Berlin: The Downfall 1945

During the best part of that day, the ‘Danmark’ and ‘Norge’ regiments hung on to Strausberg airfield, defending it against Katukov’s tanks. Obersturmbannfuhrer Klotz, the regimental commander of the ‘Danmark’, was killed when his vehicle received a direct hit. He was laid out by his men in the small chapel of a nearby cemetery. There was no time to bury him. They soon had to withdraw further, south-westwards to the Berlin autobahn ring.

The Nordland avoided the main roads in its withdrawal. Reichstrasse I was in chaos, especially the section near Rudersdorf, with hundreds of vehicles heading westwards, often blocked by farm carts full of refugees machine-gunned by Shturmovik ground-attack aircraft. Soldiers who had received no rations for five days broke into houses abandoned by their owners. Some were so exhausted that after eating whatever they could find, they collapsed on to a bed, their uniforms still encrusted with mud from their trenches. They then slept so long that in some cases they awoke only with the arrival of the enemy. One Hitler Youth was so exhausted that, after a long and deep sleep, he woke with a start to find that a battle had been fought all around him.

Officers tried to reimpose order at pistol point. A major halted a self-propelled flak gun transporting wounded to the rear. He ordered the driver to take it back towards the enemy. The crew told him that the barrels were shot out and useless. The major still insisted and ordered them to unload the wounded. Some Volkssturm men nearby shouted out, ‘Shoot him! Shoot him!’ The major backed off. An officer’s authority, unless supported by the sub- machine guns of the Feldgendarmerie, carried little weight on such a retreat.

The chaos on the roads was further increased by rumour and panic. There were false cries of ‘Der Iwan Kommt!’, and other occasions when Soviet tanks really did appear, having overtaken them. German soldiers claimed that a ‘Seydlitz traitor’ drove through the retreating troops giving out orders to pull back as far as Potsdam on the far side of Berlin. This may well be true, since the Red Army 7th Department was pushing its ‘anti-fascist’ prisoners to take almost any risk.

Red Army soldiers clearly felt at home fighting through the pine forest east of the capital, even if the warm weather made those still wearing a fur ushanka and padded jacket jealous of those already in summer uniforms. ‘The closer one gets to Berlin,’ one Russian noted, ‘the more the area looks like the country round Moscow.’ But some Red Army habits did not speed their advance. On 20 April, Muncheberg was heavily looted ‘mostly by officers and men of special [i.e. tank and artillery] regiments… More than fifty soldiers were arrested in a day. Some were sent to rifle companies. They were stealing clothes and shoes and other things right in full view of the local population. These men explained that they were looting because they wished to send things home.’

While Weidling’s LVI Panzer Corps was pushed back to the eastern suburbs of Berlin, the remains of the CI Corps had withdrawn north of the city. Part of it pulled back to the area of Bernau during the night of 19 April. The wounded had been abandoned by the side of the road, because there were so few vehicles left with any fuel. Many of them were apparently killed where they lay by further shelling.

Most of the troops in Bernau were trainee officers and technicians from scratch regiments. As soon as they were quartered in schools and houses, they simply collapsed and fell asleep. One group of apprentice signallers found an abandoned barracks. But in the early hours of 20 April, when the 125th Rifle Corps of the 47th Army attacked, a sergeant had to go round, kicking them awake, to force them out to defend the town. ‘It was all senseless,’ commented one of their commanders years later, but at the time the Wehrmacht fought on because nobody had told them that they could stop.

The fighting for Bernau, the last real defensive action before the battle for Berlin began in earnest, was chaotic and short. German officers commanding the young trainees soon realized that they could no longer prevent total disintegration. Many escaped, slipping away alone or in small groups. When the 47th Army captured Bernau, a battery of the 30th Guards Artillery Brigade fired off a victory salute aimed at Berlin. In the meantime, Bogdanov’s 2nd Guards Tank Army pushed on past the north-eastern suburbs of the city, just outside the autobahn ring. Many Soviet soldiers had heard of it as a massive engineering feat, but those who had witnessed Stalinist showpieces professed disdain.

The 7th Department used more and more prisoners as agents to encourage desertion. On the 3rd Shock Army’s front, five soldiers from a Volkssturm battalion were sent back to their comrades on 20 April. ‘They returned the following day with almost the whole battalion.’ But despite the promises of the political department, many Russian soldiers seemed to be obsessed with finding Waffen SS soldiers on whom to take revenge. ‘Du SS!’ they would shout accusingly. Soldiers who laughed in astonishment were in severe danger of being shot out of hand. Some of those captured by NKVD troops and accused by SMERSH of being members of Werwolf were forced into confessing that they had been ‘given chemical substances to poison wells and rivers’.

General Busse, with the larger half of the Ninth Army — the XI S S Panzer Corps, the V SS Mountain Corps and the garrison of Frankfurt an der Oder — soon began to withdraw south-westwards towards the Spreewald, despite orders from the Fuhrer bunker that the line of defence on the Oder must never be abandoned.

The Fuhrer’s compulsion to launch counter-attacks for their own sake returned on the evening of 20 April, just when Zhukov and Konev were forcing their own tank army commanders to advance more rapidly. Hitler told General Krebs to launch an attack from the west of Berlin against Konev’s armies to prevent encirclement. The force expected to ‘hurl back’ the 3rd and 4th Guards Tank Armies consisted of the Friedrich Ludwig Jahn Division, made up of boys in Reich Labour Service detachments, and the so-called ‘Wunsdorf Panzer formation’, a batch of half a dozen tanks from the training school there.

A police battalion was sent to the Strausberg area that day ‘to catch deserters and execute them and shoot any soldiers found retreating without orders’. But even those detailed as executioners began to desert on their way forward. One of those who gave themselves up to the Russians told his Soviet interrogator that ‘about 40,000 deserters were hiding in Berlin even before the Russian advance. Now this number is rapidly increasing.’ He went on to say that the police and the Gestapo could not control the situation.

18. The Flight of the Golden Pheasants

On the morning of Saturday 21 April, just after the last Allied air raid had finished, General Reymann’s headquarters on the Hohenzollerndamm swarmed with brown uniforms. Senior Nazi Party officials had rushed there to obtain the necessary authorization to leave Berlin. For once the ‘Golden Pheasants’ had to request permission from the army. Goebbels, as Reich Commissioner for Berlin, had ordered that ‘no man capable of bearing arms may leave Berlin’. Only the headquarters for the Defence of Berlin could issue an exemption.

‘The rats are leaving the sinking ship’ was the inevitable reaction of Colonel von Refior, Reymann’s chief of staff. Reymann and his staff officers received a fleeting satisfaction from the sight. Over 2,000 passes were signed for the Party ‘armchair warriors’, who had always been so ready to condemn the army for retreating. Reymann said openly that he was happy to sign them since it was better for the defence of the city to be rid of such cowards.

This idea was echoed strongly two days later by the Werwolfsender, Goebbels’s special transmitter at Konigs Wusterhausen, when it broadcast appeals to the ‘Werwolfe of Berlin and Brandenburg’ to rise against the enemy. It claimed that all the cowards and traitors had left Berlin. ‘The Fuhrer did not flee to southern Germany. He stands in Berlin and with him are all those whom he has found worthy to fight beside him in this historic hour… Now, soldiers and officers of the front, you are not only waging the final and greatest decisive battle of the Reich, but by your fight you are also completing the National Socialist revolution. Only the uncompromising revolutionary fighters have remained.’ This deliberately ignored the far larger numbers of reluctant Volkssturm and conscripts forced to fight on with the threat of a noose or a firing squad.

An intensive artillery bombardment of Berlin began at 9.30 a.m., a couple of hours after the end of the last Allied air raid. Hitler’s SS adjutant, Otto Gunsche, reported that the Fuhrer, a few minutes after having been woken, emerged unshaven and angry in the bunker corridor which served as an anteroom. ‘What’s going on?’ he shouted at General Burgdorf, Colonel von Below and Gunsche. ‘Where’s this firing coming from?’

Burgdorf answered that central Berlin was under fire from Soviet heavy artillery. ‘Are the Russians already so