection than the rooms on the first floor, but is also the place where he stores the supplies that were put by in anticipation of a siege and isolation from any ordinary provisions.
Dr Böttcher came back in the early afternoon. He had visited the surrounding houses, he did a medical round, in a sense, he leaped from hallway to hallway, he asked in the cellars to see if anyone needed medical help and helped, so far as possible. He prescribed the occasional spoonful of bromide or valerian, a few dozen tablets of Sulfadiazine, Redoxon or Albucid, and distributed reassuring words and advice. Dr Böttcher is exhausted, but even more than that he is depressed, because everything he has done has seeped like a drop of water into hot desert sand. No toxins and anti-toxins, allopathic and homeopathic preparations can give suffering people the things they really need to heal: peace, quiet, silence, harmony.
