Berlin: The Downfall 1945

soldiers. ‘Many soldiers asked me,’ one political officer reported, ‘if Ehrenburg still continued to write and they told me that they are looking for his articles in every newspaper that they see.’

The change in policy just before the great offensive came far too late for soldiers imbued with the personal and propaganda hatreds of the last three years. One of the most unintentionally revealing remarks was made by one of Zhukov’s divisional commanders, General Maslov. He described German children crying as they searched desperately for their parents in a blazing town. ‘What was surprising,’ wrote Maslov, ‘was that they were crying in exactly the same way as our children cry.’ Few Soviet soldiers or officers had imagined Germans as human beings. After Nazi propaganda had dehumanized the Slavs into Untermenschen, Soviet revenge propaganda had convinced its citizens that all Germans were ravening beasts.

The Soviet authorities had another reason for concern at the advance of the Western Allies. They were afraid that the majority of the 1st and 2nd Polish Armies would want to join the Polish forces which owed allegiance to the government in exile in London. On 14 April, Beria passed to Stalin the report from General Serov, the NKVD chief with Zhukov’s 1st Belorussian Front. ‘In connection with the rapid advance of the Allies on the Western Front,’ Serov wrote, ‘unhealthy moods developed among the soldiers and officers of the Ist Polish Army.’ SMERSH had gone into action, carrying out mass arrests.

‘Intelligence organs of the Ist Polish Army,’ he reported, ‘have discovered and taken under control [sic] nearly 2,000 ex-soldiers of the Anders army and members of the Armia Krajowa and soldiers who have close relatives in Anders’s army.’ The ‘hostile attitude’ of these Poles to the Soviet Union was underlined by the fact that they had concealed their real addresses from the Soviet authorities to prevent reprisals against their families. Serov also failed to mention the fact that since 43,000 members of the Polish Communist forces had been transferred straight from Gulag camps, their feelings towards the Soviet Union were unlikely to be entirely fraternal. And in Poland, members of the Armia Krajowa arrested by NKVD troops were given the choice of a labour camp in Siberia or the Communist army — ‘W Sibir ili w Armiju?’

SMERSH informers had warned their controllers that Polish soldiers were listening regularly to the ‘London radio’. Informers also reported that Polish troops were convinced that ‘Anders’s army is coming to Berlin from the other side with the English army’. ‘When the Polish troops meet up,’ an officer unwittingly told an informer, ‘the majority of our soldiers and officers will pass over to the Anders army. We’ve suffered enough from the Soviets in Siberia.’ ‘After the war, when Germany is finished,’ a battalion chief of staff apparently told another informer, ‘we’ll still be fighting Russia. We have 3 million of Anders’s men with the English.’ ‘They are pushing their “democracy” into our faces,’ said a commander in the 2nd Artillery Brigade. ‘As soon as our troops meet up with Anders’s men, you can say goodbye to the [Soviet-controlled] provisional government. The London government will take power again and Poland will once more be what it was before 1939. England and America will help Poland get rid of the Russians.’ Serov blamed commanders of the Ist Polish Army ‘for not strengthening their political explanatory work’.

While the American Third and Ninth Armies were charging forward to the Elbe, Field Marshal Model’s Army Group B in the Ruhr pocket was being ground down, largely by air attack. Model was one of the very few army commanders to be trusted completely by Hitler. His fellow generals, however, considered him to be ‘extremely rude and unscrupulous’. Model was known to the troops as ‘der Katastrophengeneral’ because of his habit of turning up in a sector when things were going very badly. The Ruhr, in any case, was Model’s last catastrophe. He refused to fly out. On 21 April, when his troops began to surrender en masse, he shot himself, which was exactly what Hitler expected of his commanders.

Well before the end, Colonel Gunther Reichhelm, the chief operations officer of Army Group B, was flown out of the Ruhr encirclement along with many other key personnel. Out of seventeen aircraft, only three reached Juterbog, the airfield south of Berlin. Reichhelm was driven to OKH headquarters at Zossen, where he collapsed from exhaustion. He awoke only when Guderian’s former deputy, General Wenck, sat on his bed. Wenck, brought back to operations before he had completely recovered from his car crash during Operation Sonnenwende, had just been appointed the commander-in-chief of the Twelfth Army. Wenck suspected that this new army existed more on paper than in reality, despite its task of holding the line of the Elbe against the Americans.

‘You’re coming as my chief of staff,’ Wenck told him. But first of all Reichhelm had to report on the situation of Army Group B in the Ruhr pocket. Jodl ordered him to come to the Reich Chancellery bunker. There he found Hitler with Goring and Grand Admiral Donitz. He told Hitler that Army Group B had no more ammunition, and its remaining tanks could not move because they had no more fuel. Hitler paused for a long time. ‘Field Marshal Model was my best Field Marshal,’ he said at last. Reichhelm thought that Hitler finally understood that it was all over, but he did not. Hitler said, ‘You are to be chief of staff of the Twelfth Army. You must free yourself from the stupid guidelines of the general staff. You must learn from the Russians, who by sheer willpower overcame the Germans who stood before Moscow.’

Hitler then went on to say that the German Army must chop down trees in the Harz mountains to stop Patton’s advance and launch a partisan war there. He demanded I:25,000 scale maps, the sort which company commanders used, to prove his point. Jodl tried to disabuse him, but Hitler insisted that he knew the Harz well. Jodl, who was usually very controlled, replied sharply. ‘I do not know the area at all,’ he said, ‘but I know the situation.’ Goring, Reichhelm noticed, had meanwhile gone to sleep in a chair with a map over his face. He wondered whether he was full of drugs. Hitler finally told Reichhelm to join the Twelfth Army, but first he should go via the camp at Doberitz, where he could obtain 200 Volkswagen cross-country Kubelwagen jeeps for the Twelfth Army.

Reichhelm left with a sense of relief at escaping from a madhouse. At Doberitz he could lay his hands on only a dozen vehicles. Finding Wenck and the headquarters of the Twelfth Army was even harder. Eventually, he found Wenck in the sapper school at Rosslau on the opposite bank of the Elbe from Dessau. To his great pleasure, he saw that the chief operations officer was an old friend, Colonel Baron Hubertus von Humboldt-Dachroeden. Part of the Twelfth Army, he heard, was made up with ‘astonishingly willing young soldiers trained for half a year in officers’ schools’, as well as many NCOs with front experience who had returned from hospital. Both officers greatly admired their army commander. Wenck was young, flexible and a good field commander who ‘could look soldiers in the eye’.

Although the headquarters was improvised and had few radio sets, they found that they could use the local telephone network, which was still functioning well. The army was better supplied than most thanks to the army ammunition base at Altengrabow and the number of stranded barges and boats in the Havelsee. Wenck refused to follow Hitler’s ‘Nero’ order, and he prevented the destruction of the electricity plant at Golpa, south-east of Dessau, one of the main electricity supply points for Berlin. On Wenck’s orders, the Infantry Division Hutten provided guards to prevent any fanatics from trying to blow it up.

The Twelfth Army’s principal task was to prepare for an attack by the American Ninth Army ‘along and either side of the Hanover-Magdeburg autobahn’. The Americans were expected to develop a bridgehead on the east bank of the Elbe and then head for Berlin. The first attack took place sooner than expected. ‘On 12 April, the first contact report arrived of the enemy attempt to cross near Schonebeck and Barby.’ The Scharnhorst Infantry Division attempted to counterattack with a battalion and a few assault guns on the following day. They put up fierce resistance on the first day, but they found the enemy, especially the US Air Force, far too strong.

Reichhelm realized that if the Americans were to cross the Elbe in force, there was ‘no other possibility but to surrender’. The Twelfth Army could not have continued to fight ‘for more than one or two days’. Humboldt was of exactly the same opinion. The Americans were across the Elbe in a number of places. By Saturday 14 April, SHAEF recorded, ‘the Ninth Army has occupied Wittenberge, 100 kilometres north of Magdeburg. Three battalions of the 83rd Infantry Division have crossed the Elbe at Kameritz to the south-east of Magdeburg.’ The 5th Armored Division, meanwhile, had reached the Elbe on a twenty-five kilometre front around Tangermunde. On 15 April, Wenck’s Twelfth Army mounted a strong counter-attack against the 83rd Infantry Division near Zerbst, but this was repulsed.

The bridgeheads across the Elbe appeared to present more of a problem to Eisenhower than an opportunity. He spoke to General Bradley, the army group commander, to ask his view about pushing on to Berlin. He wanted to