At 1 A.M. on April 23, the phone rang in the Wiesenburg forest headquarters of General Walther Wenck, commander of the Twelfth Army. The Wehrmacht’s youngest general was still in uniform, dozing in an armchair. His command post, Alte Hölle—Old Hell—about thirty-five miles east of Magdeburg was the former home of a gamekeeper.
Wenck picked up the phone himself. One of his commanders reported that Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel had just passed through the lines, en route to the headquarters. Wenck called his Chief of Staff, Colonel Günther Reichhelm. “We have a visitor coming,” he said. “Keitel.” Wenck had always heartily disliked Hitler’s Chief of Staff. Keitel was the last man in the world he wanted to talk to now.
In the last few weeks Wenck had seen more sorrow, hardship and suffering than he had ever witnessed in battle. As Germany’s boundaries shrank, his area had become a vast refugee encampment. Homeless Germans were everywhere—along the roads, in the fields, villages and forests, sleeping in wagons, tents, broken-down trucks, railway carriages, and in the open. Wenck had turned every habitable building in the area—homes, churches, even village dance halls—into shelters for the refugees. “I felt,” he said later, “like a visiting priest. Every day I went around trying to do what I could for the refugees, in particular the children and the sick. And all the time we wondered how soon the Americans would attack from their bridgeheads across the Elbe.”
His army was now feeding more than half a million people a day. Trains from all over the Reich had reached this narrow area between the Elbe and Berlin and had been unable to proceed farther. The freight they carried was both a boon and a burden to the Twelfth Army. Every conceivable kind of cargo, from aircraft parts to carloads of butter, had been found on the trains. A few miles away, on the eastern front, Von Manteuffel’s panzers were halted for lack of fuel; Wenck, on the other hand, was almost awash in gasoline. He had reported these surpluses to Berlin, but as yet no arrangements had been made to collect them. Nobody had even acknowledged his reports.
Now as he waited for Keitel, Wenck reflected with some concern that if the OKW Chief of Staff learned of his social work among the refugees he would hardly approve. Under Keitel’s code of soldierly ethics, such actions were simply inconceivable. Wenck heard a car drive up and one of his staff said, “Now watch Keitel play the hero.”
In the full trappings of a field marshal, even to baton, Keitel entered the little house followed by his adjutant and aide. “The arrogance and pomp of Keitel and his group, strutting as though they had just taken Paris,” seemed disgraceful to Wenck, “when every road told its tale of misery and Germany lay defeated.”
Formally Keitel saluted, touching his cap with his field marshal’s baton. Wenck saw immediately that for all his punctilious behavior his visitor was anxious and excited. Keitel’s adjutant produced maps and spread them out; without preamble, Keitel leaned over, tapped Berlin, and said: “We must save the Führer.”
Then, as though he felt he had been too abrupt, Keitel dropped that subject and asked for a briefing on the Twelfth Army’s situation. Wenck did not mention the refugees or the army’s part in caring for them. Instead, he spoke in general terms of the Elbe area. Even when coffee and sandwiches were served, Keitel did not relax. Wenck did little to put his visitor at ease. “The truth was,” he later explained, “that we felt terribly superior. What could Keitel tell us that we did not already know? That the end had come?”
Keitel suddenly stood up and began pacing the room. “Hitler,” he said gravely, “has broken down completely. Worse, he has given up. Because of this situation, you must turn your troops around and drive toward Berlin, together with the Ninth Army of Busse.” Wenck listened quietly as Keitel described the situation. “The battle for Berlin has begun,” he said. “No less than the fate of Germany and Hitler are at stake.” He looked solemnly at Wenck. “It is your duty to attack and save the Führer.” Irrelevantly, Wenck suddenly thought that this was probably the closest Keitel had ever been to the front lines in his life.
Long ago in his dealings with Keitel, Wenck had learned that “if you gave an argument, one of two things happened: you got two hours of blistering talk or you lost your command.” Now he replied automatically, “Of course, Field Marshal, we will do what you order.”
Keitel nodded. “You will attack Berlin from the sector Belzig-Treuenbrietzen,” he said, pointing to two small towns about twelve miles northeast of the Twelfth’s front lines. Wenck knew that this was impossible. Keitel was talking about a plan which was based on forces—men, tanks and divisions—that had long since been destroyed, or had simply never existed. With virtually no tanks or self-propelled guns and with few men, Wenck could not simultaneously hold the line against the Americans at the Elbe and attack toward Berlin to save the Führer. In any case, it would be immensely difficult to attack northeast into Berlin. There were too many lakes and rivers in his path. With the limited forces at his disposal, he could only get into Berlin from the north. He suggested to Keitel that the Twelfth drive on Berlin “north of the lakes, via Nauen and Spandau. I think,” Wenck added, “that I can mount the attack in about two days.” Keitel stood for a moment in silence. Then he told Wenck stonily, “We can’t wait two days.”
Again, Wenck did not argue. He could not waste the time. Quickly he agreed to Keitel’s plan. As the Field Marshal left the headquarters, he turned to Wenck and said, “I wish you complete success.”
When Keitel’s car had driven away, Wenck called together his staff. “Now,” he said, “here’s how we will actually do it. We will drive as close to Berlin as we can, but we will not give up our positions on the Elbe. With our flanks on the river we keep open a channel of escape to the west. It would be nonsense to drive toward Berlin only to be encircled by the Russians. We will try for a link-up with the Ninth Army, and then let’s get out every soldier and civilian who can make it to the west.”
As for Hitler, Wenck said only that “the fate of one person does not matter any more.” While he was giving orders for the attack, it occurred to Wenck that in all the long night’s discussion Keitel had never once mentioned the people of Berlin.
As dawn came up at Magdeburg, three Germans slipped across the Elbe and surrendered to the U.S. 30th Infantry Division. One of them was 57-year-old Lieutenant General Kurt Dittmar, a Wehrmacht officer who had daily broadcast the latest communiqués from the front, and who was known throughout the Reich as the “voice of the German High Command.” With him were his 16-year-old son Eberhard and Major Werner Pluskat, the D-Day veteran whose Magdeburg guns had played an important part in preventing General Simpson’s U. S. Ninth Army from crossing the Elbe.
Dittmar, who was considered the most accurate of all German military broadcasters, had a large following, not only in Germany but among the Allied monitoring staffs. He was immediately taken to the 30th’s headquarters for questioning. He surprised intelligence officers with one piece of information: Hitler, he said firmly, was in Berlin. It was enlightening news to the Allied officers. Up to now no one had been certain of the Führer’s whereabouts.* Most rumors had placed him in the National Redoubt. But Dittmar could not be shaken from his story. The Führer was not only in Berlin, he told his interrogators, but he believed that “Hitler will either be killed there or commit suicide.”
“Tell us about the National Redoubt,” somebody urged. Dittmar looked puzzled. The only thing he knew about a national redoubt, he said, was something he had read in a Swiss newspaper the previous January. He agreed that there were pockets of resistance in the north, “including Norway and Denmark, and one in the south in the Italian Alps. But,” he added, “that is less by intention than by force of circumstance.” As his interrogators pressed him about the redoubt, Dittmar shook his head. “The National Redoubt? It’s a romantic dream. It’s a myth.”
And that is all it was—a chimera. As General Omar Bradley, the Twelfth Army Group commander, was later to write, “the Redoubt existed largely in the imagination of a few fanatical
Nazis. It grew into so exaggerated a scheme that I am astonished we could have believed it as innocently as we did. But while it persisted, this legend … shaped our tactical thinking.”
Amid clouds of dust, columns of German tanks hammered through the cobbled streets of Karlshorst, on the outskirts of Berlin’s eastern district of Lichtenberg. Eleanore Krüger, whose Jewish fiancé Joachim Lipschitz was hiding in the cellar of her home, watched in amazement. Where had the tanks come from? Where were they going? Instead of heading into the city, they were dashing south toward Schöneweide, as though fleeing Berlin. Were the Russians right behind? If they were, it would mean freedom at last for Joachim. But why were German troops leaving the city? Were they abandoning it? Retreating?
Eleanore did not know it, but she was watching the lost and battered remnant of General Weidling’s 56th Panzer Corps in the process of restoring contact with the main force. After being pushed back to the very outskirts of the city, Weidling’s men had re-established communications with Busse’s now-encircled Ninth Army in a most roundabout way: the moment they hit the edge of the city they had used the public telephone to call High Command headquarters in Berlin, and they had thereupon been connected by radio with the Ninth. The 56th had immediately received orders to head south of the capital, cut their way through the surrounding ring of Russians, and link up with the Ninth again about fifteen miles from the city in the area of Königswusterhausen and Klein Kienitz. From there they would join the effort to cut off Koniev’s forces.
But first Weidling had some unfinished business to attend to. He had now heard that officers from both Busse’s and Hitler’s headquarters had been sent to bring him in on charges that he had deliberately fled the battlefield, leaving his corps leaderless. Angrily, he ordered his men to push on without him while he headed into the city to confront Krebs.
Some hours later Weidling, having crossed Berlin to the Reichskanzlei, made his way through the basement to the so-called aide-de-camp bunker where Krebs and Burgdorf had their office. They greeted him coolly. “What’s going on?” demanded Weidling. “Tell me why I’m supposed to be shot.” His headquarters, said Weidling sharply, had been located almost on the front line from the moment the battle began: how could anyone say he had fled? Someone mentioned the Olympic Village at Döberitz. The 56th had been nowhere near Döberitz, growled Weidling; to have gone there “would have been the greatest stupidity.” Slowly Krebs and Burgdorf thawed; soon they were promising to clear up matters with the Führer “without delay.”
Weidling then gave the two men a briefing on his situation. He told them that his corps was about to attack south of Berlin—and then, “in passing, I casually added that before leaving I had received a report that Russian tank spearheads had been seen near Rudow.” Rudow lay just beyond the edge of the southeastern district of Neukölln. Krebs immediately saw danger. In that case, he said, the Ninth’s order for the 56th Corps had to be changed: Weidling’s corps would have to stay in Berlin. Then both Krebs and Burgdorf hurried off to see Hitler.
Shortly thereafter Weidling was told that Hitler wanted to see him. The walk to the Führerbunker was a long one, through what Weidling later called an “underground city.” From Krebs’s office he proceeded first along a subterranean tunnel, then through a kitchen and dining room, and finally down a staircase and into the Führer’s personal quarters.
Krebs and Burgdorf introduced him. “Behind a table loaded with maps,” Weidling wrote, “sat the Führer of the Reich. When I entered, he turned his head. I saw a puffy face with feverish eyes. When he tried to stand up, I noticed to my horror that his hands and legs were constantly trembling. He succeeded with great effort in getting up. With a distorted smile he shook hands with me and asked in a hardly audible voice whether we hadn’t met before.” Once before, said Weidling; the Führer had given him a decoration a year earlier. Hitler said: “I do remember the name, but cannot remember the face.” When Hitler sat down, Weidling noticed that even in a sitting position “his left leg kept moving, the knee swinging like a pendulum, only faster.”
Weidling told Hitler what the 56th’s situation was. Then Hitler confirmed Krebs’s instructions that the Corps was to stay in Berlin. The Führer thereupon launched into his plan for the defense of Berlin. He proposed to pull in the armies of Wenck from the west, Busse from the southeast and Group Steiner from the north, and thus, somehow, cut off the Russians. “It was,” wrote Weidling, “with ever-growing astonishment that I listened to the big talk of the Führer.” Only one thing was clear to Weidling: “Short of a miracle, the days until final defeat were numbered.”
That evening the 56th Corps, suffering heavy losses, managed to disengage from the Russians in the south, then pivot and enter Berlin. Twenty-four hours later, to Weidling’s horror, he was named Commandant of the city.
The order from Stalin was numbered 11074. It was addressed to both Zhukov and Koniev; and it divided up the city between them. As of this day, April 23, the order said, the boundary line between the First Belorussian Front and First Ukrainian Front would be “Lübben, thence to Teupitz, Mittenwalde, Mariendorf, Anhalter Station of Berlin.”
Although he could not complain publicly, Koniev was crushed. Zhukov had been given the prize. The boundary line, which ran straight through Berlin, placed Koniev’s forces roughly 150 yards west of the Reichstag—which the Russians had always considered the city’s prize plum, the place where the Soviet flag was to be planted.
Now the city began to die. In most places, water and gas services had stopped. Newspapers began to close down; the last was the Nazis’ own Völkischer Beobachter, which shut up on the twenty-sixth (it was replaced by a Goebbels-inspired four-page paper called Der Panzerbar [The Armored Bear], described as the “Combat Paper for the Defenders of Greater Berlin,” which lasted six days). All transportation within the city was grinding to a halt as streets became impassable, gasoline scarce, and vehicles crippled. Distribution services broke down; there were almost no deliveries of any kind. Refrigeration plants no longer functioned. On April 22, the city’s 100-year-old telegraph office closed down for the first time in its history. The last message it received was from Tokyo; it read: “GOOD LUCK TO YOU ALL.” On the same day, the last plane left Tempelhof Airport, bound for Stockholm with nine passengers aboard, and Berlin’s 1,400 fire companies were ordered to the west.*
And now, with all the police serving in either the army or the Home Guard, the city slowly started to go out of control. People began to plunder. Freight trains stalled in the marshaling yards were broken into in broad daylight. Margarete Promeist, who made an extremely dangerous journey to the rail yards under heavy shelling, came away with a single piece of bacon; “looking back on it,” she said afterward, “I thought this was sheer madness.” Elena Majewski and Vera Ungnad rushed all the way to the railway freight yards in Moabit. They saw people grabbing cases of canned apricots, plums and peaches. There were also sacks of a strange kind of beans, but the girls passed these by. They did not recognize green coffee beans. They got a case of canned goods labeled “Apricots” and when they got home discovered it was applesauce. Both girls had always hated it. Robert Schultze fared even worse: he spent five hours as part of a mob trying to get at some potatoes in a large food store—but by the time his turn came they were all gone.
Storekeepers who would not give supplies away were often forced to do so. Hitler Youth Klaus Küster walked into a store with his aunt and asked for some supplies. When the owner insisted that he had only some cereals left, Küster pulled a gun and demanded food. The shopowner quickly produced an assortment of foodstuffs, literally from under the counter. Küster gathered up as much as he could carry, and he and his scandalized aunt left the store. “You are a godless youth,” his aunt cried when they were outside, “using American gangster methods!” Klaus replied: “Aw, shut up! It’s now a matter of life and death.”
Elfriede Maigatter heard a rumor that the giant Karstadt department store on the Hermannplatz was bei
ng looted. She hurried to the store and found it jammed with people. “Everyone was pushing and kicking to get through the doors,” she later reported. “There were no queues any more. There was no sales staff, and nobody seemed to be in charge.” People were just grabbing everything in sight. If it turned out to be something useless they simply dropped it on the floor. In the food department there was a carpet of several inches of sticky mud on the floor, made up of condensed milk, marmalade, noodles, flour, honey—anything that had been overturned or dropped by the mob.”
A few supervisors seemed to be left, for now and then a man would shout, “Get out! Get out! The store is going to be blown up!” Nobody paid any attention to him; it was too obvious a trick. Women were grabbing coats, dresses and shoes in the clothing department. Bedding, linens and blankets were being dragged from shelves by others. In the candy section Elfriede saw a man grab a box of chocolates from a little boy. The child began to cry. Then he yelled, “I’m going to get another one.” And he did.
But at the exit door came the denouement: two supervisors were stopping everyone as they tried to get out with their booty. They were letting people take food, but nothing else. Soon a great pile of merchandise began to grow near the door. People plowed through it, pushing and shoving, trying to force their way past the supervisors. When Elfriede tried to get through with the coat she had taken, one of the store officials grabbed it away from her. “Please let me have it,” she begged. “I’m cold.” He shrugged, took it back off the pile and gave it to her. “Beat it,” he said. And all the time, as the mob pushed and shoved and grabbed everything in sight, someone kept yelling: “Get out! Get out! The store is going to be blown up!”