Berlin: Story Of A Battle

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Text originally published in 1963 under the same title.

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Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

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BERLIN: STORY OF A BATTLE

BY

ANDREW TULLY

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 3

DEDICATION 4

A FOREWORD AND A NOTE ON SOURCES 5

BOOK ONE: THE ALARM 7

ONE 7

TWO 18

THREE 26

FOUR 34

FIVE 41

BOOK TWO: THE ATTACK 54

SIX 54

SEVEN 65

EIGHT 70

NINE 79

TEN 90

ELEVEN 98

BOOK THREE: IN EXTREMIS 108

TWELVE 108

THIRTEEN 116

FOURTEEN 124

FIFTEEN 134

SIXTEEN 145

SEVENTEEN 156

EIGHTEEN 166

NINETEEN 174

TWENTY 188

BIBLIOGRAPHY 195

DOCUMENTS, NEWSPAPERS AND PERIODICALS 196

ILLUSTRATIONS 198

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 236

DEDICATION

To my sister Bea with loving gratitude

A FOREWORD AND A NOTE ON SOURCES

In a sense, I started writing this book on April 27, 1945, when, as a war correspondent for the Boston Traveler, I was one of the first three Americans to enter Berlin. With me were Miss Virginia Irvin of the St. Lôuis Port-Dispatch and my jeep driver, Sergeant Johnny Wilson of the United States 26th Infantry Division and Roxbury, Massachusetts. We remained in Berlin for three days and two nights as guests of a Russian artillery battalion commanded by Major Nikolai Kovalesky of Leningrad. Then we left to file our stories, since it was becoming evident we might have difficulty in returning to the American lines because of tightened Soviet restrictions on travel by non-accredited personnel.

Since that day seventeen years ago when we rode into the raging battle that was the capital of the Third Reich, I have gathered every scrap of available material on the fall of Berlin. By the fall of 1961, when I was engaged by Simon and Schuster to write this book, I had accumulated hundreds of pages of notes and impressions and had read more than one hundred books dealing with the final phase of the German-Soviet conflict. Then in the early summer of 1962 I went to Germany to interview as many soldiers and civilians as I could find who had been in Berlin during the battle for the city. I had intended also to go to the Soviet Union on the same errand, but for reasons that remain obscure to me the Soviet government refused to issue me a visa.

In Germany I talked to 147 German soldiers and civilians who had been involved in the Battle of Berlin. Some of the accounts given me were not usable, due to inaccuracies that were easily discernible. Other stories were discarded because the people who told them were unwilling to permit use of their names. In only a few instances have I employed fictitious names, and then only when I was able to assure myself, by checking with other sources, that the persons involved had told substantially the truth.

I am satisfied, for example, that the story of the German girl Renate, and the Russian soldier Pyotr Ivanovich Telegin is true, and thus I am protecting the German girl by giving her the fictitious name Renate. The tragic story of the Mohnke Girl Lotte Behn was told me by her onetime fiancé, Karl, and was substantiated by Loge’s father and a girlfriend; but the names given these three people in the book are fictitious, again for obvious reasons. The story of the soldier with the fake pay-book name Ernst Wolf was told to me by a soldier who was present at the time Wolf was killed by the S.S. The torture and murder of soldiers of a Soviet regiment near the Oder front was supported by the finding of the bodies and by a talk with a member of the S.S. regiment, who got the story from one of the participants.

Many persons refused to permit use of their names because of fear that the Nazis somehow would come into power again and wreak vengeance. German soldiers who deserted during the battle naturally did not wish to be identified in print.

Although I was not permitted to go to the Soviet Union, I received considerable help from Yuri I. Volsky, Cultural Counselor of the Soviet Embassy in Washington, and from several members of the staff of the Soviet Embassy in East Berlin. Additionally, I was able to interview thirteen Soviet soldiers in East Berlin who had taken part in the battle seventeen years before. The war diaries of the Soviet war correspondent Vsevolod Vishnevsky were invaluable; Mr. Vishnevsky apparently jotted down every scrap of conversation during the truce negotiations between Soviet officers and German representatives leading to the surrender of Berlin. Also rich in material was the collection of excerpts from war diaries and letters edited by the Russian V. S. Vesalv.

Of the documentary sources used, the record of the trial of the Nazi war criminals in Nuremberg was rich in firsthand material on the antics and psyches of Hitler’s court. Similarly, the various books by high officials and military men of the Nazi regime were filled with the conversations, attitudes and impressions which so startlingly illumined the philosophy of the Nazi fanatics. Notable among these books were General Guderian’s Panzer Leader, Schellenberg’s The Labyrinth, General Koller’s Der letzte Monat, and Count Schwerin von Krosigk’s Es geschah in Deutschland. I also leaned heavily on H. R. Trevor-Roper’s The Last Days of Hitler, a classic of its kind; Jürgen Thorwald’s Das Ende an der Elbe and Flight in the Winter; William L. Shirer’s monumental The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich; and B. H. Liddell Hart’s The German Generals Talk. A complete bibliography will be found elsewhere.

But at least eighty-five per cent of the material in this book has come from eyewitnesses and is here published for the first time. The following list of acknowledgments is as complete as possible; I regret if I have omitted the names of any persons who contributed to the book in any way. With this apology-in-advance on record, then, I want to express my sincere thanks to the following:

WASHINGTON, D.C.

Legare H. B. Obear, chief of the Loan Division, Library of Congress; Miss Helen-Anne Hilker, information officer, Library of Congress; Mrs. Jean Burch, Miss Adoreen McCormick and Miss Nancy Emery of the Library staff; Dr. Stetson Conn, chief historian, Office of Military History, U.S. Department of the Army; Dr. John Miller, Jr., deputy chief historian, and Dr. Earl Ziemke, deputy chief, Current Branch, Office of Military History.

Robert Borchardt, Press Counselor, German Embassy; Joachim Schoenbeck, Press Secretary, German Embassy; Miss Renate Friedemann, German Embassy; Egon Weck, German Embassy; Yuri L Volsky, Cultural Counselor, Soviet Embassy; Edward Saratov, Press Attaché, Soviet Embassy; Georgi Bolshakov, editor of the Soviet English-language magazine U.S.S.R.; and Lothar Loewe, chief of the Washington bureau of North German Radio and a former member of a Hitler Youth detachment which fought in Berlin.

GERMANY

Werner Haupt, director, Bibliothek für Zeitgeschichte Weltkriegsbücherei, Stuttgart; Frau Hansi Clemens Boehmler, Stuttgart; Rudolf Boehmler, Stuttgart; Frau Erika Schneider, Stuttgart; Fritz Ludwig Schneider, Stuttgart; Frau Charlotte Walrand Angermann, Stuttgart; William MacFarlane, United States Information Service, Stuttgart; Kent Fry, Pan American World Airways, Stuttgart.

Dr, Wolf Leo Harting, director, West German Republic Press Visitors Bureau, Berlin; Rudolf Kettlein, deputy chief, Press Information Office, city of Berlin; Arthur K. Willey, United States Information Service, Berlin; Admiral Heinrich Stiegel (retired), Berlin; Kurt Rech, Berliner Morgenpost, Berlin; and the following, also from Berlin: Fräulein Gretel Spitzer, Frau Hilde Lemke, Fritz Liedtke, Dr. Arnulf Pritzsch, Egon Mangerrapp, Fräulein Jadwiga Urbanowicz, Willy Luedicke, Dietrich von Behmen, Fräulein Ursula Kroll, Lutz Hoffmann, Frau Anna Neumann, Zaki Fahart, Wolfgang Kretschmer, United Press International chief Joseph Fleming, Ed Clark of Time magazine, Hans Joachim Kletsch, Fräulein Helga Kristoleit, Otto Grups, Fred Beuttenmueller, Karl Funk, Helmut Christian, Theodor Kuebler, Hans Keppler, Willy John, Fritz Model, Anton Diehn, Adolf Eicke, Lothar Frank, Ernst Forster, Fräulein Erika Goerdeler, Walther Busch, Joachim Glueck, Alfred Harnack, Rudolf Graefe, Willy Hofer, Heinz Kleist, Erich Krancke, Siegfried Weber, Karl Stein, Fräulein Gertrud Schrader and Fräulein Charlotte Pohl.

As for the ridiculous hundred million Slavs, we will mold the best of them to the shape that suits us, and we will isolate the rest of them in their own pigsties....Surely I have a right to remove millions of an inferior race that breeds like vermin!—ADOLF HITLER

Kill, Red Army men, kill! No fascist is innocent, be he alive, be he as yet unborn. Kill!—ILYA EHRENBURG

BOOK ONE: THE ALARM

ONE

WHEN THE SMOKE began to clear around Haupt’s butcher shop in the Knesebeckstrasse in Charlottenburg, the old woman looked down to see what was the matter with her leg and discovered that the leg no longer existed. For a moment, her eyes had a look almost of detachment as she stared at the bloody stump just above her knee. Her head bent lower; she seemed fascinated by the whitish cords which dangled from the stump. Then she screamed, and fainted.

The British plane had scored a direct hit on Haupt’s shop, splattering the remains of the queue against the walls of buildings across the street. For a while it was difficult to tot up the casualties because first it was necessary to match limbs with torsos—and torsos with heads. But in the end a reasonably accurate figure was possible: twenty-three dead and seventeen wounded. No, twenty-four dead; the old woman who had lost her leg suddenly died.

But the raid was over, and there was still meat to be had at the shop across the street. Slowly, the people picked themselves up from the street where they had thrown themselves face first, or emerged from doorways. Slowly, and then with quickened steps, they moved toward the shop across the street. As they advanced, their eyes on the loins of pork and small hams in the butcher’s window, some of them used their sleeves to wipe the blood off their meat coupons. A few women still wore on their heads the tin buckets they had put on when the first bomb fell several hundred yards down the Kurfürstendamm. There was a jostling for position in the new queue. Even in the midst of death one must try to live, and with a bit of meat one could prolong the process.

The moment the air raid ended, the argument on the roof of the flak tower of the Zoo Bunker resumed its cackling feminine cacophony. While shattering explosions continued to tear at Berlin’s vitals, the girls on the tower jabbered fiercely over the question of who should get the prize cake for spotting the first plane. It was a question without a clear-cut answer; almost simultaneously at least a half-dozen of Captain Hilde Lemke’s Labor Service Corps spotters had shrieked their warnings.

Hilde Lemke, husky and mannish, sometime doctor of philosophy and tutor of fresh-faced American girl students, surveyed her charges with an affection that brought moisture to her lips. They had done well, these girls, both with their searchlights at night and with their naked eyes in daylight. Only six months earlier they had been trucked in from farms and munitions factories to replace the soldiers on the tower’s roof. Now, on this seventeenth of April, 1945, they would be in on the final, glorious battle of the war, for Marshal Zhukov’s Asian horde had crossed the Oder only fifty miles away and Berlin was in the path of the invaders. It would be glorious, Hilde Lemke reminded herself sharply; the Führer had given his promise.

But—what to do when you had only so many food coupons? Hilde Lemke strode into the middle of the jabbering group, her decision, as always, made and irrevocably stamped official.

Soldiers, soldiers—quiet! Captain Lemke always addressed her girls as soldiers. The babble subsided and Captain Lemke gave the group a fond smile that was almost a physical caress. But her voice stayed officially stern. There are too many of you—too many good ones, she said. You are too efficient for your poor leader’s means. I have coupons for only one cake, and so there can be no cake.

She paused to look out over the rooftops of the city through the haze of smoke and dust lit up here and there by the bloodlike glare of skyscraping flames. Her girls looked up at her, glum and silent. Although it was still only eleven o'clock in the morning the air raid’s violence had produced a kind of dusty twilight, and the soiled light softened the girls’ grim faces.

Hilde Lemke laughed her hoarse laugh. But we shall celebrate, she said. We shall all celebrate. The coupons are not enough for cake for all, but there shall be pudding for all!

They jabbered at her, excited and grateful. Captain Lemke smiled at them again and turned away. Leave Berlin, indeed! How could she leave Berlin, as the Labor Service commander Hierl had told her to do, when the climactic hour was approaching, when great events were unfolding? As a loyal member of the Nazi Party she had to stay, and she had told Hierl so in firm language. Her husband, toiling stolidly in his office at the bank, was a different matter, and she had tried to persuade him to leave. But he had been adamant, too. If I leave, it will be the end of our marriage, he had told her. I stay. And so he had stayed, and at this moment probably was quietly balancing an account at the Handelsgesellschaft in the Behrenstrasse.

Captain Lemke took the copy of the Völkischer Beobachter out of her tunic pocket. She told herself she did not need reassurance, but it was relaxing to absorb information that had the authentic stamp of Dr. Goebbels’ hand. It was no longer a proper newspaper, just a single sheet printed on both sides, but she had lifted it from the baker’s counter when he wasn’t looking; she needed it to expand her horizon.

Here were Dr. Goebbels’ defiant words; she read them hungrily, for the third time: The Mongol horde will be thrown back across the Oder. The Bolshevik enemy will not advance another foot on the sacred soil of the Fatherland. Eagerly, too, she read of the Russian atrocities: Sixty-eight-year-old Woman Raped. Oriental Communists Violate 26 Nuns in Convent. The place names came closer and closer to Berlin—Mark Buchholz, Seelow, Müncheberg. But the Russians would be stopped. They would be stopped.

Across the smoking ruins and the leaping flames, in the Neukölln section, the big Karstadt department store on the Hermannplatz was guarded by several squads of S.S. troops. The crowd had gathered slowly, picking its way over the rubble—over the cobblestones heaped high by the bombs, over the twisted trolley tracks ripped up into pointing steel fingers by the explosions, over bathtubs blasted out of once neat apartments into the street. The crowd had gathered slowly, and silently; no words passed between its staring faces and the determinedly offhand mien of the S.S. guards. But the posture of the crowd was demanding, and the S.S. knew what the crowd wanted. The Karstadt was bulging with food supplies for the S.S. and other important folk in Adolf Hitler’s official family, and this timid amateur mob, trying hard not to grovel, wanted a share of that food.

An. S.S. lieutenant, smart in tight-fitting uniform, marched out of a door and stood there, tapping his smooth thigh with his riding crop. His expression was one of weary boredom, but his blue eyes were icy, and when his voice came it was surprisingly loud for having issued through such rigid lips.

Get out, all of you! he bawled. Disperse! Get back to your homes. There is no food here for the likes of you.

The crowd continued to stare at him for one long moment, and then, slowly, watching where their steps led them, the people turned and left.

One of them, Herr Behn, walked across the Hermannplatz and after a while found his steps turning into the Mainzer Strasse. Well, he might as well look in on the funeral of that odd couple whose house had been razed by a direct hit from a phosphorus bomb. Funny, he couldn’t remember their name, but they had caused a stir in the neighborhood by persisting with their daily croquet games in their garden. Herr Behn found a choir of three men and one woman chanting at the double grave in the garden, while the gravediggers stood impatiently by the two raw pine coffins. Well, it was nice that the authorities had given the people permission to bury their dead wherever they could; the garden had been the whole world to the man and woman whose remains lay in those coffins.

Herr Behn’s head cocked irritably at a commotion in the rubble that was all that remained of the house next door, behind the partially demolished brick wall. Even at a funeral! he thought. It was a woman’s voice, shrill and insistent, and as Herr Behn stared angrily the woman stepped through a gaping hole in the wall, a coarse gray sack over one shoulder.

It’s his arm! It’s his arm! she was shrieking. She strode over to the head gravedigger and deposited the sack at his feet. The head gravedigger motioned to the dead couple’s daughter, a spinster with coarse hair braided down her back under a huge black hat, and she made her stately way to his side while the other gravediggers gathered around in a circle so closely that Herr Behn couldn’t see what was going on. Shortly the circle parted, however, and the daughter walked back to her place among the mourners. She spoke to those gathered in the garden as though speaking to the whole world.

She found my father’s arm. The one that was missing. It is his; the tattoo of the sailing ship is there on the biceps.

As she spoke, two of the gravediggers were opening one of the coffins and Herr Behn saw them slip the sack and its contents into the box.

Herr Behn slipped out of the garden and turned down the street. The gruesome scene had repelled him, but curiously his hunger suddenly seemed sharper. He had to eat what little remained in his room—now. His mouth was flooded with the thought of food. The walk seemed an eternity of torn streets and rubble before he climbed the two flights of stairs to his room in the faded elegance of the big house in the Leinestrasse. Hurriedly he poked at the two potatoes in the pot; they had been on the tiny gas flame for more than an hour, but they were still hard. No matter; he stood there and forked pieces of potato out of the pot and into his mouth. He tried to take his time, but before he had had time to get used to their taste they were gone. He tipped the last of the bluish milk from the bottle into a glass and sipped it between nibbles on a hunk of gray bread. For the first time, he was glad Greta had been killed in the shelter; a wife would only make him feel worse, more helpless, more desperate. At least he didn’t have to worry about Greta living like this—Greta who loved roast loin of pork. As for Lotte, he would continue to do his best not to think of his daughter. She was gone from him; she was someone he no longer knew.

Lotte, dark and comely, with pointed breasts, couldn’t have cared less. In Steiner’s office in the Ministry of Propaganda across from the Chancellery on the Wilhelmstrasse, she had just finished putting on her new Luftwaffe uniform. The fit was far from perfect, but she was satisfied; now she belonged, now she was something more than a secretary for the fat Steiner, who had taken to staying away from the office for days at a time. She got her large mirror out of her handbag, propped it up against two books on Steiner’s desk and looked herself over. It was not chic, but it was—official-looking.

She belonged now—specifically, to the 1st Company of the new combat battalion formed by order of S.S. Brigadeführer (Brigadier General) Mohnke, commandant of the Chancellery, protector of the Führer. Now she was a Mohnke Girl, sworn to fight to the end in the defense of Berlin. If she did well, if she fought bravely, the chance of reward was bright. Martin Bormann, head of the chancellery of the Nazi Party (successor to the simple-minded Rudolf Hess), a man with the look of having just emerged from a hole in the ground, had announced only the other day that Junker estates in Prussia would be given to those who distinguished themselves in the coming battle. Lotte made a moue in the mirror; she wished she could show herself off to Karl, but Karl was with his medical unit at the Oder. Or at least he had been the last she had heard.

Lotte’s information was not up-to-date. As she admired herself in the mirror, Karl was in Berlin, his arm in a sling from that piece of shell in Küstrin, trudging across the city from the south on his way to his new post in the Reichstag building. He had walked for more than four hours since he crossed the city limits, and he had come no farther than the Berliner station in Wilmersdorf. When he was two blocks north of the station the air raid sirens sounded again, and he jogged wearily around the corner and down into a shelter somewhere, urged on by an ancient warden in a faded Wehrmacht uniform. Gradually his eyes grew accustomed to the dim light of the kerosene lanterns swaying from the heavy beams supporting the ceiling, and he felt a passing gratitude for the security of the place. It was not far underground—he had unconsciously counted only twenty-five steps—but the walls were constructed of huge building blocks and the ceiling between the beams seemed to consist of boulder-like rocks set in concrete. But his feeling of security was spoiled by irritation at having to sit there wasting time when he should be getting on to the Reichstag.

When the bombs started to fall, Karl was amused, in a detached sort of way, by the reactions of the prisoners in the shelter. Some pressed their backs more firmly against the wall, others held towels over mouth and nose, others flung themselves face down on the stone floor. He had heard about the towel technique—it was supposed to protect the lungs from infection caused by inhalation of rubble dust. The bombs fell nearer and the walls swayed, the ceiling creaked. Karl felt an involuntary trembling within him, and his hands suddenly were drenched with sweat. He knew he no longer was capable of fear in such circumstances; attempting to analyze his reaction objectively, he concluded it was habit, it was the fear he no longer felt expressing itself physically. He thought, Thank God it’s only sweat and the shakes with no dirtying of the trousers like that poor old man over there. That poor old man and many others in the shelter, obviously; the place suddenly had the stench of a Russian latrine and there were pools on the floor that were not water.

It was more than an hour before the all-clear sounded, and then it took Karl another two hours to reach the Reichstag. On almost every street, he had to stand aside or slip into doorways to let columns of troops pass on their way to the front. Troops! Karl was appalled at the appearance of this fresh cannon fodder. Old men of fifty with spectacles dangling on their running noses, boys of fifteen with their baby fat bulging their cheeks, men in the ranks actually limping already. Poor Lotte, he thought; she doesn’t know the war is over.

Karl trudged the last few meters from the Brandenburg Gate to the Reichstag and stopped to look up at the ancient building. Obviously there had been some near-hits. The columned façade was gouged and chipped as though by a huge ax, and most of the windows were shattered. Over the main entrance, the gold lettering still stood out: TO THE GERMAN PEOPLE. The architects who had founded the German Reich in 1871 had also built this neoclassic temple, taking the ten years between 1884 and 1894 to finish the job. It had housed the Parliament of the German States until a onetime Austrian bohemian ordered it burned in 1933 to frame the Communists. The Parliament had moved then, to the Kroll Opera House, and Adolf Hitler had let the large conference hall and the shattered glass cupola remain as the arsonists had left it: a memorial to the violent coming to power of the Nazis.

Wearily, Karl walked up the steps and went inside. The lobby was jammed with soldiers and their bedrolls, with here and there a line of cots. Rifles were stacked properly in every available open space, but the floor was a junk yard of empty cans, wrapping paper, boots, dirty mess kits and parts of uniforms. Bismarck had marched into this entrance hall, and Rosa Luxemburg, and from that window looking to the west Philipp Scheidemann had announced the formation of the Republic on November 9, 1918. But now it was an untidy, disorganized soldiers’ billet, with its occupants either asleep on the floor or playing cards from squatting positions. The smell was a mixture of sour breath, sweat and urine. In the huge conference hall the soldiers arranged themselves under the scaffolding which had been there since the fire, supporting the shattered cupola.

Sir—can you help me?

Karl turned, and his annoyance became astonishment as he surveyed the figure before him—a tall, erect, thin-waisted man with graying hair, immaculate in white tie and tails.

"What do you want?" Karl’s voice was shrilly incredulous.

The man seemed bewildered. They—the notice said to come here, to come here to report for work, he said, his voice an uneasy stammer.

Here? To report for work? Karl made a point of looking the man up and down again. And what are you doing in that getup?

The man looked down at himself, at the spotless white of his shirt front, the carefully pressed vest, the graceful curve of coat. They—it was ordered that we should report here, he said. In our working clothes. He looked at Karl with apology in his earnest gaze. Sir, I am a headwaiter.

In Charlottenburg, on the sidewalk outside his apartment at Dernburgstrasse, Rear Admiral Heinrich Stiegel confronted the S.S. captain. Behind him stood Paul, back rigid against the wall of the apartment building, sweat dampening his blond hair, his muscular body quivering.

The S.S. captain was menacing, but carefully so. The order is clear, he told Admiral Stiegel All forced laborers in this area are to be sent to special camps so that they may be properly guarded.

Guarded! Admiral Stiegel’s voice was contemptuous. There is no need to guard our Paul. He works in the elevator factory, he makes shell casings. What good will he be in a camp?

It is an order, the S.S. captain repeated. Your Paul is a Pole, an alien. He must go with the rest.

Admiral Stiegel’s voice rose in impatience. Nonsense! I won’t let you take him. He lives here with us, in a little room on the ground floor. He is quite safe with us—and of value to the Third Reich. He took a leather folder from his inside coat pocket and proffered it to the S.S. captain. You will see from this document who I am. I am in command of a detachment protecting the Bendler Strasse.

The S.S. captain took the folder and opened it casually, but as he read the admiral’s credentials his face wrinkled with concern, as Admiral Stiegel knew it would. Bendler Strasse meant only one thing to the military: the headquarters of the O.K.W.—the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, or High Command of the Armed Forces. Soldiers of every rank walked respectfully past the big building on the Tirpitz Embankment near the Tiergarten.

Yes. Yes, so I see. The S.S. captain’s voice was carefully respectful. He returned the folder to the admiral. Yes—then you may keep your Pole. Of course, I shall have to report it.

Of course. Admiral Stiegel’s voice was comfortable. "But for now, auf Wiedersehen."

The S.S. captain turned on his heel and marched to the Volkswagen at the curb. He got in, and the car drove off. Paul grasped both of Admiral Stiegel’s hands in his and kissed them.

You’ve saved my life, Paul said. His eyes were brimming. He would have taken me to my death.

Admiral Stiegel rescued his hands from Paul’s; his face was crimson. Nonsense! he said. They just wanted to complicate things. You’d have grown fat and lazy in that camp, Paul. You belong here, where we can get some work out of you. He looked