Bahn, trams, gas supply, factory owners and public figures had been summoned. ‘They all receive their appointments here in this office. Vice-directors become directors, chiefs of regional enterprises become magnates of national importance.’ Grossman was fascinated by signs other than words: the ‘shuffling of feet, greetings, whisperings’. Old German Communists from before the Nazis’ rise to power appeared, hoping for an appointment. ‘An old housepainter shows his [German Communist] Party card. He has been a Party member since 1920. Berzarin’s officers show little reaction. They tell him, “Take a seat.”’
Like the other Russians present, Grossman was taken aback when a burgermeister, on being told to provide working parties to clear streets, asked, ‘How much will the people be paid?’ After the way Soviet citizens had been treated as slave labourers in Germany, the answer was obvious. ‘Everyone here certainly seems to have a very strong idea of their rights,’ observed Grossman. But German civilians received a shock the next day, 27 April, when Soviet troops rounded up 2,000 German women in the southern suburbs and marched them to Tempelhof aerodrome to clear the runways of shot-up machines. Red Army aviation wanted to be able to use it as a base within twenty-four hours.
During the withdrawal towards the centre, Sector Z, the battle intensified. Whenever Germans managed to knock out a Soviet tank with a panzerfaust, the local Soviet commander always tried to retaliate with a katyusha strike. But revenge with such an area weapon was akin to shooting hostages in response to a partisan attack.
A small panzerfaust group of the French SS were captured by Soviet troops. The French ?CO claimed that they were forced labourers who had been press-ganged into uniform by the Germans when the Red Army launched its attack on the Oder. They were lucky to be believed. At that stage, Soviet troops did not know about SS tattoos.
That evening, one of the grotesque melodramas which so characterized the fall of the Third Reich took place. General Ritter von Greim, whom Hitler had summoned from Munich to take over command of the Luftwaffe from Goring, was carried into the bunker anteroom on a stretcher. He had been wounded in the leg by Soviet anti-aircraft fire. He was accompanied by his mistress, Hanna Reitsch, a test pilot and devotee of the Fuhrer. Flying in a Fieseler Storch for the last leg of their extremely hazardous journey, they had been hit over the Grune-wald. Hanna Reitsch, reaching around the wounded Greim’s shoulders, had managed to land the small aircraft near the Brandenburg Gate. It was a feat requiring considerable bravery and skill. Yet that does not alter the fact that Hitler, by insisting on this symbolic handover, had nearly managed to kill the very man he wanted to promote to the supreme command of an organization which had effectively ceased to exist.
On the following day, 27 April, General Krebs followed the Nazi leaders who were deceiving the troops under his command. Although evasive on the question of negotiations, he claimed that ‘the Americans could cross the ninety kilometres from the Elbe to Berlin in the shortest space of time and then everything would change for the better’.
Everyone there was obsessed with reinforcements, whatever their number or effectiveness. Mohnke was ecstatic when he told Krukenberg that a company of sailors had been flown in and had taken up position in the gardens of the Foreign Office on the Wilhelmstrasse. Krukenberg was more encouraged to hear that eight assault guns from the 503rd SS Heavy Panzer Battalion had been assigned to support the
Krukenberg’s divisional headquarters were reduced to a subway carriage in the U-Bahn station Stadtmitte without any electric light and without a telephone. His men kept going only because they had stripped the grocery shops in the nearby Gendarmenmarkt. Their fighting strength now rested on the large quantities of panzerfausts from the improvised arsenal in the Reich Chancellery cellars. Short of other weapons and ammunition, the French, like many other troops, were using them in close-quarter house combat as well as in their official anti-tank role. Hauptssturmfuhrer Pehrsson arrived with four armoured personnel carriers taken from the Red Army and two of the original half-tracks belonging to the
In Sector Z, wounded soldiers were sent back to the dressing station set up in the cellars of the Adlon Hotel. SS soldiers were taken to another one in the Reich Chancellery cellars run by SS doctors and surgeons. There were nearly 500 wounded packed in there by the end of the battle. A bigger one, the Thomaskeller Lazarett, resembled a ‘slaughterhouse’. Like the civilian hospitals, the military field hospitals lacked food and water, as well as anaesthetic.
The Soviet advance into Berlin was extremely uneven. In the north-west, the 47th Army, which had completed the encirclement of the city by meeting up with Konev’s 4th Guards Tank Army, was now approaching Spandau. Its officers had no idea that the huge citadel there housed German research into the nerve gases Tabun and Sarin. It was also involved in fierce fighting on Gatow airfield, where Volkssturm and Luftwaffe cadets used the 88mm anti-aircraft guns and shot back from behind wrecked aircraft.
In the north, the and Guards Tank Army had hardly advanced out of Siemensscadt, while the 3rd Shock Army had reached the northern barrier to the Tiergarten and Prenzlauerberg. The 3rd Shock Army had bypassed the immensely powerful Humboldthain flak bunker, which was left as a target for their heavy artillery and the bombers. Continuing in a clockwise direction, the 5th Shock Army, driving into the eastern districts, similarly bypassed the Friedrichshain bunker. The bulk of its strength was between the Frankfurterallee and the south bank of the Spree after its 9th Corps crossed into Treptow.
From the south, the 8th Guards Army and the 1st Guards Tank Army had reached and breached the Landwehr Canal on 27 April. This was the last major obstacle to the government district and less than two kilometres from the Reich Chancellery, even though all of Zhukov’s armies were obsessed with Stalin’s target of the Reichstag. In the south-west, the 3rd Guards Tank Army had just entered Char-lottenburg, with a left-flanking hook through the Grunewald against the remains of the 18th Panzergrenadier Division.
Red Army troops reached Dahlem on 24 April, and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics the next day. The fighting, with katyushas firing and tanks advancing amid the spacious villas and neat tree-lined streets, produced strange contrasts. The frontline troops were followed by the ubiquitous panje-wagons pulled by shaggy little ponies and even pack camels.
There is nothing to show that any commanders in Rybalko’s army, or even Rybalko himself, had been warned of the Institute’s significance, yet they must have been aware of the large force of NKVD troops and specialists who secured the complex off the Boltzmannstrasse within two days.
Since the one thing holding up Soviet attempts to replicate the Manhattan Project’s research was the shortage of uranium, the importance which Stalin and Beria attached to securing research laboratories and their supplies was considerable. They also wanted German scientists capable of processing uranium. Beria’s preparations for the Berlin operation had clearly been enormous. Colonel General Makhnev was in charge of the special commission. The large numbers of NKVD troops to secure the laboratories and uranium stores were directly supervised by no less a personage than General Khrulev, the chief of rear area operations for the whole of the Red Army. The chief NKVD metallurgist, General Avraami Zavenyagin, had set up a base on the edge of Berlin and scientists from the main team of researchers oversaw the movement of materials and the dismantling of laboratories.
The NKVD commission made its report. As well as all the equipment at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, they found ‘250kgs of metallic uranium; three tons of uranium oxide; twenty litres of heavy water’. The three tons of uranium oxide misdirected to Dahlem was a real windfall. There was a particular reason for speed, Beria and Malenkov reminded Stalin rather unnecessarily in a retrospective confirmation of action already carried out: the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute was ‘situated in the territory of the future Allied zone’. ‘Taking into account the extreme importance for the Soviet Union of all the above-mentioned equipment and materials,’ they wrote, ‘we request your decision on disassembling and evacuating equipment and other items from these enterprises and institutes back to the USSR.’
