daughters to help out with washing and cooking, but, according to a French prisoner of war, the unit’s officers raped them ‘that very evening’.
While the occupants of the Fuhrer bunker were preoccupied with the T-34s and Stalin tanks advancing from the Potsdamerplatz and up the Wilhelmstrasse, Soviet eyes were fixed on the northern side of central Berlin. The 3rd Shock Army angled its advance through Moabit, just north-east of the Spree, to line itself up for an attack on the Reichstag.
The commander of the 150th Rifle Division, General Shatilov, thought that Goebbels himself was directing the defence of Moabit prison and that they might capture him alive. He described Moabit prison ‘looking at us maliciously with its narrow windows’. (It is striking how Russians saw evil in the very buildings of Berlin, just as they had in German trees on crossing the frontier.) Moabit prison did not appear an easy task to storm. The artillery brought forward a heavy gun, but it attracted frantic firing from within the prison. The very first gun-layer was killed and so was the second, but a breach was soon blasted in the walls.
Storm groups dashed across the street and entered the courtyard. Once they were inside, the German garrison surrendered very quickly. The sappers, who had found mines near the entrance, went running in to check for explosives. Their commander remembered the heavy metallic echo as they ran up the iron stairways. Every German who came out with raised arms was closely examined, even those in private’s uniform, in case they. were Goebbels in disguise. Cell doors were thrown open, and the liberated prisoners came out squinting in the sunlight.
Other objectives cost far heavier casualties in a city where the streets drifted with smoke from indiscriminate shellfire. ‘What a terrible price we are paying for each step to victory,’ observed the editor of the military newspaper
Even if the Red Army had ‘soon learned what to expect’ in street-and house-fighting in Berlin, with ‘fausters near barricades’ and ‘stone and concrete buildings turned into bunkers’, it began to rely more and more on the 152mm and 203mm heavy howitzers fired at short range over open sights. Only then would the assault teams go in. But the one battleground that Soviet troops avoided if at all possible was subway tunnels and bunkers, of which there were over 1,000 in the greater Berlin area. They were extremely cautious about entering civilian airraid shelters, convinced that German soldiers were hiding ready to ambush them, or emerge to attack them in the rear. As a result, they virtually sealed off any shelters they overran. Civilians who came to the surface were likely to be shot. There are stories, mainly the product of German paranoia, that T-34S were driven into railway tunnels to emerge behind their lines. The only genuine case of an underground tank, however, appears to be that of an unfortunate T-34 driver who failed to spot the entrance of the Alexanderplatz U-Bahn station and charged down the stairs. Stories of light artillery bumped down station stairs, step by step, and manhandled on to the tracks also owe more to folklore than to fact.
From the Moabit prison, it was only 800 metres down Alt Moabit to the Moltke bridge over the Spree. Another 600 metres beyond that stood the Reichstag, which from time to time became visible when the smoke cleared. For the 150th and the 171st Rifle Divisions, it seemed so close now, and yet they had no illusions about the dangers ahead. They knew that many of them would die before they could raise their red banners over the building chosen by Stalin as the symbol of Berlin. Their commanders, to please Comrade Stalin, wanted the building captured in time for it to be announced at the May Day celebrations in Moscow.
The advance down to the Moltke bridge began on the afternoon of 28 April. The lead battalions from the two divisions left from the same start-line, further emphasizing the race. The bridge ahead was barricaded on both sides. It was mined and protected with barbed wire and covered by machine-gun and artillery fire from both flanks. Shortly before 6 p.m., there was a deafening detonation as the Germans blew the Moltke bridge. When the smoke and dust settled, it became clear that the demolition had not been entirely successful. The bridge sagged, but was certainly passable by infantry.
Captain Neustroev, the battalion commander, ordered Sergeant Pyatnitsky to take his platoon across in a probing attack. Pyatnitsky and his men dashed over the open space which led to the bridge and managed to shelter behind the Germans’ own barricade. Neustroev then called in artillery support for the crossing. It seems to have taken rather a long time for the artillery observation officers to turn up and organize their batteries, but just as the last light was fading, artillery preparation began. The heavy bombardment at close range smashed the German fire-positions, and the leading infantry platoons dashed across to fight their way into the large buildings on the Kronprinzenufer and Moltke-strasse. By midnight, just as Hitler was marrying Eva Braun, they established a firm bridgehead. During the rest of the night, the bulk of the 150th and 171st Rifle Divisions crossed the Spree.
The 150th Rifle Division stormed the Ministry of the Interior, on the southern side of the Moltkestrasse. This massive building immediately became known as ‘Himmler’s House’. With doors and windows blocked to provide embrasures for the defenders, it proved a hard fortress to storm. Unable to bring forward gun and rocket batteries, sappers improvised individual katyusha launchers on lengths of railway line. But the basic tools of this close-quarter fighting through the morning of 29 April were grenades and sub-machine guns.
Soviet soldiers, even if afraid of dying in the last days of the battle, also wanted to impress everyone at home. As conquerors of Berlin, they saw themselves as an elite in the post-war Soviet Union. ‘Greetings from the front,’ wrote Vladimir Borisovich Pereverzev that day. ‘Hello, my nearest and dearest ones. So far I am alive and healthy, only I am slightly drunk the whole time. But this is necessary to keep up your courage. A reasonable ration of three-star cognac will do no harm. Naturally we ourselves punish those who don’t know their capacity [for drink]. Now we’re tightening the circle round the centre of the city. I am just 500 metres from the Reichstag. We have already crossed the Spree and within a few days the Fritzes and the Hanses will be kaputt. They are still writing on the walls that “
‘Sunday 29 April,’ wrote Martin Bormann in his diary. ‘The second day which has started with a hurricane of fire. During the night of 28–29 April, the foreign press wrote about Himmler’s offer of capitulation. The wedding of Hitler and Eva Braun. Fuhrer dictates his political and private wills. Traitors Jodl, Himmler and the generals abandon us to the Bolsheviks. Hurricane fire again. According to the information of the enemy, the Americans have broken into Munich.’
Hitler, even though his optimism and pessimism had been surging back and forth, finally realized that all was lost. His secure radiotelephone communications had collapsed, literally, when the last balloon raising the aerial above the Fuhrer bunker was shot down. As a result Red Army listening stations intercepted its ordinary signals traffic that day. Bormann and Krebs jointly signed a message to all commanders: ‘Fuhrer expects an unshakeable loyalty from Schorner, Wenck and others. He also expects Schorner and Wenck to save him and Berlin.’ Field Marshal Schorner replied that ‘the rear areas are completely disorganized. The civilian population makes it difficult to operate.’ Finally, Wenck made it clear that no miracles should be expected from the Twelfth Army: ‘The troops of the Army suffered great losses and there is a severe shortage of weapons.’
Those in the Fuhrer bunker, even the loyalists, finally saw that the longer Hitler delayed his suicide the greater the number of people who would die. After the Himmler and Goring debacles, nobody could consider a cease-fire until the Fuhrer had killed himself. The problem was that if he waited until the Russians were at the Reich Chancellery door, then none of them would get out alive.
