Berlin: The Downfall 1945

Bahn-hof. Rybalko’s tank corps at Mariendorf, on the Teltow Canal, was exactly five kilometres south of it. Zhukov had no idea that Rybalko’s army had reached Berlin until late on 23 April, when a liaison officer from Katukov’s Ist Guards Tank Army, approaching from the east, made contact. Zhukov was appalled.

Since reaching the Teltow Canal on the evening of 22 April, Rybalko’s three corps had been given a day to prepare for an all-out assault across it. The concrete banks of the canal and the defended warehouses on the northern side appeared a formidable barrier. And although the Volkssturm detachments opposite were hardly worthy opponents for the 3rd Guards Tank Army, they had been ‘corset-stiffened’ with the 18th and 20th Panzergrenadier Divisions. The breakthrough artillery formations had been ordered forward two days before, but there was such a jam of vehicles on the Zossen road, including horse-drawn supply carts, that progress was slow. If the Luftwaffe had still had any serviceable aircraft, the route would have presented a perfect target. Luchinsky’s 48th Guards Rifle Division arrived in time to prepare to seize bridgeheads across the canal, and the artillery was hurried into place. This was no easy matter. Nearly 3,000 guns and heavy mortars needed to be positioned on the evening of 23 April. This was a concentration of 650 pieces per kilometre of front, including 152mm and 203mm howitzers.

At 6.20 a.m. on 24 April, the bombardment started on the Teltow Canal. It was an even more massive concentration of fire than on the Neisse or the Vistula crossings. Konev arrived at Rybalko’s command post when it had almost finished. From the flat roof of an eight-storey office block, a clutch of Ist Ukrainian Front commanders watched the heavy artillery demolishing the buildings across the canal and wave after wave of bombers from their supporting aviation army. The infantry began to cross in collapsible assault craft and wooden rowing boats. By 7 a.m. the first rifle battalions were across, establishing a bridgehead. Soon after midday the first pontoon bridges were in place and tanks began to go over.

The pressure on the south-eastern corner of Berlin’s defences was already great before the Teltow Canal crossing. By dawn on 23 April, some of Chuikov’s rifle units managed south of Kopenick to cross both the Spree and the Dahme to Falkenberg. They had discovered a variety of craft, from rowing sculls to pleasure launches. During the day and the following night, Chuikov’s guards rifle divisions and Katukov’s leading tank brigades advanced up towards Britz and Neukolln. The 28th Guards Rifle Corps claimed that civilians were so frightened and subservient ‘they were licking [our] boots’. And in the early hours of 24 April, a corps of the 5th Shock Army, assisted by gunboats of the Dneper flotilla, crossed the Spree further north to Treptow Park.

At first light on 24 April, almost all the rest of Weidling’s corps, which had refuelled the night before at Tempelhof aerodrome, put in counterattacks against this double threat. Even though the remaining King Tigers of the Nordland ‘Hermann von Salza’ Heavy Panzer Battalion knocked out several Stalin tanks, the enemy forces were overwhelming. ‘In the course of three hours,’ wrote the divisional commander of the 5th Shock Army, ‘the SS made six attacks but were forced to retreat each time, leaving the ground littered with corpses in black uniforms. Panthers and Ferdinands were burning. By midday, our division was able to advance again. They secured the whole of Treptow Park and in the dusk we reached the [S-Bahn] ring railroad.’ ‘It was,’ wrote a participant on the German side, ‘a bloody, bitter fight, without mercy.’ It was also a conflict without scruples. Soviet troops were told by political officers that ‘Vlasov and his men are taking part’ in the battle for Berlin. This was totally untrue. They were almost all down in the area of Prague by then.

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While Konev’s tank armies were forcing the line of the Teltow Canal, his rear flanks came under threat. From the west, Wenck’s troops were advancing towards Treuenbrietzen and Beelitz, while on his right, the Ninth Army was trying to break out of its encirclement in the forests south-east of Berlin.

General Luchinsky had already started to turn part of his 28th Army eastwards to face the Ninth Army, roughly along the line of the Berlin — Cottbus autobahn. And the Stavka, having done little to deal with the isolated Ninth Army, now at last reacted quickly. Marshal Novikov, the head of Red Army aviation, was ordered to oversee the concentration of the 2nd, 16th and 18th Air Armies against these 80,000 German troops moving through the forests. What the Soviet commanders did not yet know was whether they would try to fight their way back into Berlin, or attempt to break out westwards to join up with General Wenck’s Twelfth Army.

The worst fears of the nurses in the hospital complex at Beelitz-Heilstatten were realized on the morning of 24 April. Suddenly, the ground began to vibrate as the noise of tank engines and tracks grew. One of Lelyushenko’s tank columns, having apparently forced the Swiss Red Cross representatives aside, rolled right into the compound. Tank crews armed with sub-machine guns stormed the first block. For the moment, they were interested only in watches and shouted, ‘Uri! Uri!’ But then news arrived of rape, looting and random killing in Beelitz itself. The nurses and adult patients steeled themselves for the worst. The children from the Potsdam hospital had little idea of what was going on.

The nurses did not know that they were about to be rescued by Wenck’s young soldiers. Hitler, on the other hand, was now convinced that he and Berlin would be saved by Wenck’s army. Steiner’s so-called army detachment was hardly mentioned any more in the Fuhrer bunker. The loyal Grand Admiral Donitz signalled that in answer to Hitler’s appeal, he was sending all available sailors to help in the fight for Germany’s fate in Berlin. The plan to deliver them by crash-landing Junkers 52s in the centre of the city showed as little regard for reality as it did for the lives of his sailors.

Clearly few people in the bunker expected anyone to get through, to judge by the surprise caused by Brigadefuhrer Krukenberg’s arrival at midnight. When he was eventually taken to see General Krebs, whom he had known in 1943 with Army Group Centre, Krebs admitted his amazement openly. He told him that over the last forty-eight hours, large numbers of officers and units had been ordered to Berlin. ‘You’re the only one who has made it.’

The Fuhrer bunker, for all the efforts and expense that had gone into its construction, lacked proper signalling facilities. As a result, Major Freytag von Loringhoven and Captain Boldt had only one method of establishing the extent of the Red Army’s advance ready for the Fuhrer’s situation conferences. They rang civilian apartments around the periphery of the city whose numbers they found in the Berlin directory. If the inhabitants answered, they asked if they had seen any sign of advancing troops. And if a Russian voice replied, usually with a string of exuberant swearwords, then the conclusion was self-evident. For the European situation, they secretly obtained the latest Reuters reports from Heinz Lorenz, Hitler’s chief press secretary. Freytag von Loringhoven suddenly found that everyone who had ignored them in the bunker on their arrival now became pleasant in order to have access to the only source of reasonably reliable information.

Most of the occupants of the bunker did not have anything to do. They sat around drinking and loitered in the corridors discussing whether suicide was better by gun or by cyanide. It seemed generally assumed that hardly anybody was going to leave the bunker alive. Although cool and damp, conditions in the bunker were still infinitely better than in any other cellar or air-raid shelter in Berlin. The occupants had water and electric light from generators, and there was no shortage of food and drink. The kitchens up in the Reich Chancellery were still serviceable and constant meals of stew were served.

Berliners now referred to their city as the ‘Reichsscheiterhaufen’ — the ‘Reich’s funeral pyre’. Civilians were already suffering casualties in the street-fighting and house-clearing. Captain Ratenko, an officer from Tula in Bogdanov’s 2nd Guards Tank Army, knocked at a cellar door in Reinickendorf, a district in the north-west. Nobody opened it, so he kicked it in. There was a burst of sub-machine-gun fire and he was killed. The soldiers from the 2nd Guards Tank Army who were with him started firing through the door and the windows. They killed the gunman, apparently a young Wehrmacht officer in civilian clothes, but also a woman and a child. ‘The building was then surrounded by our men and burned down,’ the report stated.

SMERSH took an immediate interest in the question of concealed Wehrmacht officers. It set up a special hunting group, with a bloodhound who had been a Nazi Party member since 1927. He promised to find officers for them, no doubt in exchange for his own life. Altogether they took twenty, including a colonel. ‘Another officer killed his wife then committed suicide when SMERSH knocked at his door,’ the report stated.

Red Army soldiers decided to use the telephone network, but for amusement rather than information. While searching apartments, they would often stop to ring numbers in Berlin at random. Whenever a German voice answered, they would announce their presence in unmistakable Russian tones. This ‘surprised the Berliners