I knew there was a plan to try to break out over the Weidendammer Bridge and travel west to surrender to the British, but that just seemed like madness to me. The Soviets were bound to have all of the bridges covered and would, I assumed, have cordons around all the possible western routes. Instead, I settled on a bold plan: to go EAST towards the oncoming Red Army. I needed to go south down Wilhelmstrasse, then get off the main roads and travel carefully and quietly towards Leipziger Strasse and Kochstrasse, and then turn east. I must have been in the apartment blocks in or around Zimmerstrasse when I decided to hole up for the daylight hours, before the dawn broke. I needed a hideout urgently, but most of the buildings were so badly damaged and cluttered with rubble that it made finding a cellar, my preferred option, difficult.
At last, I found one, but the door was blocked by a still-smouldering beam and piles of rubble. I hurriedly cleared away the debris, but the beam was heavy and took a huge effort to finally shift it half a metre to enable me to open the cellar door. When I did so I was assailed by a putrid stench that made my eyes water. I coughed so violently that I almost vomited. I risked a quick flash of my torch and found that the stairway down into the cellar was blocked by three bodies. They must have been trapped in there by the falling beam and died of thirst and hunger. Judging by the stench, they were in a fairly advanced stage of decomposition. I adjusted my neckerchief so it covered my mouth and nose and set about hoisting the bodies off the stairs and out onto the ground floor. Pushing them further down into the cellar wasn’t an option. I wouldn’t be able to put up with that stench for any length of time.
I laid them out across the threshold of the main entrance to the apartment in the hope that it might deter people from coming in. The bodies belonged to an oldish man and woman and a younger woman, perhaps a daughter or daughter-in-law. Seeing the man in his old blue suit gave me an idea: it would provide a good disguise. I took off his shoes, jacket and trousers, but when I came to remove his shirt, I found it impossible. The shirt and his flesh had rotted together to form a congealed mess. Even if I could get it off, it would be impossible to wear. I urgently needed a shirt. The stairs leading to the first floor were in a precarious state—the banister had fallen away, and several steps were crushed and broken by falling masonry. Near the top, the stairs had parted company with the wall, so that as I started to climb, the whole structure moved alarmingly. By scrambling over the broken areas and clinging to the landing when I was high enough, I finally made it onto the first floor.
The first room I entered had lost most of the rear wall, the floor sloped slightly and some of the furniture was tottering on the edge. A dressing table stood against one of the remaining walls, covered in dust and rubble, partly buried amongst which was a picture, the glass broken. It was the picture of a young man in the uniform of the Waffen SS. I imagined it would be the young woman’s husband. I hoped he had been killed in Russia—better that than having to come home to this nightmare.
I tried the next room. Judging by the clothing hanging in a still-intact wardrobe, this belonged to the old couple. I was drawn to a chest of drawers. The first two drawers were full of women’s clothing, but the third contained men’s, including several shirts, all clean and beautifully pressed.
I grabbed one of the shirts and gingerly made my way back down the staircase. The sun was just coming up, so I hastily changed clothing and hid my uniform under a pile of rubble, retaining my belt with weapons and water bottles. Everything was a little too small for me, but it would do. I wedged the door of the cellar open with a piece of wood, leaving a gap through which I could just about enter, then piled rubble up against the outside so that when I closed it, it would fall against the door giving, I hoped, the impression that it had not been opened recently.
I wriggled through the gap then pulled the wooden wedge away, allowing the door to slam shut. I heard the reassuring rumble and clatter of the rubble pile as it fell against the closed door. I just hoped I would be able to open it when the time came.
I stayed in the cellar the whole of the next day, listening to the blast of artillery shells, the rattle of machine gun fire and the whine of ‘Stalin’s Organs’, as we called the Soviet rocket launchers. I confess to having a few moments of guilt. Berlin, my beloved Berlin, was dying—and there I was, hiding in a cellar. I knew that there was a Fallschirmjäger group to the north of the city, but it would have been impossible to reach them. It would have meant passing through, or very close to, the main battle area of the chancellery and Reichstag and then having to cross the River Spree. In other words, it would have been tantamount to committing suicide, and I wasn’t ready to do that just yet.
That night, the sound of fighting seemed remarkably close to my position. It was probably the final push to the centre from the south. It would not be a good idea to leave my bunker at that time, with Soviet troops all around me. I still had enough water and food to last me another day, so I decided to sit tight. The following morning—that would
