Another visitor besides Speer had arrived in the bunker unannounced the previous evening: General Helmuth Weidling, commander of the 56th Panzer Corps, attached to the 9th Army fighting to the south-east of Berlin. Communications had been lost with him since the evening of 20 April, and Hitler had ordered him arrested for desertion. Astonishingly, he had made his way back to Berlin, and into the Führer Bunker, to protest his innocence. Hitler was impressed. Next morning, he made Weidling responsible for Berlin’s defence, replacing Colonel Ernst Kaether, who had held the post for all of two days.
It was a daunting assignment. Weidling had at his disposal units rapidly patched together, comprising 44,600 soldiers, along with 42,500 Volkssturm men (whose fighting capabilities were severely limited on account both of their age and their miserable equipment), around 2,700 boys from the Hitler Youth, and a few hundred other ‘combatants’ from the Labour Service and Organisation Todt, assigned to defend the bridges that Wenck’s relieving army would have to cross. A further 5,500 sailors had been promised by Dönitz, but were not yet available. Facing them, and closing in on the city by the hour, were some 2½ million combat troops in crack divisions of the Red Army. Weidling knew from the start that his task was an impossible one.
The news from the ever-narrowing fronts around Berlin was meanwhile becoming ever grimmer. By midday on 24 April, Soviet troops from Zhukov’s and Konev’s armies had met up in the southern suburbs of the city. The encirclement of Busse’s 9th Army was complete. Hopes of it fighting its way through to the west to join Wenck’s 12th Army – still only in the preparatory stage of its march on the capital – were now illusory. Reports were reaching the Reich Chancellery of bitter street fighting in eastern and southern districts of the capital. Several districts to the north were already in Soviet hands, and the Nauen road, the last main road to the west, was blocked by T34 tanks. Tempelhof aerodrome, close to the city centre, had been bombarded by Soviet artillery since lunchtime. By the evening, Gatow airfield on the banks of the Havel to the west of Berlin had also come under heavy shelling. The East-West Axis, where Albert Speer had landed the previous day, was in practice now Berlin’s last remaining thin artery of non-telephonic communication with the outside world.
By dawn next morning, areas close to the city centre had started to come under persistent and intense artillery fire. Around midday, the spearhead of Konev’s army, skirting round Berlin to the south, met up with forward units from Zhukov’s army, heading round the city to the north, at Ketzin in the west. Berlin was as good as encircled. About the same time, Soviet and American troops were smoking cigarettes together at Torgau, on the Elbe, in central Germany. The Reich was now cut in two.
Symbolically – there was absolutely no military purpose to the operation (other than striking at the possible focus of continued Nazi guerrilla warfare after formal cessation of hostilities from what transpired to be a mythical ‘National Redoubt’) – Hitler’s alpine palace, the Berghof, above Berchtesgaden, had been reduced to smouldering ruins by RAF bombers that morning.
In his ever more isolated and beleaguered underground lair, with communications rapidly worsening, and with operational charts increasingly out of date and almost immediately overtaken by events, Hitler was still sure that he knew best. ‘The situation in Berlin looks worse than it is,’ he stated, with apparent confidence, on 25 April, having not ventured out of doors for five days. He ordered the city combed for all possible last reserves of manpower to throw into the fray and help prepare the ground from within for the arrival of Wenck. By this time, Wenck had made some advance towards the lakes south of Potsdam. But parts of his army were still engaged in combat with the Americans to the west, on the Elbe north of Wittenberg. And only remnants were by now left of the 9th Army, which was to have joined forces with him. With what he had at his disposal, Wenck had only the remotest chance of reaching Berlin.
But Wenck was now the only hope. Hitler was still looking for one final victory, one last chance to turn the tables on his enemies. Even now, he clung to the belief that the Alliance against him would fall apart if he could deliver a stinging blow to the Red Army. ‘I think the moment has come when out of self-preservation-drive the others will confront in any case this hugely swollen proletarian Bolshevik colossus and moloch … If I can be successful here and hold the capital, perhaps the hope will grow among the English and Americans that they could maybe still face this whole danger together with a Nazi Germany. And the only man for this is me,’ he asserted.
His comments to Goebbels that day were in part still apparently directed at convincing himself that his decision not to go to south Germany and to stay in Berlin was the right one. ‘I’d regard it as a thousand times more cowardly to commit suicide on the Obersalzberg than to stand and fall here,’ he stated. ‘They shouldn’t say: “You, as the Führer …” I’m only the Führer as long as I can lead. And I can’t lead through sitting somewhere on a mountain, but have to have authority over armies that obey. Let me win a victory here, however difficult and tough, then I’ve a right again to do away with the sluggish elements who are constantly causing an obstruction. Then I’ll work with the generals who’ve proved themselves.’
More than anything, Hitler’s words were aimed at his place in history. Even now – egged on, naturally, by Goebbels – he remained the propagandist, looking to image. Whether leading to glorious victory, or sacrificial self-destruction, the last stand in the bunker was necessary for prestige purposes. It never occurred to him to question the continued slaughter of soldiers and civilians to that end. ‘Only here can I attain a success,’ he told Goebbels, ‘… and even if it’s only a moral one, it’s at least the possibility of saving face and winning time.’ ‘Only through a heroic attitude can we survive this hardest of times,’ he went on. If he won the ‘decisive battle’ he would be ‘rehabilitated’. It would prove by example that he had been right in dismissing generals for not holding their ground.
And if he were to lose, then he would have perished ‘decently’, not like some ‘inglorious refugee sitting in Berchtesgaden and issuing useless orders from there’. He saw, he said, ‘a possibility of repairing history’ through gaining a success. ‘It’s the only chance to restore personal reputation … If we leave the world stage in disgrace, we’ll have lived for nothing. Whether you continue your life a bit longer or not is completely immaterial. Rather end the struggle in honour than continue in shame and dishonour a few months or years longer.’ Goebbels, with Frederick the Great’s exploits at the famous Battle of Leuthen – the Prussian King’s epic victory in 1757 over an Austrian army far superior in numbers – tripping once more from his tongue, summed up the ‘heroic’ alternatives: ‘If all goes well, then it’s in any case good. If things don’t go well and the Führer finds in Berlin an honourable death and Europe were to become bolshevized, then in five years at the latest the Führer would be a legendary personality and National Socialism would have attained mythical status.’
III
Not everyone in the maze of tunnels below the Reich Chancellery was looking to share the ‘heroic’ end that Hitler and Goebbels were contemplating. ‘I don’t want to die with that lot down there in the bunker,’ thirty-one-year-old Major Bernd von Freytag-Loringhoven, Krebs’s tall adjutant, uttered. ‘When it comes to the end, I want my head above ground and free.’ Even the SS men from Hitler’s bodyguard were anxiously asking about Wenck’s progress, consoling themselves with drink when off duty, and looking for possible exit-routes from what looked more and more like a certain grave. In the streets above, despite the threat – often carried out – of summary execution by ‘flying courts-martial’ for ‘defeatism’, let alone desertion, many elderly Volkssturm men, aware of the utter futility of carrying on such a hopeless unequal fight and looking to avoid a pointless ‘hero’s’ death, sought any opportunity at the approach of Soviet troops to melt away and try to rejoin families taking what refuge they could in cellars and bunkers.
Amid the burning rui
ns of the great city, living conditions were deteriorating rapidly. Food was running out. The water-supply system had broken down. The old, infirm, wounded, women and children, injured soldiers, refugees, all clung on to life in the cellars, in packed shelters, and in underground stations as hell raged overhead.
As communications increasingly petered out – the lines to Jodl at OKH headquarters went dead for a time in the course of the evening – ‘intelligence’ of troop movements in the city was gathered for the once-mighty Army High Command in the bunker by using the telephone directory to ring numbers at random. ‘Excuse me, madam, have you seen the Russians?’ ran the question. ‘Yes,’ would come a reply, ‘half an hour ago two of them were here. They were part of a group of about a dozen tanks at the crossroads.’
Despite the uneven contest, the regular troops, mostly insufficiently trained and badly equipped, often down to their last reserves of ammunition, continued the bitter struggle in Berlin’s streets. By the evening of 26 April, Soviet soldiers were close to Alexanderplatz, the very heart of the city. The Reich Chancellery in the government district, under heavy fire all day, was now less than a mile away.
A fresh moment of excitement gripped the inmates of the bunker during the early evening: the unexpected arrival of the wounded Colonel-General of the Luftwaffe Robert Ritter von Greim, and his glamorous female companion, twenty years his junior, the flying-ace and test pilot Hanna Reitsch. Both were fervent, long-standing admirers of Hitler. Greim had been summoned two days earlier to Berlin. He and Reitsch had had to risk an extremely hazardous flight from Munich. Greim’s foot had been injured when their Fieseler Storch had been hit by artillery fire on approach to the centre of Berlin, and Reitsch had grabbed the controls and brought the plane down safely on the East-West Axis. They had then requisitioned a car to bring them to the Reich Chancellery. Propped up by Reitsch, the wounded Greim now limped painfully into the bunker. He still did not know why he had come.
Once his foot had been bandaged, Hitler came in to tell him. After railing at Göring’s ‘betrayal’, Hitler informed Greim that he was promoting him to Field-Marshal and appointing him as the new head of the Luftwaffe. It could all have been done by telephone. Instead, Greim had had to risk life and limb to receive the news in person. And, it seemed likely, he and Reitsch were now doomed to end their lives in the bunker. But far from being infuriated or depressed, or both, Greim and Reitsch were exhilarated. They begged to stay in the bunker with Hitler. They were given phials of poison, should the worst happen. But Hitler persuaded Greim that all was not lost. ‘Just don’t lose faith,’ Koller heard Greim say, when he telephoned the bunker. ‘It’ll all come to a good end. The meeting with the Führer and his vigour have given me extraordinary new strength. It’s like the fountain of youth here.’ Koller thought it sounded more like a madhouse.
The briefing sessions were by this time much reduced in size and changed in character. Krebs was now the only senior military figure present. Goebbels had joined since taking up residence in the bunker. Hitler Youth Leader Axmann, General Weidling (responsible for the defence of Berlin), Vice-Admiral Voß (Dönitz’s liaison), Colonel Nicolaus von Below (the long-serving Luftwaffe adjutant), and SS-Brigadeführer Wilhelm Mohnke, just appointed by Hitler as commandant of the government quarter of Berlin (which had been dubbed ‘The Citadel’) were also present.
Discussion at the first meeting on 27 April, in the early hours, centred on the prospects of Wenck breaking through. He had reached the outskirts of Potsdam. But he had only three divisions at his disposal. He desperately needed reinforcements. The chances of Busse’s beleaguered 9th Army forcing their way north-westwards to join him were now slim in the extreme. But there were still hopes that troops under Lieutenant-General Rudolf Holste, to the north-west of Berlin, might fight their way south to link up with Wenck. Time was short. Krebs reported heavy street-fighting in the heart of the city. The Soviets had advanced on Alexanderplatz. They would soon have Potsdamer Platz in their sights; and that was where the bunker was situated. ‘May God let Wenck come!’ intoned Goebbels. ‘A dreadful situation crosses my mind,’ he added, grimly. ‘Wenck is located at Potsdam, and here the Soviets are pressing on Potsdamer Platz!’ ‘And I’m not in Potsdam, but in Potsdamer Platz,’ commented Hitler laconically.
His assessment of the situation was realistic: Wenck’s three divisions were not enough. They might suffice to take Potsdam, but they were only infantry divisions, lacking panzer support, and not capable of breaking their way through the Soviet tank units. Voß breathed encouragement. ‘Wenck will get here, my Führer! It’s only a question of whether he can do it alone.’ It was enough for Hitler to lapse into a new reverie. ‘You’ve got to imagine. That’ll spread like wildfire through the whole of Berlin when it’s known: a German army has broken through in the west and established contact with the Citadel.’ The Soviets, he thought, had suffered great losses, were suffering even more in the intense house-to-house fighting, and could only throw more troops into exposed forward positions. The thought sufficed: he had convinced himself that the situation was not wholly bleak. The constant explosions had kept him awake in recent nights. But he would sleep better tonight, he said. He only wanted to be awakened ‘if a Russian tank is standing in front of my cabin’ so that he had time to do what was necessary.
The second briefing of the day began with Mohnke announcing that the first enemy tanks had managed to penetrate to the Wilhelmplatz, the heart of the government quarter. They had been repulsed – on this occasion – but time was running out. Krebs reckoned the bunker residents had no more than about twenty-four to twenty-six hours; the link-up between the armies of Wenck and Busse had to take place within that time if there was to be any hope. Hitler inwardly knew, however, that this would not happen. He repeatedly bemoaned ‘the catastrophic mistake’ of the 9th Army, which he blamed for ignoring his orders and trying to penetrate the Soviet lines in the wrong direction. The faint hopes from the remaining forces in the north, those of Holste and Steiner (in whom Hitler had lost all confidence days earlier), were now also – realistically, if not in dreams – largely abandoned.
Despite a desperate plea from Keitel to throw everything into the relief of Berlin, Jodl had diverted the hard-pressed units of Holste and Steiner to fend off Soviet forces to the north of the capital. It was tantamount to giving up on Berlin. Bormann scathingly commented in his diary, in remarks pointedly directed at Reichsführer-SS Himmler’s recognized reluctance to deploy Steiner’s SS corps to help save Berlin: ‘The divisions marching to our relief are held up by Himmler-Jodl! We will stand and fall with the Führer: loyal into death. Others believe they have to act “from higher insight”. They sacrifice the Führer, and their lack of loyalty – shame on them – matches their “feeling of honour”.’
Hitler and Goebbels relapsed into reminiscences. They were prompted by Mohnke’s remark, entirely without irony: ‘We haven’t quite brought about what we wanted in 1933, my Führer!’ Hitler’s explanation – it had scarcely been in his mind at the time – was that he had come to power too early. A year or more later, at Hindenburg’s death, would have been the right time. To bring about a complete revolution, the old system needed to have revealed itself as utterly bankrupt. As it was, he had been forced to compromise with Hugenberg, Schleicher – not much of a compromise since the former Reich Chancellor had, in fact, been murdered by Hitler’s henchmen at the time of the ‘Röhm affair’ in 1934 – and other pillars of the old order. By the time of Hindenburg’s death, Hitler went on, the determination to rid himself of the conservatives had lessened, and the work of reconstruction was under way. ‘Otherwise, thousands would have been eliminated at that time,’ he declared. ‘It could have happened, if I had come to power through an express will of the people’– presumably meaning a presidential election – ‘or through a putsch. You regret it afterwards that you are so good,’ he concluded.
This took the discussion inexorably once more back into pathos and an evocation
of ‘heroism’. He was staying in Berlin, Hitler said, ‘so that I have more moral right to act against weakness … I can’t constantly threaten others if I run away myself from the Reich capital at the critical hour … I’ve had the right to command in this city. Now I must obey the commands of fate. Even if I could save myself, I won’t do it. The captain also goes down with his ship.’ Voß, predictably, picked up the metaphor. Pathos and emotion got the better of him, too. ‘Here in the Reich Chancellery it’s just like the command-bridge of a ship,’ he implausibly ruminated. ‘One thing here applies to all. We don’t want to get away.’ (He would, ultimately, like most of the others, nevertheless seek to flee the bunker at the last moment.) ‘We belong together. It’s only a matter of being an upright community.’
IV
The news trickling in during the day could scarcely have been worse. Wenck’s troops, without assistance from the 9th Army (whose encirclement was by now accepted as practically a foregone conclusion), had been pushed back south of Potsdam. There was a ‘doomsday’ mood in the bunker, alleviated only by copious supplies of alcohol and food from the Reich Chancellery cellars. Hitler told Below he had decided to give Weidling, the Commandant of Berlin, the order to break out. All his staff should go, as well as Bormann and Goebbels. He would stay behind and die in the capital. By evening, amid worsening news, he had changed his mind. An attempt to break out would be useless. He gave Below a poison-capsule, should it come to ‘a difficult situation’.
The fate of the encircled 9th Army, with its eleven divisions almost four times as strong as the forces at Wenck’s disposal, took Hitler back, like a long-playing record, at the third briefing of the day to what he saw as constant disobedience and disloyalty in the army. Only Schörner, commander of Army Group Centre, was singled out for praise as ‘a true warlord’. Dönitz, too, stood in high favour for holding to his promise to send naval units to the defence of Berlin, and to Hitler’s personal protection. The faint hope in Wenck was still not totally extinguished. But Hitler was looking to the last stand in the ‘Citadel’. Firm command and reliable troops for the defence of the ‘Citadel’ were vital. His fear of capture surfaced again. ‘I must have the absolute certainty,’ he said, following news that enemy tanks had for a short time forced their way into Wilhelmstraße, ‘that I will not be dragged out through some crafty trick by a Russian tank.’ He saw it as only a question of time before the Soviets brought up heavy artillery to shell the ‘Citadel’ from close range. ‘It’s a matter then of a heroic struggle for a last small island,’ he commented. ‘If the relief doesn’t arrive, we have to be clear: it’s no bad end to a life to fall in the struggle for the capital of your Reich.’