As Pemsel left Berlin, he felt that fate and the weather had been exceptionally kind to him. It was clear that the city could not be defended. Passing a hodgepodge of tree trunks, steel spikes and cone-shaped concrete blocks that would be used as anti-tank obstacles, he shook his head in disbelief. Still farther along, the car sped by elderly Home Guardsmen slowly digging trenches. As he left the city behind, Pemsel later recounted, “I thanked God for allowing this bitter chalice to pass from me.”
At his headquarters on the Hohenzollerndamm, the city’s Commandant, General Reymann, stood before a huge wall map of Berlin looking at the defense lines marked on it and wondering, as he afterward put it, “what in God’s name I was supposed to do.” Reymann had hardly slept for the past three days and he was bone-weary. Since morning he had taken countless telephone calls, attended several meetings, visited sections of the perimeter defense lines and issued a batch of orders????most of which, he privately believed, stood little chance of being completed before the Russians reached the city.
Earlier in the day, Goebbels, Berlin’s Gauleiter and self-appointed defender, had held his usual weekly “war council.” To Reymann, these meetings seemed almost farcical now. In the afternoon he described this latest one to his Chief of Staff, Colonel Refior. “He told me the same old thing. He said, ‘If the battle for Berlin was on right now you would have at your disposal all sorts of tanks and field pieces of different calibers, several thousand light and heavy machine guns, and several hundred mortars, in addition to large quantities of corresponding ammunition.’ ” Reymann paused. “According to Goebbels,” he told Refior, “we’ll get everything we want—if Berlin is encircled.”
Then Goebbels had suddenly switched the conversation. “Once the battle for Berlin begins, where do you intend to set up your headquarters?” he had asked. Goebbels himself planned to go to the Zoo Bunker. He suggested that Reymann operate from there also. Reymann thought he saw immediately what the Gauleiter had in mind; Goebbels intended to keep Reymann and the defense of Berlin completely under his own thumb. As tactfully as he could, Reymann had sidestepped the offer. “I would like to refrain from that,” he said, “since both the military and political could be eliminated at the same time by a freakish hit.” Goebbels had dropped the subject but Reymann noticed an immediate coolness in the Gauleiter’s manner. Goebbels was well aware that it would be almost impossible for the massive Zoo Bunker to be destroyed by even a score of large bombs.
Reymann knew the Reichsminister would not forget that his invitation had been turned down. But at the moment, while he was faced with the almost hopeless task of trying to prepare a defense for the city, the last person Reymann wanted in close proximity was Goebbels. He placed no stock in either the Gauleiter’s pronouncements or in his promises. Only a few days earlier, again discussing supplies, Goebbels had said that the Berlin defense would be bolstered with “at least one hundred tanks.” Reymann had asked for a written list of the promised supplies. When he finally got the information, the hundred tanks turned out to be “twenty-five tanks completed, seventy-five now being built.” No matter how many there were, Reymann knew he would see no part of any of them. The Oder front would have priority on all such vital weapons.
In Reymann’s view, only one Cabinet member really understood what lay ahead for Berlin. That was Reichsminister Albert Speer, and even he had his blind spot. Immediately after the Gauleiter’s war council, Reymann had been ordered to present himself before Speer. At the former French Embassy on the Pariser Platz where Hitler’s wartime production chief now had his offices, the usually urbane Speer was furious. Pointing to the great highway running across a map of the city, Speer demanded to know what Reymann “was up to on the East-West Axis.” Reymann looked at him in amazement. “I’m building a landing strip between the Brandenburg Gate and the Victory Column,” he answered. “Why?”
“Why?” exploded Speer. “Why? You are chopping down my lamp posts—that’s why! And you cannot do it!”
Reymann had thought Speer knew all about the plan. In the battles for Breslau and Königsberg, the Russians had grabbed the airports on the outskirts of both cities almost immediately. To circumvent a similar situation in Berlin should one occur, it had been decided to build a landing strip almost in the very center of the government district, along the East-West Axis where it passed through the Tiergarten. “For this reason,” Reymann said later, “in agreement with the Luftwaffe, the strip between the Brandenburg Gate and the Victory Column was chosen. It meant that the ornamental bronze lamp posts would have to be removed, and the trees, for a depth of 30 meters [about 100 feet] on either side, would have to come down. When I mentioned this plan to Hitler, he said that the lamp posts could go but the trees had to remain. I did my utmost to persuade him to change his mind, but Hitler would not hear of the trees being cut. Even though I explained that if the trees were not taken out only small planes would be able to take off and land, he still would not change his mind. What his reasons were I do not know, but the removal of a few trees would hardly have ruined the city’s beauty at this late date.” And now Speer was objecting to the removal of the lamp posts.
Reymann explained the situation to Speer, pointing out in conclusion that he had the Führer’s permission to remove the posts. But that made no impression on the Reichsminister. “You cannot take down those lamp posts,” he insisted. “I object to that.” Then Speer added, “You do not seem to realize that I am responsible for the reconstruction of Berlin.”
In vain Reymann tried to persuade Speer to change his mind. “It is vital that we keep an airstrip open, especially in this location,” he argued. The Reichsminister would hear no more. As Reymann remembered it, “the conversation ended with Speer expressing his intention of taking up the whole matter with the Führer. Meanwhile his lamp posts remained, and the work on the strip was to stop—even though the Russians were advancing steadily toward us.”
Just before the meeting ended, Speer brought up the matter of Berlin’s bridges. Again he argued with Reymann, as he had at Heinrici’s headquarters the day before, that to destroy the bridges was futile, that water, power and gas mains were carried over many of them and that the “severing of these lifelines would paralyze large parts of the city and make my task of reconstruction that much more difficult.” Reymann knew that Speer’s influence with Hitler was great: he had already received a direct order from the Reichskanzlei to strike off his list several of those bridges slated for destruction. Now, Speer was insisting that they all be saved. Reymann turned as stubborn as Speer. Unless counter orders were received from Hitler, Reymann intended to carry out his instructions and blow up the remaining bridges. He did not like the idea any more than Speer, but he had no intention of risking his own life and career to save them.
From Speer’s office Reymann made a quick visit to one of the defense sectors on Berlin’s outskirts. Each of these inspections only served to deepen Reymann’s conviction that Berlin’s defenses were an illusion. In the strutting, triumphant years, the Nazis had never considered the possibility that one day a last stand would be made in the capital. They had built fortifications everywhere else—the Gustav Line in Italy, the Atlantic Wall along the European coast, the Siegfried Line at Germany’s western borders—but not even a trench had been built around Berlin. Not even when the Russians drove with titanic force across eastern Europe and invaded the Fatherland did Hitler and his military advisors act to fortify the city.
It was only when the Red Army reached the Oder early in 1945 that the Germans began to strengthen Berlin’s defenses. Slowly a few trenches and anti-tank obstacles appeared on the eastern outskirts of the city. Then, incredibly, when the Red Army pulled up before the frozen river to wait for the spring thaws, the preparations for the capital’s protection stopped, too. Not until March was the defense of Berlin given any serious consideration—and by then it was too late. There were no longer the forces, the supplies, or the equipment to set up the necessary fortifications.
In two grueling months of frenetic activity, a makeshift series of defense lines had been thrown together. Sometime in late February, an “obstacle belt” had been hurriedly established in a broken ring twenty to thirty miles outside the capital. This line ran through wooded areas and marshes and along lakes, rivers and canals, mostly north, south and east of the city. Before Reymann took command, orders had been issued declaring the obstacle areas “fortified places.” In keeping with Hitler’s fortress mania, local Home Guard contingents were told that they would be expected to stand fast at these locations and fight to the last man. To turn such localities into a solid zone of resistance, staggering quantities of men, guns and materials would have been needed, for the obstacle belt girdled nearly 150 miles of territory around Greater Berlin.
As Reymann soon discovered, except where the obstacle zone came under direct army supervision, the so-called fortified places were often nothing more than a few trenches covering main roads, some scattered gun positions, or a few concrete-reinforced structures hurriedly converted into blockhouses with bricked-up windows and slits for machine guns. These feeble positions, most of them not even manned, were marked on Reichskanzlei defense maps as major strongpoints.
The main line of resistance lay in the city itself. Three concentric rings made up the inner defense pattern. The first, sixty miles in circumference, ran around the outskirts. In the absence of proper fortifications, everything and anything had been used to create barriers: ancient railroad cars and wagons, ruined buildings, massive concrete-block walls, converted air raid bunkers and, nature’s contribution, Berlin’s lakes and rivers. Now, gangs of men were working night and day to tie these natural and manmade devices into a continuous defense line and anti-tank barrier. The work was being done by hand. There was no power equipment. Most heavy earth-moving machines had long since been sent east to work on the Oder front fortifications. The use of the few remaining machines was restricted because of the shortage of fuel—every available gallon had gone to the panzer divisions.
There were supposed to be 100,000 laborers working on the fortification rings. In fact there were never more than 30,000. There was even a shortage of hand tools; appeals through the newspapers for picks and shovels had brought little results. As Colonel Refior put it, “Berlin gardeners apparently consider the digging of their potato plots more important than the digging of tank traps.” To Reymann, it was all futile anyhow. The perimeter ring would never be finished in time. It was a hopeless job, hopelessly far from completion.
The second or middle ring could be a formidable obstacle, if manned by veteran troops amply supplied with weapons. It had a circumference of about twenty-five miles and its barriers had long been in place. The Berlin railway system had been converted into a deadly trap. In some places there were deep track cuttings and sidings, some of them one hundred to two hundred yards wide, which made perfect anti-tank ditches. From fortified houses overlooking the tracks, gunners could pick off tanks caught in the gullies. Along other stretches the line followed the elevated railway (S-Bahn), giving defenders the advantage of high rampartlike embankments.
If even these defenses gave way, there still remained the third or inner ring, in the city’s center. Called the Citadel, this lastditch area lay within the arms of the Landwehr Canal and the Spree River, in the Mitte district. Nearly all the major buildings of the government crowded this last island of defense. In great structures linked together by barricades and concrete block walls, the last defenders would hold out—in Goering’s immense Air Ministry (Reichsluftfahrtministerium), in the huge Bendler Block military headquarters, and in the empty, echoing hulks of the Reichskanzlei and the Reichstag.
Radiating out from the Citadel through all three of the defense rings were eight pie-shaped sectors, each with its own commander. Beginning with the Weissensee district on the east, the sectors were labeled clockwise from A through H. The inner ring itself was Z. Supporting the rings, six formidable bombproof flak towers were spotted about the city—at Humboldthain, Friedrichshain, and in the grounds of the Berlin Zoo.
But many vital links were missing in Festung Berlin. The most crucial one was manpower. Even under ideal conditions, Reymann believed, 200,000 fully trained and combat-seasoned soldiers would have been needed to defend the city. Instead, what he had to hold Berlin’s 321 square miles, an area almost equal to that of New York City, was a miscellaneous collection of troops ranging from 15-year-old Hitler Youths to men in their seventies. He had policemen, engineering units and flak battery crews, but his only infantry consisted of 60,000 untrained Home Guardsmen. These tired old men of the Volkssturm now digging trenches or moving slowly into positions along the approaches to Berlin, would have to assume the largest burden of the city’s defense. The Volkssturm occupied a kind of nether world among the military. Although they were expected to fight alongside the Wehrmacht in times of emergency, they were not considered part of the army. They, like the Hitler Youth, were the responsibility of the local party officials; Reymann would not even assume command of their forces until after the battle began. Even the Volkssturm equipment was the responsibility of the party. The Home Guardsmen had no vehicles, field kitchens or communications of their own.
In all, one third of Reymann’s men were unarmed. The remainder might as well have been. “Their weapons,” he was to relate, “came from every country that Germany had fought with or against. Besides our own issues, there were Italian, Russian, French, Czechoslovakian, Belgian, Dutch, Norwegian and English guns.” There were no less than fifteen different types of rifles and ten kinds of machine guns. Finding ammunition for this hodgepodge of arms was almost hopeless. Battalions equipped with Italian rifles were luckier than most: there was a maximum of twenty bullets apiece for them. Belgian guns, it was discovered, would accept a certain type of Czech bullet, but Belgian ammunition was useless in Czech rifles. There were few Greek arms, but for some reason there were vast quantities of Greek munitions. So desperate was the shortage that a way was found to remachine Greek bullets so that they could be fired in Italian rifles. But such frantic improvisations hardly alleviated the overall problem. On this opening day of the Russian attack, the average ammunition supply of each Home Guardsman was about five rounds per rifle.
Now, as Reymann toured positions along the eastern outskirts, he felt certain that the Russians would simply roll over the German positions. Too many defense necessities were missing. There were almost no mines available, so the belts of minefields that were essential to a defensive position hardly existed. One of the most ancient and effective of all defense items, barbed wire, had become almost impossible to obtain. Reymann’s artillery consisted of some mobile flak guns, a few tanks dug in up to the turrets so that their guns covered avenues of an approach, and the massive flak tower guns. Powerful as they were, these high-angled batteries had limited usefulness. Because of their fixed positions they could not be deflected toward the ground to stave off close-range infantry and tank attacks.
Reymann knew his own situation was hopeless. He was almost equally pessimistic about the outlook elsewhere. He did not believe that the Oder front would hold, nor did he expect help from troops falling back on the city. Colonel Refior had discussed the possibility of obtaining aid with officers at General Busse’s headquarters. He got a blunt answer: “Don’t expect us,” said Busse’s Chief of Staff, Colonel Artur Hölz. “The Ninth Army stays and will stay on the Oder. If necessary we will fall there, but we will not retreat.”
Reymann kept thinking of an exchange he’d had with a Volkssturm official in one sector. “What would you do right now,” Reymann had asked, “if you suddenly saw Russian tanks in the far distance? How do you let us know? Let’s assume that tanks are heading this way. Show me what you would do.”
To his amazement the man turned abruptly and ran back to the village just behind the positions. A few minutes later he returned, breathless and dejected. “I couldn’t get to the telephone,” he explained sheepishly. “I forgot.
The post office is closed between one and two.”
As he headed back into the city, Reymann stared unseeing out the car window. He felt that an awful doom was gathering and that in its blackness Berlin might disappear forever.
The line was cracking slowly but surely under the massive enemy pressure. Heinrici had been at the front all day, going from headquarters to headquarters, visiting field positions, talking to commanders. He marveled that Busse’s soldiers had done so well against such terrible odds. First the Ninth Army had stood off three days of heavy preliminary attacks; now, for more than twenty-four hours, they had been taking the full force of the main Russian offensive. Busse’s troops had fought back ferociously. In the Seelow area alone, they had knocked out more than 150 tanks and had shot down 132 planes. But they were weakening.
As he drove in darkness back to his headquarters, Heinrici found himself slowed by crowds of refugees. He had seen them everywhere this day—some carrying bundles, some pulling hand carts filled with their last possessions, some in farm wagons drawn by horses or oxen. In many places their numbers were posing almost as great a problem to Heinrici’s troops as the Russians.
At his command post, anxious staff officers gathered to hear the General’s firsthand impression of the situation. Gravely Heinrici summed up what he had seen. “They cannot last much longer,” he said. “The men are so exhausted that their tongues are hanging out. Still,” he continued, “we are holding. It is something Schörner couldn’t do. That great soldier has not been able to hold Koniev even for one day.”