conquerors. Unlike the Americans, whose occupying forces were largely disciplined, the French troops, especially it seems a minority of the feared colonial troops from North Africa, looted extensively and perpetrated numerous rapes on entering German villages and townships, as reports by the local clergy and others made plain. In Freudenstadt, the worst instance, the raping, looting and pillaging went on for three days.9
In the meantime, driving south through Franconia, American troops encountered resistance, sometimes heavy, but took town after town—most surrendered without a fight—before on 16 April reaching Nuremberg, the very shrine of Nazism. Hitler ordered the ‘city of the Reich Party Rallies’ to be defended to the last. The fanatical Party leadership, with nothing to lose and
On 15 April the western Allies had laid down their immediate future objectives: in the north, press on to Lubeck, consolidate positions on the Elbe in central Germany, and in the south, advance to the Danube and into Austria. That same day Hitler stipulated that, should the Reich be split into two by enemy advance through central Germany, Grand-Admiral Donitz in the north and Field-Marshal Kesselring in the south should take command of the defence as his delegates in whichever part of the country he himself was not situated.11
The Wehrmacht in the west was by now in a truly desolate situation. And in the east, the awaited big Soviet offensive, directed at Berlin, was set to begin before dawn of the very next day, 16 April.
In East Prussia the Soviets had finally broken the siege of the once beautiful, now devastated city of Konigsberg. On 9 April, with his forces on the verge of complete destruction and the city an inferno, its commandant, General Otto Lasch, finally surrendered—though only when Red Army soldiers stood outside his bunker. The defence of Konigsberg had cost the lives of 42,000 German soldiers and 25,000 civilians. Some 27,000 soldiers left in the garrison at the end entered Soviet captivity.12 In a towering rage, Hitler had Lasch sentenced in his absence to death by hanging—a sentence impossible to have been carried out—and his family imprisoned.13 He also dismissed General Friedrich-Wilhelm Muller, last commander of the 4th Army, which, apart from remnants still holding out in the Samland, was by now effectively defunct. By the time the harbour at Pillau eventually fell, on 25 April, only 3,100 of an army once comprising half a million soldiers were left, barricaded on the Frische Nehrung until the end of the war.14
To the south-east, there had been a further great disaster: after a siege lasting nearly two weeks the Austrian capital, Vienna, fell, a ruined shell, to the Red Army on 13 April, after days of intense street-fighting that continued into the heart of the city with heavy losses on both sides. The Soviets could now push further westwards into Austria on both sides of the Danube. Few German soldiers forced to retreat further into a shrinking Reich could have placed much faith in Hitler’s empty words two days later: ‘Berlin stays German, Vienna will be German again, and Europe will never be Russian.’15
By then Zhukov’s troops, massed on the Oder only some 70 kilometres from Berlin, awaited the signal to launch the attack which, they were confident, would destroy Hitler’s regime and bring them victory. A mighty army had been assembled for the battle of Berlin. Zhukov’s 1st Belorussian Front and, further north, preparing to attack westwards from Pomerania, the 2nd Belorussian Front under Rokossovsky together comprised 1.4 million men, with more than 4,000 tanks and 23,000 pieces of heavy artillery. To the south, Konev’s 1st Ukrainian Front, ready to be launched from bases on the Nei?e, had a further 1.1 million men and 2,150 tanks. Each of the fronts was backed by massive air support, amounting in all to 7,500 planes. Facing them were Heinrici’s Army Group Vistula (an outdated name, since they were now preparing to fight west of the Oder), consisting of the 3rd Panzer Army under Manteuffel to the north and the 9th Army under General Theodor Busse, directly guarding the approaches to Berlin, together with, defending the attack from the Nei?e and protecting the southern outreaches of the city, part of Schorner’s Army Group Centre (the 4th Panzer Army under General Fritz-Hubert Graser). The German forces amounted in total to a million men, 1,500 tanks and armoured vehicles, and 10,400 artillery pieces, backed by 3,300 fighter planes. The imbalance in forces was compounded by the fact that many of the Germans were young, ill- trained recruits, while the air-strength was purely nominal since so many planes were grounded through lack of fuel. Only the three concentric rings of deep-echeloned fortifications barring the path to the capital gave an advantage to the defenders.
Zhukov’s offensive began at 3.30 a.m. on 16 April with an immense artillery barrage amid a battery of searchlights aimed at blinding the enemy and illuminating the path of attack. But German defences held for two days before, after ferocious fighting and huge losses on both sides, the heavily fortified Seelow Heights, a steep outcrop of hills ranging 90 metres above the Oder valley between Seelow and Wriezen and the last formidable natural defensive barrier outside Berlin, fell to Zhukov’s troops. With this, Busse’s 9th Army was split into three parts and forced into retreat in the north, centre and south of the front. Konev’s offensive from the Nei?e, meanwhile, had broken through more easily, driving the defenders back towards Dresden but, even more menacingly, rapidly advancing northwards towards Berlin and the rear of Busse’s army. By 20 April, the 1st Belorussian Front had forced its way through the outer defensive ring around Berlin and its right flank was preparing to press the advance to the north of the city. Berlin was on the verge of being encircled. South of Berlin, Konev’s tanks had reached Juterbog, the German army’s major ammunition depot, and were about to overrun Zossen, its communications centre. Zhukov’s forces had taken Bernau, north of the capital, early in the morning. A few hours later, his guns opened fire directly on Berlin.16
III
In the last desperate weeks, in which the gains from fighting on were hard to rationalize, Hitler’s front commanders remained paralysed from taking any action other than continuing the struggle, whatever the cost in lives and destruction. Since they had attempted nothing to halt the gathering self-destructive (as well as massively devastating) momentum over previous months, there was no likelihood of their doing anything when the end was so close. On the contrary, through an almost Darwinistic selection achieved by the dismissal of so many generals, only hardline loyalists, committed to continuing the fight whatever the cost, were left in key posts.
Field-Marshal Kesselring, Commander-in-Chief West (though by now with little of a western front to command), had for a time in the 1930s been Chief of Staff in the Luftwaffe, commanded an air fleet in the early years of the war, then sealed his reputation as a tough commander-in-chief in Italy, a military leader of high professional competence who took care to keep out of politics.17 He was an arch-loyalist, always exuding real or contrived optimism, however grim the military situation, and invariably impressed by Hitler’s will to hold out. It was little surprise that Speer had no success in trying to persuade him not to implement Hitler’s ‘Nero Order’ to destroy Germany’s economic infrastructure on retreat.18 Speer was again disappointed in the field-marshal when Kesselring arrived in the Fuhrer Bunker in early April to inform Hitler of the hopelessness of the situation. After only a few sentences, Hitler interrupted with a lengthy disquisition on how he was going to turn the tables on the Americans. Whether he was genuinely convinced, or, more likely, taking the easy way out, Kesselring was soon agreeing with Hitler’s fantasies.19
After the war, in his self-serving memoirs, Kesselring gave a glimpse of his mindset in mid-April, with the Ruhr lost and the battle for central Germany unfolding. He saw meaning in sustaining the fight in the Harz Mountains in order to hold up the enemy’s advance ‘until a stronger, organised striking force came to the rescue’. He had in mind the 12th Army, scraped together at the end of March and stationed east of the Elbe and in the region stretching from Dessau to Bitterfeld and Wittenberg. ‘Only with its help could there be a certain assurance that the course of events on the Russian front would not be influenced from the west and the splitting of Germany into two halves be prevented.’ His views, he stated, coincided with those of the High Command of the Wehrmacht. ‘At that moment I did not examine the question of the effect of these operations on the outcome of the war, which was no longer a matter for profitable thought. All I was trying to do was to prolong the battle by all available means in front of the Harz to give time for our operations on the Russian front to mature.’ Even if the Russians and the western Allies were to meet on the Elbe or in Berlin there would still be a justification for continuing the war: ‘the imperative necessity to gain time for the German divisions engaged in the east to fight their way back into the British and American zones’.20
The Commander-in-Chief of Army Group B, encircled in the Ruhr, Field-Marshal Model, had long been
