Constanze Manzialy, and Bormann’s secretary, Elsa Kruger. Hitler told the women that they must prepare to leave for the Berghof like the others. Eva Braun smiled and went to him. ‘You know that I am never going to leave you,’ she said. ‘I will stay by your side.’ He pulled her head down to him and, in front of everybody, kissed her full on the lips. This act astonished all who knew him. Traudl Junge and Gerda Christian said that they would stay too. Hitler looked at them fondly. ‘If only my generals had been as brave as you,’ he said. He dispensed cyanide pills to them as a farewell present.
It was presumably soon after this that Eva Braun went to type a last letter to her best friend, Herta Ostermayr. This was to accompany all her jewels. One of the men about to fly south was waiting to take the package for her. She told Herta in the letter that the jewels were to be distributed according to her will. Their value would help friends and family keep their heads ‘above water’ in the days to come. ‘Forgive me if this is a bit confused,’ she wrote, ‘but I am surrounded by the six children of G[oebbels] and they are not being quiet. What should I say to you? I cannot understand how it should have all come to this, but it is impossible to believe any more in a God.’
19. The Bombarded City
On 23 April, the Nazi-controlled radio station in Prague claimed that the Fuhrer’s decision to stay in the capital of the Reich gave ‘the battle a European significance’. The same morning, the headline of the newspaper of the 3rd Shock Army read, ‘Motherland Rejoice! We are on the streets of Berlin!’ National Socialism had laid claim to an international cause, while international Communism had become unashamedly patriotic.
For the civilians of Berlin, ideological causes made little difference any more. Survival was what counted under the bombardment. Worse was to come. General Kazakov was bringing in 600mm siege guns on specially widened tracks along the line leading to the Schlesicher Bahnhof in the east of the city. Each shell weighed half a ton.
Apart from the three flak towers, one of the largest refuges in Berlin was the Anhalter Bahnhof bunker, next to the main station. Built in ferro-concrete, with three storeys above ground and two below, its walls were up to four and a half metres thick. Pine seats and tables had been provided by the authorities, as well as emergency supplies of tinned sardines, but neither lasted long when both fuel and food were in such short supply. The Anhalter bunker’s great advantage was its direct link to the U-Bahn tunnels, even though the trains were not running. People could walk the five kilometres to the Nordbahnhof, without ever being exposed.
The conditions in the bunker became appalling, with up to 12,000 people crammed into 3,600 square metres. The crush was so great that nobody could have reached the lavatory even if it had been open. One woman described how she spent six days on the same step. For hygienic Germans, it was a great ordeal, but with water supplies cut, drinking water was a far higher priority. There was a pump which still worked outside the station, and young women near the entrance took the risk of running with a pail to fetch water. Many were killed, because the station was a prime target for Soviet artillery. But those who made it back alive earned eternal gratitude from those too weak to fetch it for themselves, or they bartered sips for food from those who lacked the courage to run the gauntlet themselves.
At the anti-tank barriers set up at major intersections, the Feldgendarmerie checked papers, ready to arrest and execute any deserters. In cellars, a growing trickle of German officers and soldiers began to appear in civilian clothes. ‘Desertion suddenly seems quite natural, almost creditable,’ a woman diarist noted on that morning of Monday 23 April. She thought of Leonidas’s 300 Spartans at Thermopylae, about whom they had heard so much at school. ‘Maybe here and there 300 German soldiers would behave in the same way: 3 million would not. The greater the crowd, the less the chance for schoolbook heroism. By nature, we women don’t appreciate it much either. We’re sensible, practical, opportunistic. We prefer men alive.’
When she went in search of coal later that morning along the S-Bahn tracks, she found that the tunnel to the south was already blocked against the Russians on the southern rim of the city. She heard from bystanders that a man accused of desertion had been hanged at the other end of the tunnel. Apparently he had been hanged with his feet not very far off the ground and some boys had been amusing themselves by twisting the corpse round and making it spin back.
On her way home she was horrified by the sight of ‘soft-faced children under huge steel helmets… so tiny and thin in uniforms far too large for them’. She wondered why she was so outraged by ‘this abuse of children’, when if they had been just a few years older, she would have been far less upset. She concluded that some rule of nature, which protected the survival of the species, was being broken by throwing immature humans into battle. To take that step was ‘a symptom of madness’.
Perhaps as a side-effect of this law linking death with sexual maturity, the arrival of the enemy at the edge of the city made young soldiers desperate to lose their virginity. Girls, well aware of the high risk of rape, preferred to give themselves to almost any German boy first than to a drunken and probably violent Soviet soldier. In the broadcasting centre of the Grossdeutscher Rundfunk on the Masurenallee, two-thirds of the 500-strong staff were young women — many little more than eighteen. There, in the last week of April, a ‘real feeling of disintegration’ spread, with heavy drinking and indiscriminate copulation amid the stacks of the sound archive. There was also a good deal of sexual activity between people of various ages in unlit cellars and bunkers. The aphrodisiac effect of mortal danger is hardly an unknown historical phenomenon.
A Norwegian journalist, describing the atmosphere in the city, claimed that boys and girls in uniform simply gave in ‘to their impulses’ in ‘a hectic search for pleasure’. But this showed a lack of understanding, especially for the girls facing the prospect of rape. In any case, apart from those coupling round the Zoo bunker and in the Tiergarten’s rhododendron bushes, which were just coming into flower amid the wreckage, many others simply cuddled each other in a desperate need for reassurance.
The other instinct of the moment was to hoard like a squirrel. Gerda Petersohn, a nineteen-year-old secretary with Lufthansa, was at home in Neukolln, not far from an S-Bahn station, when word spread in the neighbourhood that a Luftwaffe rations wagon was stranded on the track. Women rushed down to loot it. They plunged into boxes and crates to grab at anything. Gerda saw a woman nearby with her arms full of lavatory paper just as Russian planes attacked, strafing with machine-gun fire and dropping small bombs. Gerda rolled under a wagon. The woman with lavatory paper in her arms was killed. ‘What a thing to die for,’ Gerda thought. The last thing she grabbed before running back to their apartment building was a packet of pilot’s emergency rations, containing Schoka-Cola and small malt tablets. These tablets were to prove very useful in an unexpected way.
There has been a dramatic account of the looting of the Karstadt department store in the Hermannplatz, where queuing shoppers had been blown to pieces during the first artillery bombardment on 21 April. According to this story, SS troops allowed civilians to take what they wanted before they blew the place up. The explosion was said to have killed many over-eager looters. But in fact when the SS
Once the electricity supply failed and wirelesses ceased working, the rumour mill became the only news available. More false stories than true ran around Berlin. One claimed that Field Marshal Model had not committed suicide, he had been secretly arrested by the Gestapo. The regime’s own smokescreen of lies made almost anything believable, however inaccurate.
The 7th Department of the 1st Belorussian Front launched a propaganda blitz on Berlin with air-dropped leaflets telling German soldiers that it was ‘hopeless to fight on’. A Soviet prison was the only way to save their lives, which were not worth losing for the fascist government. Others were ‘safe-conduct passes’ to be shown to Red Army soldiers when surrendering. The department claimed success because ‘almost 50 per cent of Germans who surrendered in Berlin’ had one of the leaflets and showed it to their Soviet captors. Altogether ninety-five different leaflets, almost 50 million copies in all, were dropped. Others — around 1.66 million — were distributed by German civilians and soldiers who were sent back across the lines. During the Berlin operation 2,365 civilians were sent back to infiltrate the city. Also 2,130 German prisoners of war were sent back, of whom 1,845 returned bringing a further 8,340 prisoners. This tactic was deemed to be such a success that the commander of the 3rd
