below.
Hoffman recalled his own glory days as a Stuka dive-bomber ace during the Blitzkrieg five years before, when the whole world seemed to be falling to German force of arms. Then, he had thought little about the Nazis; he had been driven by a young man’s exuberance and the small world of camaraderie and loyalty and honour. And now here he was, commander of the newly formed 9th Luftwaffe Parachute Division Lebelstar, the last-ditch defenders of the Reich. They were all here on the roof now, his division: the thirty-odd boys of the Hitler Youth and Luftwaffe auxiliary who still survived from the flak battery. As soon as the Soviets advanced beneath the minimum trajectory of the guns, his orders were to remuster these boys as elite paratroopers, somehow find weapons for them and lead them out to final glory in the scorched and blasted streets below. And he had been given no choice. The Feldgendarmerie would execute anyone who faltered, himself included. The Nazis did not even trust their own heroes.
A boy detached himself from the group in front of one of the big guns and came running towards him. He could be no more than twelve, and was wearing lederhosen shorts and an outsized helmet that wobbled as he ran. His face was tense, wax-like beneath a shock of blond hair, and smeared with filth and tears. Dried blood caked his neck below his ears where they had been bleeding. Hoffman had taught the boy to leave the chin strap unfastened on his helmet, to open his mouth and grimace to equalize the pressure in his Eustachian tubes, to lean forward to avoid the blast of the guns ripping his lungs, but there was nothing he could do to save the boy’s hearing. The lad had latched on to him when Hoffman had arrived for the first time on the roof two days before. Maybe he reminded him of his father, probably dead like the fathers of most German children, remembered only by a photograph of a man in a uniform like his own. ‘Herr Oberstleutnant,’ the boy piped breathlessly, coming to a halt in front of him. ‘ Wann kommt der Russ? Wann kommt der Iwan? ’
It was a child’s question of a father, asking the unanswerable. Hoffman knelt down in front of him. There were no Feldgendarmen up here on the gun platform; like most Nazi thugs they were frightened of it, of the reality of war. It was the one place where nobody was listening or watching. He tapped the boy’s helmet. ‘Can you hear me?’
‘ Was? ’ The boy screwed up his face. Hoffman raised his voice.
‘When you know Ivan is coming, take off this helmet, right? You don’t want to look like Hitler Youth.’ He reached into his trouser pocket and took out a half-finished packet of cigarettes. ‘These are American. Save them and offer them to Ivan, right? Then find an officer. You know how to recognize Russian officers? Show him the room where I’ve been working. Tell him there are important secrets there, in the order books. You understand me?’
The boy clutched the cigarettes, put them carefully in his pocket and looked at Hoffman, nodding. Hoffman felt a knot of anguish in his stomach. He remembered Goebbels’ children, the girl with the sad eyes. He remembered the pilot in his squadron who had made a forced landing near a Ukrainian village, and had seen the SS-Einsatzgruppen at work. He had returned to the squadron shocked. ‘Their children cry just like our children,’ he had said. Hoffman put out his hand to touch the boy’s face, then remembered watching Hitler doing the same only a few days before in front of a ragged line of Hitler Youth, the Fuhrer’s left arm shaking uncontrollably behind his back, his right hand stroking cheeks, tweaking ears. It had been repulsive. Hoffman let his hand drop to the boy’s shoulder, and squeezed it. He nodded towards the gun. ‘You’d better get back to your post. It won’t be long now.’
He turned to look for the battery commander. Then he heard the boy yelling: ‘Alert! Alert!’ Hoffman spun back and saw the boy at the parapet, looking out. Others rushed to join him, and Hoffman followed. For the first time since coming up here, he gazed down at the ruins of the city looming out of the smoke, at the gutted shells of buildings with their upper windows open to the sky. East over the Tiergarten he saw only a shifting miasma of smoke, and he followed the boy’s gaze down to the street to the south beyond the Zoo grounds, where they knew the Russians would come. About five hundred metres away he saw the lingering smoke of an explosion, and the dust of a collapsed building. They all watched, and waited. Then the man next to the boy jostled him and put a hand on his arm. ‘Ivan’s out there, you can count on it. But don’t tempt him. Let’s get back to the guns.’
They left the parapet, but Hoffman remained, looking down at the smouldering wasteland between the base of the tower and the beginning of the city block. In the nearest buildings lay the first line of German defenders: the odd surviving machine gun, a sniper he had seen go out camouflaged in black like a wraith. Between the buildings and the tower lay the ruins of the Berlin Zoo, pocked by shell craters filled with black and yellow scorch marks. Down there was the last line of defenders, boys and old men of the Volkssturm militia armed with the final wonder-weapon the Reich had thought fit to issue them: the Volkshandgranate, made from a charge of explosive embedded in a piece of concrete, useless against tanks and barely effective against men. The Zoo animals were still there too, in broken cages and blasted compounds: dead gorillas and elephants, shell-shocked baby baboons clinging to their mothers. He stared, watching a monkey outside its shattered cage, limping round and round, half- crazed. He could hear songbirds, and wondered if they were deafened to the sound of their own music. He remembered the flowers that day he had come here with his son. It had been late spring then, as it was now, and the rhododendrons should be coming out. He smelt that farmyard smell again, the dung from thousands of Russian horses. It conjured up an image he had seen in the room below in the book by Heinrich Schliemann on ancient Troy, a woodcut of the ruins before the excavation: a pastoral scene of grazing animals and shepherds among the tumbled walls. He wondered whether Berlin could become like that, or whether this place would be too poisoned and blighted by history ever to nurture life again.
Then he saw it. He whipped out his binoculars. The boy had been right. The ghostly shape of a Soviet T-34 tank poked through the rubble at the end of the street, probing forward. He saw flashes, exploding shells, lines of tracer bullets, the lick of a flamethrower. An engine screamed, and then he saw the tank dip and roll over the rubble, its turret traversing, seeking a target. He could see the padded black helmet of the tank commander. Behind it an American Studebaker truck lurched into view, disgorging troops. An American truck. His heart leapt, but then he remembered dive-bombing a merchant ship off Norway with lines of those trucks lashed down on its deck, destined for Russia. The soldiers fanned out on either side of the street, picking their way through the rubble. One appeared tottering along on a bicycle, with a Panzerfaust anti-tank rocket strapped to the front. Hoffman remembered the parade he had attended with the Fuhrer a few days before, seeing off boys of the Hitler Youth as they rode into battle on those bicycles. It was hard to tell whether the Russian cyclist was deadened to the danger around him, or whether he was deliberately cycling to his nemesis like the German boy who had ridden the bicycle before him. Suddenly the cyclist flopped sideways, his head disintegrating in a spray of red from a sniper’s bullet. There was a burst of sub-machine-gun fire and the sniper’s rifle clattered down from an upstairs window into the street below. The falling bike set off the Panzerfaust, which screeched into the building opposite, exploding and bringing down the entire facade in a cascade of brick and dust. On the upper floor a bathroom was revealed, the porcelain bathtub hanging precariously from the open frontage with a shattered mirror behind, a jarring scene of domestic intimacy. The T-34 roared and squealed forward, the driver grinding the gears as he negotiated a route through the piles of masonry. He ran over the fallen cyclist, popping and squeezing the body like a toothpaste tube, leaving a bloody clot on one track that reappeared with each turn as the tank lunged forward. Another glorious death in battle, another wreathed photograph on a mother’s mantelpiece. Hoffman watched the infantry come up behind, picking their way through the rubble. He heard the distinctive echoing rip of a German Spandau machine gun, and three of them fell. Then the tank gun traversed and cracked and a tottering pile of masonry disintegrated, silencing the Spandau. In minutes the Soviets would be under the elevation of the flak guns, and the tanks would be firing point-blank at the steel covers over the windows of the Zoo tower, trying to punch a hole large enough for a flamethrower to spurt fire into the thousands of people crammed in the darkness below. Unless they surrendered it soon, the tower would become a giant crematorium.
Then Hoffman heard another sound, nearby on the platform this time, a groan of machinery followed by a whirring and rattling noise. He looked over towards the ammunition elevator and saw the first 128mm shell emerge, then watched three boys struggle to carry it to the nearest gun. As a tactic against the Soviet advance, it was a futile gesture. The tanks would be under the guns’ minimum elevation by the time they were ready to fire. But he and the battery commander had devised the plan to keep the Feldgendarmen convinced that they would fight to the end, and to provide a distraction. The gunners would fire ten rounds a minute until the ammunition was expended. The noise and vibration inside the tower would be horrendous.
He saw the battery commander crawl out from the shaft, streaked in oil, his head wreathed in a blood- stained bandage. The man immediately hunched down and set to with a wrench unscrewing the fuses as each new shell appeared, surrounded by crouched boys. Hoffman knew that the remaining ammunition for the big guns had
