of a cinematic finale. Her last letters are untainted by melodrama and yet she had found a magnificent role — the heroine who, after suffering years of humiliation and neglect in the shadow of the man she loves, is vindicated in an ending where her devotion is finally acknowledged.
Her furniture had been moved into a room next to Hitler’s in the Reich Chancellery underworld on 15 April, and from then on she slept down there too. ‘She was always immaculately turned out,’ wrote Hitler’s Luftwaffe aide, Nicolaus von Below. ‘She was charming and obliging and she showed no weakness right up to the last moment.’ The threat of being caught alive by Russian soldiers prompted her and Hitler’s secretaries into pistol practice in the ruined courtyard of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. They were proud of their prowess and challenged officers in the bunker to a competition.
‘We can already hear the gunfire from the front,’ Eva Braun wrote to Herta Ostermayr. ‘My whole life is spent in the bunker. As you can imagine we are terribly short of sleep. But I’m so happy, especially at this moment, at being near him… Yesterday, I telephoned Gretl probably for the last time. From today on, there’s no way of getting through. But I have an unshakeable faith that all will turn out well and he is unusually full of hope.’
That morning, the ordinary women of Berlin emerged to queue for food after the air raid. The sound of artillery fire in the distance confirmed their fears that this might be their last chance to stock up. The sunshine buoyed up the spirits of many. ‘Suddenly one remembers it’s spring,’ wrote one young woman that afternoon. ‘Through the fire-blackened ruins the scent of lilac comes in waves from ownerless gardens.’
The desperation for news meant that a small crowd of people were already waiting at the kiosk when the paper boy arrived. ‘Newspapers’ were now no more than a single piece printed on both sides and they contained far more propaganda than information. The only useful section was the Wehrmacht daily communique, which, despite its evasive circumlocutions, indicated by the towns it cited how far the enemy had advanced. The mention of Muncheberg that day, seventeen kilometres west of Seelow on Reichstrasse I, meant that the Russians had definitely broken through.
For the moment, however, the obsession with food was paramount. Rumours had reached Berlin that their fellow countrymen trapped in Silesia had been reduced to eating roots and grass. The Russians, it was said in the queue at the grocer’s, would starve them too. Priorities became stark. Only things that could be eaten or drunk, or objects that could be bartered for food, were now of any use. And on this day Berliners were supposed to receive ‘crisis rations’, which meant some sausage or bacon, rice, dried peas, beans or lentils, some sugar and a little fat. It was the authorities’ indirect acknowledgement that the city was both besieged and embattled.
With water, gas and electricity severely interrupted or cut off, Berliners suddenly faced a primitive existence. Already many of them had been reduced to cooking half-rotten potatoes over a tiny fire enclosed by three bricks on the floor of their balcony. Provident housewives began to pack suitcases with essential provisions to carry down to the cellar to survive the battle to come. And this was after eighty-three air raids since the beginning of February. The determined show of normal life, with people still travelling to bomb-blasted offices each day, ceased abruptly.
Marshal Zhukov recorded that, on that afternoon of 20 April, ‘the long-range artillery of the 79th Rifle Corps of the 3rd Shock Army opened fire on Berlin’. But in fact few people in the city were aware of the fact. Zhukov seemed to have no idea that it was Hitler’s birthday. He was desperate for something to show that he had attacked Berlin before Konev. The guns were firing at extreme range and only the north-eastern suburbs were affected.
When Zhukov heard for certain of Konev’s tank army advancing on Berlin from the south, he sent on that evening an urgent order to Katukov and Bogdanov, the commanders of the 1st and 2nd Guards Tank Armies. He gave them ‘a historic task: to break into Berlin first and to raise the banner of victory’. They were to send the best brigade from each corps to break through to an outskirt of Berlin by 4 a.m. the next day, and to report at once so that Stalin could be informed immediately and it could be announced in the press. In fact, the first of his tank brigades did not reach the outskirts until the evening of 21 April.
South-east of Berlin, meanwhile, Marshal Konev was whipping on his two tank armies across the Spreewald. His main interest was with the 3rd Guards Tank Army targeted at the southern flank of Berlin. Rybalko’s leading tank corps attempted at midday to rush the town of Baruth, just twenty kilometres south of Zossen, but failed at the first attempt. ‘Comrade Rybalko,’ Konev signalled, ‘you are again moving like a worm. One brigade is fighting while the whole army is stuck. I order you to cross the line Baruth–Luckenwalde via a swamp using several routes in an extended battle order. Inform me on fulfilment.’ The town was taken within two hours.
Lelyushenko’s 4th Guards Tank Army, further to the south and west, was heading in a roughly parallel line for Juterbog and then Potsdam. Stalin was still concerned that the Americans might suddenly advance again. The
The German retreat from the Seelow Heights during 19 and 20 April left no front line. Exhausted stragglers pulled back as best they could and improvised battle groups fought fierce little engagements wherever they were threatened. Ninth Army headquarters informed Heinrici of their ‘
Berzarin’s 5th Shock Army had reached the edge of Strausberg on the evening of 19 April. To make matters worse for the retreating German forces, all roads leading westwards were blocked with increasingly panic-stricken refugees. When the T-34S reached Werneuchen airfield, the anti-aircraft defence battery depressed their 88mm guns to take on ground targets. But in all such fighting east of Berlin, ‘It was clear to us soldiers,’ wrote one participant, ‘that this battle could not last long.’
During the morning of 19 April, the
Weidling ordered them to counter-attack in the Buckow forest, but this failed. The reconnaissance battalion of
The survivors were forced to retreat towards Strausberg along small roads through the pinewoods. Russian infantry followed rapidly along the ditches, with their tanks coming up behind to give them covering fire. The Scandinavian Waffen SS had only infantry weapons and a couple of mortars. A lone German assault gun appeared and attempted to take on the T-34S. It was destroyed immediately. But then a solitary King Tiger appeared through the trees. It blasted the two T-34S and saved the situation.
The remnants of the reconnaissance battalion reassembled in a wood near Strausberg. They bound their wounds, patched up their vehicles and cleaned their weapons. The desolate scene did not stop Sturmbannfuhrer Saalbach from making a speech about the Fuhrer’s birthday and the meaning of the battle against Bolshevism in which they were engaged.
Obersturmbannfuhrer Langendorf, who had been wounded, was taken back to the S S field hospital. He heard Goebbels’s speech for Hitler’s birthday while the surgeon was working on him. The SS surgeon muttered, ‘Now we’ll let them have it.’ The nurses were volunteers from Holland, Flanders, Denmark and especially from Norway. One of the young Norwegian nurses, Langendorf noticed, had discovered her Waffen SS lover among the badly wounded just brought in. ‘She embraced him and laid his head in her lap and stayed with him until he died from a serious head-wound.’ Like all the foreign fascists and National Socialists who had volunteered for the SS, they had lost their countries and now had lost their cause. This, combined with their visceral hatred of Bolshevism, made them formidable fighters in the battle for Berlin.
