Berlin: The Downfall 1945

has always helped the brave in their hour of greatest need.’ Both historically and theologically, this was an extremely dubious assertion.

Himmler, aware that word was spreading fast of the flight of senior Nazi officials, especially Gauleiters Koch and Greiser, decided to make an example at a lower level. On the same day as his other orders, he announced the execution of the police director of Bromberg for abandoning his post. A burgermeister who had ‘left his town without giving an evacuation order’ was hanged at 3 p.m. at Schwedt on the Oder a few days later.

This twelfth anniversary of Hitler’s regime was also the second anniversary of the defeat at Stalingrad. Beria was informed of a conversation picked up by microphones hidden in a prison cell between Field Marshal Paulus, General Strecker, the commander who held out for longest in the factory district, and General von Seydlitz.

‘Captured German generals are in very bad spirits’, Beria was informed. They had been horrified by Churchill’s speech in the House of Commons six weeks earlier, supporting Stalin’s proposal that Poland should be compensated with East Prussia and other areas. The German generals felt that their position in the Soviet-controlled Free Germany movement had become impossible. ‘The Nazis in this matter are more positive than we are,’ Field Marshal Paulus acknowledged, ‘because they are holding on to German territory, trying to preserve its integrity.’

Even General von Seydlitz, who had proposed the airlift of anti-Nazi German prisoners of war to start a revolution within the Reich, thought that ‘the ripping away of German lands to create a safety barrier will not be fair’. All the captured generals now realized that the anti-Nazi League of German Officers had just been exploited by the Soviet Union for its own ends. ‘I am tormented by a terrible anxiety,’ said Seydlitz, ‘whether we have chosen the right course.’ The Nazi regime had labelled him ‘the traitor Seydlitz’ and condemned him to death in absentia.

‘All Hitler thinks about,’ said Paulus, ‘is how to force the German people into new sacrifices. Never before in history has lying been such a powerful weapon in diplomacy and policy. We Germans have been cunningly deceived by a man who usurped power.’

‘Why has God become so angry with Germany,’ replied Strecker, ‘that he sent us Hitler! Are the German people so ignoble? Have they deserved such a punishment?’

‘It is two years since the Stalingrad catastrophe,’ said Paulus. ‘And now the whole of Germany is becoming a gigantic Stalingrad.’

Himmler’s threats and exhortations did nothing to save the situation. That very night Soviet rifle battalions led by Colonel Esipenko, the deputy commander of the 89th Guards Rifle Division, reached the Oder and crossed the ice during darkness. They fanned out, forming a small bridgehead just north of Kustrin.

Berzarin’s men from the 5th Shock Army crossed the frozen Oder early on the morning of Sunday 31 January, and entered the village of Kienitz. They had crossed the ice following the tracks of farmers who had been collecting firewood on the eastern bank. Only the baker and his assistant were awake. The Soviet troops under Colonel Esipenko captured a train with six anti-aircraft guns, thirteen officers and sixty-three young conscripts from the Reich Labour Service. A small group, clad in no more than the clothes in which they had been sleeping, managed to escape across the snowfields to warn the nearby town of Wriezen of the enemy coup de main. Soviet troops were now within seventy kilometres of the Reich Chancellery.

On the same day, just south of Kustrin, the ebullient Colonel Gusakovsky crossed the Oder with his 44th Guards Tank Brigade, forming another bridgehead. He thus won his second gold star of Hero of the Soviet Union. Soviet troops on both bridgeheads immediately began digging trenches in the frozen marshy ground of the Oderbruch, the Oder flood plain between the river and the Seelow Heights. Artillery regiments were rushed forward to give them support. They expected a rapid and furious counter-attack, but the Germans were so shaken by what had happened — Goebbels was still trying to pretend that fighting was going on close to Warsaw — that it took them time to rush in sufficient ground forces. Focke-Wulf fighters, however, were in action over the Oder the following morning, strafing the freshly dug trenches and anti-tank gun positions. The Soviet anti-aircraft division which had been promised did not turn up for three more days, so Chuikov’s men, laying ice tracks across the thinly frozen river, were extremely vulnerable. They managed nevertheless to pull anti-tank guns across on skis to defend their positions.

The news of Soviet bridgeheads across the Oder was just as much of a shock to soldiers as to local civilians. Walter Beier, who had been spared from the Feldgendarmerie’s trawl of leave-takers on the train from East Prussia, was enjoying his last days at home on the Buchsmuhlenweg, between Kustrin and Frankfurt an der Oder. ‘Happiness in the bosom of the family did not last long,’ he recorded. On the evening of 2 February an agitated neighbour came running to the house to say that about 800 Russians had taken up position in an oak wood only 500 metres away.

There were no troops in the area except for a few Volkssturm companies armed with nothing more than rifles and a couple of panzerfausts. Commanded by an old headmaster, they kept their distance. They found that Soviet snipers had climbed into the oak trees. An alarm battalion of anti-Soviet Caucasians, stiffened with some Germans from the 6th Fortress Regiment, was hurried to the spot from Frankfurt. Beier, as a frontline soldier, was put in charge of a group by an officer.

While Beier was observing the wood with them from a ditch, one of the Caucasians pointed at it and said in broken German, ‘You no shoot, we no shoot there. We no shoot at comrades.’ Beier reported this and the Caucasians were disarmed and sent back from the front line to dig trenches instead. Their fate, when captured later by the Red Army, would not have been softened by this refusal to fire at their own countrymen.

The scratch German force was joined by a group of very young trainee soldiers of the Panzergrenadier Division Feldherrnhalle. Most of them were between sixteen and eighteen years old. They began to mortar the oak wood, one of the few patches of deciduous woodland in the area. There were around 350 of them in a chaotic array of uniforms. Some had steel helmets, some had Kappis, or sidehats, others wore peaked caps. Many had nothing more than their Hitler Youth uniforms. They were intensely proud of their task, yet many of them could hardly pick up a full ammunition box, and they could not hold the rifles properly into the shoulder, because the butts were too long for their arms. On their first attack, the Soviet sharpshooters picked them off with deliberate aim. The unit commander fell with a bullet through the head. Only a handful of the soldiers returned alive.

Beier managed to slip back to his parents’ house. He found that a dressing station had been set up in the cellar and all their sheets were being torn up for bandages.

More weighty reinforcements arrived to attack the bridgehead as Chuikov’s men pushed forward to seize the Reitwein Spur, a commanding feature which looked up the whole Oderbruch and across to the Seelow Heights on its western edge. On 2 February the 506th SS Heavy Mortar Battalion moved north to the edge of the bridgehead and in three days and nights it fired 14,000 rounds. A battalion of the Kurmark Panzer Regiment was also brought up. On 4 February the battalion, recently re-equipped with Panther tanks, was sent in to attack the Reitwein Spur from its southern end. The tanks, however, failed disastrously because the thaw predicted by meteorologists had started, and they slipped and slithered on the muddy hillsides.

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News of Red Army troops crossing the Oder shocked Berlin. ‘Stalin ante portas!’ wrote Wilfred von Oven, Goebbels’s press attache, in his diary on 1 February. ‘This cry of alarm runs like the wind through the Reich capital.’

National Socialist rhetoric became fanatical, if not hysterical. The guard regiment of the Grossdeutschland Division was paraded. They were told that the Oder bridgeheads must be recaptured for the Fuhrer. Berlin city buses drove up and they were taken out to Seelow, over-looking the Oderbruch.

A new SS Division was also formed. It was to be called the 30. Januar in honour of the twelfth anniversary of the Nazis taking power. This division was given a core of SS veterans, but many of them were convalescent wounded. Eberhard Baumgart, a former member of the SS Leibstandarte at a recuperation camp, received orders to parade along with the other SS invalids. An Obersturmfuhrer told them of the new division. Its task was to defend the Reich’s capital. The new division needed battle-hardened veterans. He called on them to volunteer and yelled the SS motto devised by Himmler at them: ‘Unsere Ehre heisst Treue, Kameraden!’ — ‘Our honour is called