Colonel Refior in the Bendlerblock received a call from the Reich Chancellery. He was to start sending messages to the Red Army command in Berlin informing them that General Krebs wanted to arrange a time and place for negotiations.
The whole process of arranging a cease-fire on the 8th Guards Army’s sector took from 10 p.m. until the early hours of the next morning, which was already 1 May. General Chuikov gave orders for Krebs’s safe conduct to his headquarters, a semi-suburban house at Schulenburgring, on the west side of Tempelhof aerodrome. Chuikov had been celebrating with the writer Vsevolod Vishnevsky, the poet Dolmatovsky and the composer Blanter, who had been sent to Berlin to compose a victory hymn.
General Krebs, accompanied by Colonel von Dufving and Ober-sturmfuhrer Neilandis, a Latvian acting as Dufving’s interpreter, went to the front line at around 10 p.m. Krebs himself, while remaining an apostle of total resistance, had been brushing up his Russian each day in the privacy of his shaving mirror.
The German plenipotentiaries were brought into Chuikov’s headquarters just before 4 a.m. Blanter, the only member of the merrymakers not in uniform, was pushed into a cupboard. Vishnevsky and Dolmatovsky, who were in uniform as war correspondents, pretended to be staff officers.
‘What I am about to say,’ Krebs began, ‘is absolutely secret. You are the first foreigner to know that on 30 April, Adolf Hitler committed suicide.’
‘We know that,’ Chuikov replied in a straight lie to disconcert his opponent.
Krebs then read Hitler’s political testament and a statement from Goebbels calling for ‘a satisfactory way out for the nations who have suffered most from the war’. Vishnevsky, who was sitting on Chuikov’s right, took down the whole conversation in his notebook.
Chuikov then rang Marshal Zhukov at his headquarters in Strausberg and brought him up to date on developments. Zhukov immediately sent his deputy, General Sokolovsky, to Chuikov’s headquarters. He did not want Chuikov, his main critic, to be able to claim that he had taken the German surrender. Zhukov then rang Stalin, who was at his dacha. General Vlasik, the chief of his security guard, answered. ‘Comrade Stalin has just gone to bed,’ he told Zhukov.
‘Please wake him up. The matter is urgent and it cannot wait until the morning.’
When Stalin picked up the telephone a few minutes later, Zhukov told him the news of Hitler’s suicide.
‘Now he’s had it,’ Stalin commented. ‘Pity we couldn’t take him alive. Where’s Hitler’s corpse?’
‘According to General Krebs, his body was burned.’
‘Tell Sokolovsky no negotiations except for unconditional capitulation, with either Krebs or any others of Hitler’s lot. And don’t ring me until the morning if there is nothing urgent. I want to have some rest before the parade.’
Zhukov had completely forgotten that later that morning, the May Day parade would take place in Red Square. Beria had even lifted the curfew on Moscow specially for the event. Zhukov thought of the capital’s garrison moving to take up position for the parade, of the Soviet leaders assembling on the Lenin mausoleum and then the march past.
Every time that Chuikov, who knew nothing of what had really happened on the German side, brought the subject to surrender, Krebs played the role of a diplomat, not a soldier. He tried to argue that the Donitz government must first of all be recognized by the Soviet Union. Only then could Germany surrender to the Red Army and thus prevent ‘the traitor’ Himmler from achieving a separate agreement with the Americans and British. But Chuikov, with his strong streak of peasant cunning, recognized this tactic for what it was.
General Sokolovsky, who had joined the group facing Krebs, eventually rang Zhukov. ‘They are being very tricky,’ he told him. ‘Krebs declares that he is not empowered to take decisions concerning unconditional surrender. According to him, only the new government headed by Donitz can. Krebs is trying to make a truce with us. I think we should send them to the devil’s grandmother if they don’t agree to unconditional surrender immediately.’
‘You’re right, Vasily Danilovich,’ Zhukov replied. ‘Tell him that if Goebbels and Bormann do not agree to unconditional surrender, we’ll blast Berlin into ruins.’ After consultation with the
No answer was received. At twenty-five minutes past the deadline, the 1st Belorussian Front unleashed ‘a hurricane of fire’ on the remains of the city centre.
25. Reich Chancellery and Reichstag
The dawn of May Day in the centre of Berlin revealed exhausted Soviet soldiers sleeping on pavements up against the walls of buildings. Rzhevskaya, the interpreter awaiting the capture of the Reich Chancellery, saw one soldier sleeping in the foetus position, with a piece of broken door as a pillow. Those who had awoken were retying their foot bandages. They had no idea of Hitler’s suicide the afternoon before. Some of them still called
The Fuhrer’s death was kept a closely guarded secret on the German side throughout the night and into the next morning, when just a few senior officers were informed. SS Brigadefuhrer Mohnke, taking Krukenberg into his confidence, could not forgo the crass pomposity of Nazi rhetoric. ‘A blazing comet is extinguished,’ he told him.
Officers awaited word of the negotiations, but the suddenly renewed storm of fire in the middle of the morning spoke for itself. General Krebs had failed to achieve a cease-fire. The Soviet commanders insisted on unconditional surrender and Goebbels had refused. The massed artillery and katyusha launchers of the 3rd Shock Army, the 8th Guards Army and the 5th Shock Army blasted away again at semi-ruined buildings.
Mohnke also told Krukenberg that morning of his fears that Soviet troops would enter the U-Bahn tunnels and come up behind the Reich Chancellery. ‘As a first priority,’ wrote Krukenberg, ‘I sent a group of
The demolition method used by the SS engineers was almost certainly a ‘hollow charge’, which meant fastening their explosives to the ceiling in a large circle to blast out a chunk. This would have been the only way to penetrate such a depth of reinforced concrete with relatively small amounts of explosive. Estimates of the time — and even the date — of the explosion vary enormously, but this is probably due to the looting of watches and clocks and the confusing, perma-night existence of all those sheltering in bunkers and tunnels. The most reliable accounts point to the explosion taking place in the early morning of 2 May. This suggests either a surprisingly long-delayed charge or that the
In any case, the explosion led to the flooding of twenty-five kilometres of S-Bahn and also U-Bahn tunnels, once the water penetrated through a connecting shaft. Estimates of casualties ranged ‘between around fifty and 15,000’. A number of Berliners are convinced that the new Soviet authorities had the victims carted to a small canal harbour near the Anhalter Bahnhof and then buried under rubble. More conservative estimates, usually around the 100 mark, are based on the fact that, although there were many thousands of civilians in the tunnels, as well as several ‘hospital trains’, which were subway carriages packed with wounded, the water did not rise quickly since it was spreading in many different directions. Women and children running through the dark tunnels as the floodwater rose were naturally terrified. Some recount seeing exhausted and wounded soldiers slip beneath the water, as well as many who had been seeking oblivion in the bottle. This may well have been true in a few cases, yet the high casualty estimates are hard to believe. The water in most places was less than a metre and a half deep and there was plenty of time to evacuate the so-called ‘hospital trains’ near the Stadtmitte U-Bahn station. It is also more than likely that many of the bodies recovered were those of soldiers and civilians who had already died of their injuries in one of the underground dressing stations and been laid aside in adjoining tunnels. The floodwater would have swept bodies along and nobody would have had the time afterwards to distinguish the real cause of death. A few of the dead were almost certainly SS men. They may have ended up among the fifty or so buried in the Jewish cemetery in the Grosse Hamburgerstrasse.
