‘For goodness sake, Willi,’ Heinz said to me, ‘what have you done? Do you know who that was?’
‘No, I didn’t know.’
‘That was Fraulein Braun!’
‘It could have been Fraulein Schwarz as far as I am concerned,’ I said. ‘What about it?’
Then he had to tell me confidentially who Fraulein Braun was, and that he had been assigned to her as her bodyguard.
With this explanation I should make it clear that even I who had been on duty in the Reichs Chancellery knew nothing of the existence of this woman. It was a taboo subject and no one talked about it. We were trained to be discreet. Nevertheless, she had been here in the Fuhrerbunker at the Reichs Chancellery since 15 April and had come, against the Fuhrer’s will, to share his fate. She usually lived at the Fuhrer’s mountain retreat in Berchtesgaden. The puppy came from Blondi, the Fuhrer’s Alsatian, and he had given it to Fraulein Braun so that she had something to remind her of him, since he could not come because of the war. When it was time to die, the pup would die too.
Of course I took this hard and asked Heinz to ask my forgiveness for my ignorance, as I had no access to the Fuhrerbunker myself.
After this fiasco I took off the boots and breeches. Like their owner, I had no need for these special boots.
Then the company commander ordered us to go into the Tiergarten and practise with the mortars. This was certainly rather late, but necessary, for the mortars had lain unused in the barracks and now had to augment the fighting strength of two regiments.
So we moved into the Tiergarten and practised setting up and so on. The company commander stood there saying nothing. Whether he knew more about these things than I did, I cannot say. It is best in such circumstances to let the sergeants get on with it, so I left them to it.
The 1st Platoon was commanded by a senior officer cadet[45] I knew from the barracks. This was the last time either I or the company commander was to see him. He was on duty in the barracks as Duty NCO every other day, and strutted around like a peacock, which was enough to set me off teasing him. He still did not have the necessary front decorations to go to officer school, and must therefore have had a powerful patron, as otherwise this would not have been possible. When such similar ‘experts’ came to the front and were set above me, although just a lowly sergeant major, they did not have it easy.
I had no intention of being sent with my men into an uncertain mission. Even my men, without my having said anything, would simply turn away if he tried to give orders over my head. For them it did not matter how many stars a superior had. They looked at it from the standpoint of what their chances of survival were with that superior, and I would rather go myself than send anyone into a dangerous mission.
So here this gentleman had no protector any more and at last had to show what he was made of.
While we were exercising, some heavy shells burst unexpectedly several hundred yards away, for the first time in the city centre. As I had heard no discharge, it was immediately apparent to me they were from a long range battery firing off a map, and were of no great concern to an experienced soldier.
So, without haste, I had my platoon move by sections into two concrete garages that stood nearby. These would not have stood up to a direct hit, of course, but that would have been highly unlikely. In order to show my men how dangerously I treated the situation I, a non-smoker, lit a cigarette and passed round the packet and started cracking jokes, and soon the first witticisms were being passed around among my men. So everyone remained calm, which was the main thing.
But the senior officer cadet, who was unfamiliar with such shelling, cried out: ‘All is lost, save yourselves!’ The company commander stood as still as a marble statue, not taking it in.
I immediately took over command of this wildly scattering mob and ordered them to lie down. Then I took them into cover by sections. The firing soon stopped and we had no casualties.
These were the kind of commanders that lead men to destruction for no reason at all, and it boded ill for the future.
As I read in Soviet military literature after the war, the shelling had been purely a propaganda gesture in order to be able to report to Stalin that: ‘The lion’s den now lies under heavy destructive fire.’ I even saw pictures of the guns, primitive things with a range of about 18 kilometres mounted on self-propelled tracks.
I did not wait for the company commander’s orders, but took my troops back to the Reichs Chancellery, not without throwing a look of contempt at these two ‘heroes’, who already had their heads together.
SS-Lieutenant August Kronke was waiting for me at the Reichs Chancellery. He was adjutant to the ‘Anhalt’ Regiment’s 2nd Battalion, commanded by SS-Captain Schafer, to which my platoon belonged, according to my instructions, thus removing me from Puttkamer’s direct command.
First Kronke had to show me the location of the battalion’s positions. The battalion was already deployed and wherever possible I was shown round by the company commander responsible. But as Schafer never held a company commanders’ conference, which I too would have had to attend, I never got to know them all. The battalion was fully committed, and there were no reserves. I just had to go along the streets behind the buildings in which our companies were deployed. I made a provisional sketch of the front and later was able to copy everything out on graph paper for my forward observers. I myself would remain primarily at the base position and send out my sergeants as observers, as they knew more about the business.
The battalion boundary on the left was the right wing of Belle-Alliance-Platz (Mehringplatz), from where it followed the Landwehr Canal to the Tiergarten, then cut across the Tiergarten to the Spree River. It then followed the Spree through the Diplomatic Quarter as far as the Kronprinzen Bridge. The Reichstag was our boundary with SS-Captain Thomas Mrugalla’s 1st Battalion. The right flank at the Reichstag was under the command of SS- Lieutenant Babick, whose heroic fight at the Reichstag I will report on later.
In the Tiergarten we could only manage a two-man foxhole every fifty metres, but here were also the tanks of the ‘Hermann von Salza’ battalion of the SS Panzergrenadier Division ‘Nordland’ under SS-Lieutenant Colonel Peter Kausch, a very brave man and holder of the Oak Leaves to the Iron Cross. [46]
There was also the mighty Zoo flak-tower, whose area was defended by Volkssturm and Hitler Youth units. This flak-tower later evolved into a strong bastion in the defence, although the flak-towers had not been designed for this purpose. With its massive concrete walls and its height, it was almost unassailable and could not be taken by the Soviets. Nevertheless, the thousands of civilians in this bunker had a terrible time.
We returned to the battalion command post on the lowest level of the Potsdamer Platz S-Bahn station, where I was introduced to the battalion commander, SS-Captain Schafer. Schafer’s command post was in a platform guard’s office, where he remained until the end. Opposite his office were several S-Bahn carriages full of supplies under the control of a quartermaster.
I was invited to eat. The commander’s batman prepared sandwiches all day long for him and his visitors. With this went either tea or ersatz coffee, and the supplies lasted until the end.
Schafer instructed me to leave my men in reserve at the Reichs Chancellery. He would call us when he needed us.
When I got back, my men were busy unloading trucks that were driving into the inner yard one after the other with ammunition and supplies from the outer districts. The Reichs Chancellery was being transformed into a vast underground supply depot.
My men had to do this out of self-preservation. No one invited them to eat or take them on ration strength. I could not approach my company commander on such a triviality. As my men told me, he just sat there comforting his wife as the shells exploded outside.
I may be over-critical, but a unit commander cannot take his wife to war with him, and here the war was becoming ever more intense, even in the Reichs Chancellery, so I can rightly accuse him of failing lamentably in his responsibilities.
Consequently, my men had to steal their daily bread by the sweat of their brows. To my shame I must admit in helping them by asking the storekeeper stupid questions while they carried off the stolen items to their quarters. Let the readers think what they like, the full stomachs of my men were more important to me than morals and propriety. Hunger hurts and the food that we had brought with us from the barracks had run out. The storekeeper, who had no hunger, could not understand this. He was a typical quartermaster and such people only respond to written orders for the issue of anything. To find such an order would have only led to unnecessary work
