Authors: Roger Moorhouse
trophe . . . Beyond question Berlin is in danger. You can scent it in the
air, read it in the distracted faces of men called up, the scurrying of
steel-helmeted policemen and couriers.18
Helmut Vaupel, an officer-cadet undergoing training in Spandau,
heard that day about the fate of the last batch of eight hundred recruits
who had been sent out to the front: only eighty had survived. The
carnage was such, he said, that even their otherwise hard-hearted
sergeant major was reduced to tears.19 Friederike Grensemann, mean-
while, was sent home from work and arrived just in time to see her
father leave to join the
Volkssturm
. As he departed, he gave her his
pistol, adding, ‘It’s all over, my child. Promise me that when the
Russians come you will shoot yourself.’20 He then kissed her in silence
and left. She would never see him again.
That evening, taking advantage of a break in the incessant firing
and Soviet air raids, Ruth Andreas-Friedrich stole upstairs from her
cellar to take a look at the city. The sky to the east, she noted, was
now tinged with red, ‘as if blood had been poured over it’. In the
distance, she and her companion could make out the sounds of combat:
‘From the east comes a grumbling like distant thunder. That’s no
bombing, that’s . . . artillery. They’re attacking the city.’ The realisa-
tion was a sobering one, and they stood for a moment transfixed, lost
in their thoughts. ‘Before us lies the endless city’, she wrote, ‘black in
the black of night, cowering as if to creep back into the earth. And
we’re afraid.’21
* * *
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361
Surprisingly, given the urgency of the hour, German plans for the
defence of Berlin were in a state of chaos. The capital had been declared
a ‘Fortress’ in February, but little of any practical use had been done
to prepare it for this role. A plan of sorts was then worked out in
March, advocating the division of the city into eight defensive sectors,
designated A to H. In addition, two concentric defence lines were to
be constructed: one roughly following the boundary of the city and
another along the line of the S-Bahn ring that circled the city centre.
An inner defence line – codenamed ‘Citadel’ – was foreseen for the
administrative district, centring on the island formed by the Spree
River and the Landwehr canal, and encompassing both the former
Reichstag building and the Reich Chancellery.
Within the city, German troops attempted to nullify the material
superiority of the Soviets by targeting enemy armour with anti-aircraft
guns and
Panzerfaust
bazookas. In engaging the infantry, meanwhile,
they resorted extensively to ambushes. Red Army Marshal Vasily
Chuikov would write of the Battle for Berlin:
The Germans fought tenaciously . . . every dwelling, every block of
houses had its machine-gun nest and its Panzerfaust grenadiers . . .
They employed the following tactic: after the counterattack, they made
a feint, as though it had failed, and pulled back. In the roomy villas,
troops were concealed with machine pistols. Their job was to attack
our assault formations on the flanks and from the rear, causing us heavy
casualties with concentrated fire.22
There were a number of natural and man-made obstacles that could
also be exploited. The city’s river and canals provided a natural line of
defence, and many of the bridges across them were mined in prepar a-
tion. Moreover, the three formidable flak towers, located in an arc around
the north of the city centre, made for obvious strongpoints in the defence
network. Not only were they bristling with weaponry – much of which
could be lowered to engage targets on the ground – their sheer size and
strength made them ideal command posts.
Elsewhere in the city, improvisation was key. Barricades had been
erected wherever possible, often consisting of disused trams or rail
carriages filled with rubble. In some locations, iron girders were set
into the ground to give strength to paving stones or railway sleepers
362
berlin at war
that were stacked up to three metres high. Other positions were rather
more formidable, featuring the working turret of a tank buried into
the ground. Yet, for all the effort involved, such barricades were often
afforded little respect by Berliners. As one of them quipped, the barri-
cades would take only ten minutes for the Soviets to clear – ‘nine
minutes for the Ivans to control their laughter, and one minute for
them to blast them into oblivion’.23
The number of troops available for the defence of Berlin totalled
around 80,000, barely enough to man the outer defence line alone –
and certainly insufficient to contend with the 1.5 million Soviet soldiers
ranged against them.24 What is more, that figure was made up of units
of vastly differing quality and experience. Around half of them
consisted of the cadres of the
Volkssturm
, many of whom lacked
weapons and even basic training. The remainder, though regular troops,
often comprised exhausted and makeshift formations, ranged along-
side a core of battle-hardened veterans.
Morale among these myriad units was far from uniform. Many
of those now fighting for their own capital – and in some instances
their own streets and suburbs – were very determined. They were
motivated not only by the Nazi habit of presenting a Soviet victory
as a triumph for barbarism and the end of European civilisation, but
also by the grim treatment they had been taught to expect from the
Soviets. The atrocities at Nemmersdorf and Metgethen in East
Prussia, in which dozens of German civilians had been raped and
murdered by the Red Army, had been ruthlessly and systematically
exploited by Goebbels. Many Berliners fully expected to witness
similar scenes if their city were to fall.
There was also a distinct war-weariness in evidence, exacerbated
no doubt by the bitter and protracted nature of the battle in the city,
as well as the dawning realisation that the end was nigh. As one diarist
from the makeshift Müncheberg Division recorded: ‘Increasing signs
of disintegration and despair . . . hardly any communications among
the combat groups, inasmuch as none of the active battalions have
radio communications any more . . . Physical conditions are inde-
scribable. No relief or respite, no regular food and hardly any bread.
Nervous breakdown from the continuous artillery fire.’25
Even within the SS there were rumblings of discontent, particu-
larly among its foreign fighters. Berlin’s defences had been bolstered
ghost town
363
by a motley collection of French, Dutch, Danes and others, the
remnants of the multi-national Waffen-SS divisions
Nordland
and
Charlemagne
, raised to fight the Soviets. Many of them would fight
courageously for their cause, with some being awarded the Knight’s
Cross during the Battle for Berlin. One of the latter was the twenty-
five-year-old Frenchman Henri Fenet, who had the additional distinc-
tion of having been awarded the Croix de Guerre in 1940. He was
presented with his Knight’s Cross in a wrecked tram, by candlelight.26
Though Fenet was determined to fight to the bitter end, there were
others who were actively seeking a way out of the impasse. Jacob
Kronika recorded how a number of his fellow Danes, members of the
SS
Wiking
Division,27 pleaded for access to the Danish Embassy’s bunker
in the capital, so that they could sit out the remainer of the battle. As
one of them explained: ‘The Battle for Berlin will be over in a few
hours. Like many others, I have allowed myself to be exploited by a
regime, which is corrupt from top to bottom. I volunteered in good
faith many years ago, but I do not wish to throw away my life for
this.’28 Such deserters were generally turned away by embassy staff.
The morale of the
Volkssturm
was even more fragile. Given that
many of those called up were little more than children, it is some-
times hard to envisage the
Volkssturm
as a fighting force at all. Dorothea von Schwanenflügel was shocked to run into one such child-soldier,
‘a sad-looking young boy’, while she was collecting her rations:
I went over to him and found a mere child in a uniform many sizes
too large for him, with an anti-tank grenade lying beside him. Tears
were running down his face, and he was obviously very frightened of
everyone. I very softly asked him what he was doing there. He lost his
distrust and told me that he had been ordered to lie in wait here, and
when a Soviet tank approached he was to run under it and explode the
grenade. I asked how that would work, but he didn’t know. In fact this
frail child didn’t even look capable of carrying such a grenade.29
Among many
Volkssturm
units the overriding sentiment appears to
have been a fervent desire to get home and avoid being killed. Erich
Neumann found himself dragooned into a makeshift platoon, after
he left his Charlottenburg home on his bicycle to find a doctor for his
sick mother. Though only fourteen, he was given a ‘used steel helmet’,
364
berlin at war
had a K-98k rifle pushed into his hand – which was barely 10 centi -
metres shorter than he was – and was sent off to the western suburbs
of the capital. There he was fortunate to run into a family friend,
‘Uncle Hermann’, who would act as his protector:
Uncle did not think much of heroism. The so-called battle consisted
of a constant search for cover in stairwells and ruin. . . . Uncle Hermann
thought only about survival, for us both. We left Spandau without a
fight and marched west, as we thought the Russians were approaching
from the east. Many others joined us and we quickly became a large
group, albeit without a commanding officer.30
After deliberately avoiding any contact with the enemy, the group
finally ran into a Soviet patrol. ‘Nobody’, Neumann recalled, ‘reached
for his gun.’31
They were fortunate not to have run into an SS patrol. Had they
done so, there is every chance that they would have been subjected to
a drumhead court martial and executed as deserters. Berlin saw
numerous such cases during those final days of the war, with most
victims being hanged from nearby trees or lampposts with a placard
placed around their necks detailing their offence: ‘I am a traitor’ or ‘I
was too cowardly to defend my wife and children’.32 Some of the offences
cited could be astonishingly petty. Two soldiers were hanged on
Friedrichstrasse for their failure to adequately maintain their weapons.33
In carrying out these tasks, the SS were no respecters of rank or
status. As one eyewitness noted, ‘More and more people were hanged
everywhere, even men in uniform wearing the Iron Cross.’34 Neither
did the military command allow wounded soldiers to be tended if
they suspected them of being traitors to the cause, or of having caused
their injuries themselves. ‘In Prenzlauer Berg, a wounded soldier was
lying in the street’, recalled Gisela Richter,
who was crying out in pain, but was not allowed to be helped as he
was a deserter. Other soldiers cast a wide cordon around him, which
no one could cross, because [they said] ‘the pig deserved nothing more’.
He lay there crying on the pavement the whole day, and only that
evening did an officer give him the coup de grâce.35
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365
Dieter Borkowski was one of the lucky ones. He had left his pos-
ition in an anti-tank unit in Friedrichshain in an attempt to check on
his mother in nearby Kreuzberg, but had been picked up by an SS
patrol, along with some foreign labourers, and had been taken to a
command post in a nearby cellar. There he was abused by a young –
and obviously drunk – SS officer who proceeded to read the order
giving him the authority to execute ‘traitors and deserters’:
The SS-Sturmführer pronounced the death sentence and poured a large
glass of cognac down his throat. I almost passed out through sheer
terror. The Frenchmen babbled in their language, no one understood
them. We were to be taken up to street level – three SS soldiers were
given the order – to be shot. Then I ran over to the drunken commander
and burst out crying from fear; ‘I am not a traitor, I don’t want to
desert!’ I cried. The commandant waved to the SS men, who carried
me away between them. I was taken up along with the French and
Dutchmen.36
Though the foreign labourers were duly executed, Borkowski was
fortunate. Just as his turn came, a report arrived informing the SS men
that the Soviets had just crossed the Jannowitz Bridge and were now
barely a kilometre away. Grabbed by the collar by the commander of
the execution detail, Borkowski was roughly sent on his way. ‘Get out
of here’, he was told, ‘the next patrol will kill you anyway.’ That night,
the fear was still so fresh that he could barely write his diary: ‘I would