Berlin: The Downfall 1945

Soviet-born ‘Hiwis’ still in their Wehrmacht uniform attempted to infiltrate the queues. They knew that they faced a terrible retribution if taken by Soviet troops. There had been 9,139 Hiwis on the ration strength of the Ninth Army at the beginning of April on the Oder, but no more than 5,000 could have survived to reach the Elbe.

Soldiers of the Waffen SS heard that the Americans would hand them over to the Red Army, so they destroyed their papers and ripped off their badges. Some of the foreign Waffen SS pretended to be forced labourers. Joost van Ketel, a dentist with the SS Nederland Division, had managed to escape arrest when stopped by Red Army soldiers in the forest near Halbe. ‘Nix SS,’ he had said. ‘Russki Kamerade-Hollandia.’ He had shown a red, white and blue striped pass, and this was accepted. Ketel managed the same trick with the Americans further south near Dessau, but his German companion was caught out immediately.

General Wenck had established his headquarters in the park at Schonhausen, the seat of Prince Bismarck. The irony that it should end there of all places was plain, since it had been Bismarck’s firm belief that Germany should avoid war with Russia at all costs. By 6 May, the surrounding bridgehead had been compressed to eight kilometres wide and two deep and the battalions defending the perimeter were virtually out of ammunition. Soviet tank, artillery and katyusha rocket bombardments were killing thousands of those still queuing to cross the single- track bridges. It was a question of ‘Kriegsgluck’ — ‘the fortunes of war’ — whether you were killed in the last moments. But the increased onslaught on 6 May also put the American troops filtering the refugees in danger. The US Ninth Army, anxious not to lose men to Soviet fire, withdrew them across the river and pulled back a little way from the Elbe. This presented just the opportunity the refugees needed. They surged across.

‘Quite a few people who were not able to cross the Elbe killed themselves,’ said Wenck’s chief of staff, Colonel Reichhelm. Others tried to get across the broad, fast-flowing river using dinghies and rafts fashioned out of planks of wood or fuel cans lashed together. Colonel von Humboldt, the operations officer, remembers canoes, skiffs and every sort of craft imaginable being used. ‘The real problem,’ he pointed out, ‘was that one person had to bring the boat back, and among people escaping, there were few volunteers.’ American detachments on the far side still tried to send them back, but they would try again. General von Edelsheim claimed that American troops were given orders to shoot at boats with civilian refugees, but this is uncertain. Strong swimmers took across the end of a line of signal cable held in their teeth, then fastened it to a tree or root on the far bank. Weaker swimmers and women and children hauled their way across on these makeshift lines, but they often broke. Scores of soldiers and civilians drowned in their attempts to cross, maybe even several hundred of them.

On the morning of 7 May, the perimeter started to collapse. The last few artillery pieces of the Twelfth Army fired off their remaining shells and then blew up their guns, ‘by far the hardest moment for any artilleryman’, wrote Rettich. He was shocked by the disintegration of some units and took great pride in the soldierly bearing of his cadets in the Scharnhorst Division — ‘probably the last formation of the Wehrmacht still in battle order in northern Germany’. Prior to pulling back across the river, they destroyed their last stores and vehicles. He dealt with his ‘faithful Tatra jeep’ by pouring a can of petrol over it and then lobbing in a hand grenade. Hundreds of abandoned horses ran around nervously. Men tried to chase them into the water in the vain hope of forcing them to swim the river. It was ‘a pitiful sight’.

Rettich assembled his remaining men near the Schonhausen bridge for a farewell address about the hard road which they had travelled together. In bitter defiance of defeat, they voiced ‘a thundering “Sieg Heil” to Germany’ before they left, ‘to be parted for ever’. As they crossed the twisted iron bridge, they threw their weapons, binoculars and other remaining equipment into the dark waters of the Elbe.

That afternoon, General Wenck crossed the river close to his headquarters at Schonhausen. He and his staff had left it until the last moment. Soviet troops opened fire on his boat, wounding two NCOs, one fatally.

In Berlin, meanwhile, the search for Hitler’s corpse continued without success. The bodies of the six Goebbels children were not discovered until 3 May. They were found under blankets in their three sets of bunk-beds. A dark blush lingered on their faces from the cyanide, making it look as if they were still alive and asleep. Vice-Admiral Voss, Hitler’s Kriegsmarine liaison officer, was brought in by SMERSH to identify them. Voss, apparently, looked absolutely devastated when he saw them.

A strange event occurred that day when generals from the 1st Belo-russian Front visited the Reich Chancellery. The body of a man with a small toothbrush moustache and diagonal fringe was found. The corpse was subsequently eliminated from the investigation because its socks were darned. The Fuhrer, it was agreed, would not have worn darned socks. Stalin was far more concerned to hear that some ordinary soldiers had been allowed to see Goebbels’s corpse. The officers responsible were punished.

The interpreter Rzhevskaya, writing about the veil of secrecy thrown over the identification of Hitler’s body, emphasized that ‘Stalin’s system needed the presence of both external and internal enemies, and he feared the release of tension’. The double was presumably to be used as evidence of some sort of anti-Soviet plot. Even when Hitler’s real body was found on the very next day, orders immediately came from the Kremlin that nobody was to breathe a word to anybody. Stalin’s strategy, quite evidently, was to associate the west with Nazism by pretending that the British or Americans must be hiding him. Rumours already circulated at a high level that he had escaped through tunnels or by aeroplane with Hanna Reitsch at the last moment, and was hiding in American-occupied Bavaria. This was almost certainly the black propaganda extension of Stalin’s suspicion that the Western Allies would do a deal with the Nazis behind his back.

On 5 May, the corpses of Hitler and Eva Braun were finally found after more interrogations. It was a windy day with an overcast sky. A renewed and more thorough search of the Reich Chancellery garden was made. A soldier spotted the corner of a grey blanket in the earth at the bottom of a shell crater. Two charred corpses were exhumed. The bodies of a German shepherd dog and a puppy were found in the same pit. General Vadis was immediately informed.

Before dawn the next morning, Captain Deryabin and a driver wrapped the corpses of Hitler and Eva Braun in sheets and smuggled them out past Berzarin’s cordon. They drove them to the SMERSH base at Buch, on the north-east edge of Berlin. There, in a small brick clinic, Dr Faust, Colonel Kraevsky and other pathologists summoned to examine Goebbels’s corpse began work on the most important remnants of the Third Reich. According to Rzhevskaya, the forensic experts were upset when ordered to maintain absolute and everlasting secrecy about their work on Hitler’s corpse. Whether or not Telegin knew of its discovery is uncertain. He was in any case arrested by Beria on another charge later. But neither Berzarin nor Zhukov was informed that Hitler’s body had been found. In fact Zhukov felt deeply betrayed when he finally found out two decades later.

Vadis, to be absolutely sure that they had the true corpse before he informed Beria and Stalin, ordered further checks. His men found the assistant of Hitler’s dentist. She examined the jaws from Hitler’s skull and confirmed that they were indeed the Fuhrer’s. She recognized the bridgework. The jaws had been specially detached for the purpose and were kept in a red satin-lined box — ‘the sort used for cheap jewellery’, observed Rzhevskaya. On 7 May, Vadis felt confident enough of his facts to write his report.

The death of Hitler, although it did not bring an immediate end to the war in Europe, certainly precipitated its terminal events. German forces in northern Italy and southern Austria, nearly a million men, surrendered on 2 May. Churchill wanted to dash for Fiume and secure Trieste before Tito’s Yugoslav partisans seized it. The race for the Baltic coast of Schleswig-Holstein was won by the British 2nd Army’s dash north of the Elbe to Lubeck and Travemunde. Allied troops prepared to move rapidly in to liberate Denmark. Rokossovsky’s 2nd Belorussian Front, now cut off from the prize of Denmark, had occupied almost all of Mecklenburg by then. His armies had, however, taken comparatively few prisoners. To Soviet fury, the remnants of Manteuffel’s Third Panzer Army and General von Tippelskirch’s Twenty-First Army had moved westwards to surrender to the British. These mass surrenders to the Western Allies deprived the Soviet Union of slave labour in compensation for war damage during the Wehrmacht’s invasion. Just after the final surrender, Eisenhower, still unwilling to upset the Kremlin, informed the Stavka that all German troops, including Schorner’s, would be handed over to the Red Army. This was ‘accepted with great satisfaction’ by Antonov.

On the afternoon of 4 May, General Admiral von Friedeburg and General Kinzel, Heinrici’s former chief of staff, arrived at Field Marshal Montgomery’s headquarters on Luneburg Heath to sign an instrument of surrender for all German forces in north-west Germany, Denmark and Holland. When General Bradley met Marshal Konev on 5 May, he handed him a map marking the position of every US Army division. Bradley received nothing in return, except a