As the two officers stood watching the scene, Jung and Koch came up to them. ‘We are about to say goodbye to you,’ Koch said in perfect Russian. Seeing their surprised expressions, he smiled. ‘Yes, I speak a little Russian. I lived in St Petersburg as a child.’
Gall suddenly thought with a rush of horror that during the negotiations Koch must have understood every word that had passed between them. Then, to his relief, he remembered that Grishin had not said anything like, ‘Promise them whatever they want and we’ll deal with them later.’
In the courtyard, Gall and Grishin saw pale and trembling civilians emerging from the cellars of the fortress. General Perkhorovich told Gall to tell them that they could all go home. Afterwards, a young woman wearing a turban, as many did at that time of unwashed hair, came up to him holding a baby. She thanked him for having persuaded the officers to surrender, thus avoiding a bloodbath. She then burst into tears and turned away.
This heart-warming tale of the surrender of Spandau is, however, rather spoiled by subsequent revelations. Colonel Jung and Lieutenant Colonel Koch were in fact Professor Dr Gerhard Jung and Dr Edgar Koch, the leading scientists in the development of Sarin and Tabun nerve agents. Rather than being concerned solely with defence against chemical weapons, as its name implied, the Heeresgasschutzlaboritorium’s first task was ‘general testing of war gases for suitability as field agents’.
A Russian lieutenant colonel with the 47th Army immediately recognized the importance of their find at Spandau and informed the general in charge of a commission of Red Army experts — they wore a cogwheel and spanner badge on their shoulder boards. The general looked forward to interviewing the two men next day, but the NKVD got to hear of the discovery and, on that evening of 1 May, NKVD officers arrived to seize Jung and Koch. The general was furious. It took the Red Army until mid-June to find where the NKVD was holding Jung and Koch and extract them. They finally flew them to Moscow in August.
Two other leading scientists, Dr Stuhldreer and Dr Schulte-Overberg, were kept under guard at Spandau and ordered to ‘continue work’. Stuhldreer, who specialized in nerve gas attacks against tanks, had used the old artillery testing ground at Kummersdorf, which had been the rendezvous in the forest for the Ninth Army. They all denied any knowledge of Tabun and Sarin, and since all the batches had been destroyed as soon as the Red Army threatened Berlin, the Soviet experts could prove nothing and they did not know what questions to ask.
In the summer, Stuhldreer and Schulte-Overberg were flown to the Soviet Union. They were reunited with Jung and Koch in a special camp at Krasnogorsk. Under Professor Jung’s leadership, the group refused to cooperate with the Soviet authorities. They insisted that they were prisoners of war. Other German scientists collaborating with the Soviet Union were brought in to persuade them to change their minds, but this did little good. They were not maltreated for their stand, however, and were eventually returned to Germany with one of the last batches of prisoners of war in January 1954.
South of Berlin, the remnants of the Ninth Army made a final effort to break through Konev’s last barrier. The Twelfth Army had managed to hold on just long enough in the area of Beelitz to keep open an escape route to the Elbe, as well as opening a route for nearly 20,000 men from General Reymann’s so-called Army Group Spree in the Potsdam area. But pressure was building up. Beelitz was shelled heavily that morning by Soviet self-propelled guns diverted down from Potsdam. Shturmovik squadrons increased their dive-bombing and strafing attacks in the area.
A Soviet rifle regiment had occupied the village of Elsholz, six kilometres south of Beelitz. It was a crucial crossing point for the exhausted German troops. Fortunately for the Germans, the sudden appearance of the last four Panthers of the
Fighting still flared behind them in the forests, where Konev’s troops continued to hunt down both small and large groups of stragglers. That May Day morning, a brigade of the 4th Guards Tank Army was sent back into the forest ‘to liquidate a large group of Germans wandering around’. The report claims that the T-34S ran into German tanks and other armoured vehicles. ‘The Soviet commander got down to business immediately,’ the report stated. ‘In two hours the enemy lost thirteen personnel carriers, three assault guns, three tanks and fifteen trucks.’ It is very hard to believe that so many vehicles were still serviceable in a single group.
Soviet troops were also attacking Beelitz itself. A group of 200 Germans, with the last Tiger tank and an assault gun, came under automatic fire south of Beelitz as they crossed asparagus fields. All they needed to do was to carry on to the woods and wade the River Nieplitz. Just beyond was the road which led to Bruck and safety.
General Wenck’s Twelfth Army staff had assembled every truck and vehicle in the area to transport the exhausted mass. They had set up field kitchen units, which began to feed the 25,000 men, as well as several thousand civilian refugees. ‘When the soldiers reached us, they just collapsed,’ said Colonel Reichhelm, Wenck’s chief of staff. ‘Sometimes we even had to beat them, otherwise they would not have climbed up into the trucks and would have died where they lay. It was terrible.’ The formerly plump General Busse was unrecognizably thin. ‘He was totally at the end of his physical strength.’
Many of those who had experienced the horror of the Halbe
This diatribe, while containing a large measure of truth, was far too sweeping, especially when one considers the efforts of the Twelfth Army to save soldiers and civilians. Even within the Ninth Army, not all was black. Another soldier recorded how, on that same day, Major Otto Christer Graf von Albedyll, who had seen the defeat of his army and the destruction of his family’s estate near the Reitwein Spur, was killed trying to help a badly wounded man. ‘A much loved leader’, he was buried at the side of the road to Elsholz by his soldiers.
Colonel Reichhelm himself was scathing about the most flagrant case of a senior officer abandoning his own men. General Holste, the commander of the XLI Panzer Corps, had appeared at Twelfth Army headquarters between Genthin and Tangermunde at 2 a.m. ‘What are you doing here, Herr General?’ Reichhelm asked him in astonishment. ‘Why aren’t you with your troops?’
‘I do not have any any more,’ Holste retorted.
In fact he had abandoned them. He had departed with his wife, two cars and two of his best horses. Reichhelm said that he must speak to General Wenck immediately. He went in to wake the army commander and told him that Holste had to be arrested. But Wenck was too exhausted. Reichhelm returned. ‘You can leave Hitler, because he’s a criminal,’ he told Holste, ‘but you can’t leave your soldiers.’ Holste ignored him and left to continue on his way across the Elbe.
In Berlin during the afternoon an order came through from the Reich Chancellery that the last Tiger tank supporting
The renewed bombardment had made communications with Krukenberg’s detachments even more difficult. The wounded Fenet and his Frenchmen were still defending Gestapo headquarters in the Prinz-Albrechtstrasse. The ‘Danmark’ was a few hundred metres east, round the Kochstrasse U-Bahn station on the Friedrichstrasse, while the ‘Norge’ defended their left rear round the Leipzigerstrasse and the Spittelmarkt.
Goebbels, realizing that the end was now very close, summoned Kunz, the SS doctor who had agreed to help kill his six children. Goebbels was in his study in the Fuhrer bunker talking with Naumann, the state secretary of the Propaganda Ministry. Kunz was made to wait for ten minutes, then Goebbels and Naumann got up and left him with Magda Goebbels. She told him that the Fuhrer’s death had made the decision for them. Troops would try to break out of the encirclement that night, so the whole family was to die. Kunz claimed afterwards that he tried to persuade her to send the children to the hospital and put them under the protection of the Red Cross, but she
