All dates given in the book refer to 1945 unless otherwise stated.

BdM Bund deutscher Mädel, League of German Girls, female equivalent of Hitler Youth.

Fritz Russian name for a German soldier. The plural was used for Germans in general.

frontovik Red Army soldier with frontline experience.

Ivan (or Iwan in German), an ordinary Soviet soldier. Term used by Red Army as well as Germans.

Kessel (German for ‘a cauldron’) a group of forces encircled by the enemy.

Landser an ordinary German soldier with frontline experience. The equivalent of the Red Army frontovik.

NKVD Soviet secret police under control of Lavrenty Beria. Military NKVD units — NKVD rifle divisions made up mostly of NKVD frontier guards regiments — were attached to each Soviet Front command. The NKVD chief with each Front was answerable only to Beria and Stalin, not to the military chain of command in the Red Army.

OKH Oberkommando des Heeres, in theory the supreme headquarters of the German Army, but in the later stages of the war its most important role was operational command of the Eastern Front.

OKW Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, the supreme headquarters of all the armed forces, Army, Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine, controlled by Hitler through Field Marshal Keitel and General Jodl. It directed operations on all fronts except for the Eastern Front.

political department a political officer (politruk) was responsible for the political education of all soldiers. The political department of each Soviet army and Front came under the Main Political Administration of the Red Army (GlavPURRKA).

S-Bahn city and suburban railway, mostly on the surface, but some of it underground.

7th Department an organization at each Soviet army headquarters whose main task was to demoralize the enemy. German Communists worked under Soviet officers, and also many German prisoners of war who had undergone ‘anti-fascist’ training in Soviet camps. They were known by the Germans as ‘Seydlitz troops’ after General von Seydlitz Kurzbach, who had surrendered at Stalingrad and helped form the so-called National Committee for a Free Germany, which was completely under NKVD control.

SHAEF Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force Europe.

shtraf company or battalion, the Soviet copy of German Straf (penal) units. Disgraced officers, deserters and defaulters were condemned to these penal units, where they were in theory offered the chance to redeem ‘their guilt with their blood’. This meant that they were used for the almost suicidal tasks, such as advancing first through a minefield. Straf units always had an escort ready to shoot any members who disobeyed orders.

SMERSH the acronym for smert shpionam (death to spies), a name allegedly chosen by Stalin himself for the counter-intelligence organization attached to Red Army units and formations. Until April 1943, when Viktor Abakumov became its chief, it had been known as the ‘special department’ of the NKVD.

Stavka the Soviet supreme headquarters of the armed forces, directly under Stalin’s control. The chief of staff in 1945 was General Antonov.

U-Bahn underground railway.

Verkhovny commander-in-chief, the term which Zhukov and other senior commanders used to refer to Stalin.

Army Group and Front A German ‘Army Group’ or a Red Army ‘Front’ represented a collection of armies under a single commander-in-chief. Depending on circumstances, strengths could vary enormously — anything from 250,000 to over a million men.

Army Each German army, usually varying in strength between 40,000 and over 100,000 men, has its name written in full in the text: e.g. Ninth Army or Third Panzer Army. Soviet armies, generally smaller, are written thus: 47th Army or 2nd Guards Tank Army. Most armies usually consisted of two or three corps. A Soviet tank army had in theory 620 tanks and 188 self-propelled assault guns.

Corps A corps consisted of several divisions, usually between two and four. A Soviet tank corps, however, consisted of three tank brigades of sixty-five tanks each and was closer in size to a full-strength German panzer division.

Division Divisions varied greatly in size. A Soviet Rifle Division in theory should have mustered 11,780 men, but most had between 3,000 and 7,000 men. German Infantry Divisions were often even more understrength by 1945.

Brigade This formation, between a regiment and a division, was used more by the US Army and the British than by the Germans and Red Army, both of which had at least two or three regiments to a division. The Red Army, however, had three tank brigades to each tank corps.

Regiment This consisted of at least two or three battalions, with anything up to 700 men each, but often far fewer.

Battalion Each battalion consisted of at least three rifle companies — each one theoretically around eighty men strong — as well as support companies, with machine guns, mortars or anti-tank guns, and then transport and supply companies.

‘History always emphasizes terminal events,’ Albert Speer observed bitterly to his American interrogators just after the end of the war. He hated the idea that the early achievements of Hitler’s regime would be obscured by its final collapse. Yet Speer, like other prominent Nazis, refused to recognize that few things reveal more about political leaders and their systems than the manner of their downfall. This is why the subject of National Socialism’s final defeat is so fascinating, and also so important at a time when teenagers, especially in Germany, are finding much to admire in the Third Reich.

The Nazis’ enemies had first been able to visualize their moment of vengeance just over two years before. On 1 February 1943, an angry Soviet colonel collared a group of emaciated German prisoners in the rubble of Stalingrad. ‘That’s how Berlin is going to look!’ he yelled, pointing to the ruined buildings all around. When I read those words some six years ago, I sensed immediately what my next book had to be. Among the graffiti preserved on the Reichstag’s walls in Berlin, one can still see the two cities linked by Russians exulting in their revenge, forcing the invaders from their furthest point of eastward advance right back to the heart of the Reich.

Hitler too remained obsessed with this decisive defeat. In November 1944, as the Red Army was grouping beyond the Reich’s eastern frontiers, he pointed back to Stalingrad. Germany’s reverses had all begun, he said in a major speech, ‘with the breakthrough of Russian armies on the Romanian front on the Don in November 1942’. He blamed his hapless allies, under-armed and ignored on the vulnerable flanks either side of Stalingrad, not his own obsessive refusal to heed the warnings of danger. Hitler had learned nothing and had forgotten nothing.

That same speech demonstrated with terrible clarity the distorted logic in which the German people had allowed themselves to become ensnared. When published, it was entitled ‘Capitulation Means Annihiation’. He warned that if the Bolshevists won, the fate of the German people was destruction, rape and slavery, with ‘immense columns of men treading their way to the Siberian tundra’.

Hitler vehemently refused to acknowledge the consequences of his own actions, and the German people realized far too late that they were trapped by a terrifying confusion of cause and effect. Instead of eliminating Bolshevism, as he had claimed, Hitler had brought it to the very heart of Europe. His abominably cruel invasion of Russia had been carried out by a generation of German youth weaned on a demonically clever combination. Goebbels’s propaganda did not simply dehumanize Jews, commissars and the whole Slav people, it made the German people fear and hate them. Hitler, in these gigantic crimes, had managed to manacle the nation to him and the approaching violence of the Red Army was the self-fulfilment of their leader’s prophecy.

Stalin, while happy to make use of symbols when it suited him, was far more calculating. The Reich’s capital was indeed the ‘culmination of all the operations of our army in this war’, but he had other vital interests. Not least of these was the plan formulated under Lavrenty Beria, Stalin’s minister of state security, to strip atomic research establishments in Berlin of all their equipment and uranium before the Americans and British arrived. The work of the Manhattan Project carried out in Los Alamos was already well known in the Kremlin, thanks to the pro-Communist spy, Dr Klaus Fuchs. Soviet science was far behind, and Stalin and Beria were convinced that if they were to seize the German laboratories and scientists in Berlin before the Western Allies got there, then they too could produce an atom bomb like the Americans.

The scale of the human tragedy by the end of the war is beyond the imagination of everyone who did not live through it, but especially of those who have grown up in the demilitarized society of the post-Cold War age. Yet this moment of fate for millions of people still has much to teach us. One important lesson is that one should be extremely wary of any generalization concerning the conduct of individuals. Extremes of human suffering and even degradation can bring out the best as well as the worst in human nature. Human behaviour to a large extent mirrors the utter unpredictability of life or death. Many Soviet troops, especially in frontline formations, unlike those who came behind, often behaved with great kindness to German civilians. In a world of cruelty and horror where any conception of humanity had almost been destroyed by ideology, just a few acts of often unexpected kindness and self-sacrifice lighten what would otherwise be an almost unbearable story.

Berliners, gaunt from short rations and stress, had little to celebrate at Christmas in 1944. Much of the capital of the Reich had been reduced to rubble by bombing raids. The Berlin talent for black jokes had turned to gallows humour. The quip of that unfestive season was, ‘Be practical: give a coffin.’

The mood in Germany had changed exactly two years before. Rumours had begun to circulate just before Christmas 1942 that General Paulus’s Sixth Army had been encircled on the Volga by the Red Army. The Nazi regime found it hard to admit that the largest formation in the whole of the Wehrmacht was doomed to annihilation in the ruins of Stalingrad and in the frozen steppe outside. To prepare the country for bad news, Joseph Goebbels, the Reichsminister for Propaganda and Enlightenment, had announced a ‘German Christmas’, which in National Socialist terms meant austerity and ideological determination, not candles and pine wreathes and singing ‘Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht’. By 1944, the traditional roast goose had become a distant memory.

In streets where the façade of a house had collapsed, pictures could still be seen hanging on the walls of what had been a sitting room or bedroom. The actress Hildegard Knef gazed at a piano left exposed on the remnants of a floor. Nobody could get to it, and she wondered how long it would be before it tumbled down to join the rubble below. Messages from families were scrawled on gutted buildings to tell a son returning from the front that they were all right and staying elsewhere. Nazi Party notices warned, ‘Looters will be punished with death!’

Air raids were so frequent, with the British by night and the Americans by day, that Berliners felt that they spent more time in cellars and air-raid shelters than in their own beds. The lack of sleep contributed to the strange mixture of suppressed hysteria and fatalism. Far fewer people seemed to worry about being denounced to the Gestapo for defeatism, as the rash of jokes indicated. The ubiquitous initials LSR for Luftschutzraum, or air-raid shelter, were said to stand for ‘Lernt schnell Russisc’: ‘Learn Russian quickly’. Most Berliners had entirely dropped the ‘Heil Hitler!’ greeting. When Lothar Loewe, a Hitler Youth who had been away from the city, used it on entering a shop, everyone turned and stared at him. It was the last time he uttered the words when not on duty. Loewe found that the most common greeting had become ‘Bleib übrig!’ — ‘Survive!’

The humour also reflected the grotesque, sometimes surreal, images of the time. The largest air-raid construction in Berlin was the Zoo bunker, a vast ferro-concrete fortress of the totalitarian age, with flak batteries on the roof and huge shelters below, into which crowds of Berliners packed when the sirens sounded. The diarist Ursula von Kardorff described it as ‘like a stage-set for the prison scene in Fidelio’ Meanwhile, loving couples embraced on concrete spiral staircases as if taking part in a ‘travesty of a fancy-dress ball’.

There was a pervasive atmosphere of impending downfall in personal lives as much as in the nation’s existence. People spent their money recklessly, half-assuming that it would soon be worthless. And there were stories, although hard to confirm, of girls and young women coupling with strangers in dark corners around the Zoo station and in the Tiergarten. The desire to dispense with innocence is said to have become even more desperate later as the Red Army approached Berlin.

The air-raid shelters themselves, lit with blue lights, could indeed provide a foretaste of claustrophobic hell, as people pushed in bundled in their warmest clothes and carrying small cardboard suitcases containing sandwiches and thermos. In theory, all basic needs were catered for in the shelters. There was a Sanitätsraum with a nurse, where women could go into labour. Childbirth seemed to be accelerated by the vibrations from bomb explosions, which felt as if they came as much from the centre of the earth as from ground level. The ceilings were painted with luminous paint for the frequent occasions during the air raids when the lights failed, first dimming then flickering off. Water supplies ceased when mains were hit, and the Aborte, or lavatories, soon became disgusting, a real distress for a nation preoccupied with hygiene. Often the lavatories were sealed off by the authorities because there were so many cases of depressed people who, having locked the door, committed suicide.

For a population of around 3 million, Berlin did not have enough shelters, so they were usually overcrowded. In the main corridors, seating halls and bunk rooms, the air was foul from over-use and condensation dripped from the ceilings. The complex of shelters under the Gesundbrunnen U-Bahn station had been designed to take 1,500 people, yet often more than three times that number packed in. Candles were used to measure the diminishing levels of oxygen. When a candle placed on the floor went out, children were picked up and held at shoulder height. When a candle on a chair went out, then the evacuation of the level began. And if a third candle, positioned at about chin level, began to sputter, then the whole bunker was evacuated, however heavy the attack above.

The foreign workers in Berlin, 300,000 strong and identifiable by a letter painted on their clothes to denote their country of origin, were simply forbidden entry to underground bunkers and cellars. This was partly an extension of the Nazi policy to stop them mingling intimately with the German race, but the overriding concern of the authorities was to save the lives of Germans. A forced labourer, particularly an ‘Ostarbeiter’, or eastern worker, most of whom had been rounded up in the Ukraine and Belorussia, was regarded as expendable. Yet many foreign workers, conscripted as well as volunteers, enjoyed a far greater degree of freedom than the unfortunates consigned to camps. Those who worked in armaments factories around the capital, for example, had created their own refuge and Bohemian subculture with newssheets and plays in the depths of the Friedrichstrasse station. Their spirits were rising visibly as the Red Army advanced, while those of their exploiters fell. Most Germans looked on foreign workers with trepidation. They saw them as a Trojan Horse garrison ready to attack and revenge themselves as soon as the enemy armies approached the city.

Berliners suffered from an atavistic and visceral fear of the Slav invader from the east. Fear was easily turned to hate. As the Red Army approached, Goebbels’s propaganda harked on again and again about the atrocities at Nemmersdorf, when Red Army troops had invaded the south-eastern corner of East Prussia the previous autumn and raped and murdered inhabitants of this village.

Some people had their own reasons for refusing to take shelter during a bombing raid. A married man who used to visit his mistress regularly in the district of Prenzlauerberg could not go down to the communal cellar because that would have aroused suspicions. One evening, the building received a direct hit, and the luckless adulterer, who had been sitting on a sofa, was buried up to his neck in rubble. After the raid, a boy called Erich Schmidtke and a Czech labourer whose illegal presence in the cellar had been tolerated heard his screams of pain and ran upstairs towards the sound. After he had been dug out and carried off for treatment, the fourteen-year-old Erich then had to go to tell the injured man’s wife that her husband had been badly injured in this other woman’s flat. She started screaming in anger. The fact that he had been with this woman agitated her far more than his fate. Children in those times received a harsh introduction to the realities of the adult world.

General Gehlen’s estimates of Soviet strength were certainly not exaggerated. If anything, they were well short of the mark on the threatened sectors. The Red Army had 6.7 million men along a front which stretched from the Baltic to the Adriatic. This was over twice the strength of the Wehrmacht and its allies when they invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. Hitler’s conviction that summer that the Red Army was about to collapse had proved to be one of the most catastrophic miscalculations in history.

‘We are lost,’ a German sergeant acknowledged in January 1945, ‘but we will fight to the last man.’ Battle-hardened combatants of the Eastern Front had come to believe that it must all end in death. Any other outcome appeared unthinkable after everything that had gone before. They knew what had been done in the occupied territories and that the Red Army intended to exact revenge. Surrender meant being worked to death in Siberian labour camps as a ‘Stalinpfertf, a ‘Stalin horse’. ‘We no longer fought for Hitler, or for National Socialism, or for the Third Reich,’ wrote an Alsatian veteran of the Grossdeutschland Division, ‘or even for our fiancées or mothers or families trapped in bomb-ravaged towns. We fought from simple fear… We fought for ourselves, so that we wouldn’t die in holes filled with mud and snow; we fought like rats.’

The disasters of the previous year, above all the encirclement and destruction of Army Group Centre, were hard to forget. National Socialist leadership officers, the Nazi imitation of the Soviet commissar, tried to raise the fighting morale of the ordinary German soldier, the Landser, with promises as well as threats of execution for anyone who deserted or retreated without orders. ‘You do not need to fear the Russian offensive,’ they told them. ‘If the enemy start to attack, our tanks will be here in four hours.’ But the more experienced soldiers knew what they were up against.

Although Guderian’s staff officers at Zossen had formed an accurate idea of the date of attack, the information does not seem to have filtered down to the front line. Corporal Alois K., of the 304th Infantry Division, seized as a ‘tongue’ by a Soviet raiding party, told intelligence officers of the 1st Ukrainian Front that they had expected an attack before Christmas, then they were told to expect one on 10 January because it was supposed to be Stalin’s birthday.

On 9 January, after an urgent tour of the three main eastern fronts — Hungary, the Vistula and East Prussia — General Guderian, accompanied by his aide, Major Baron Freytag von Loringhoven, had again gone to see Hitler at Ziegenberg. He presented the latest estimates of enemy strengths, both Gehlen’s compilation and also those of the Luftwaffe commander, General Seidemann. Air reconnaissance indicated that there were 8,000 Soviet planes concentrated on the Vistula and East Prussian fronts. Göring interrupted the army chief of staff. ‘Mein Führer, don’t believe that,’ he said to Hitler. ‘Those are not real planes. Those are just decoys.’ Keitel, in a sycophantic show of resolution, smashed his fist down on the table. ‘The Reichsmarschall is right,’ he declared.

The meeting continued as a black farce. Hitler repeated his view that the intelligence figures were ‘completely idiotic’ and added that the man who compiled them should be locked in a lunatic asylum. Guderian retorted angrily that since he supported them completely, he had better be certified as well. Hitler refused out of hand the requests of General Harpe on the Vistula front and General Reinhardt in East Prussia to withdraw their most exposed troops to more defensible positions. He also insisted that the 200,000 German troops trapped on the Courland peninsula in Latvia should remain there and not be evacuated by sea to defend the Reich’s borders. Guderian, disgusted with the ‘ostrich strategy’ of Führer headquarters, prepared to take his leave.

‘The Eastern Front,’ said Hitler, suddenly trying to charm him, ‘has never before possessed such a strong reserve as now. That is your doing. I thank you for it.’

‘The Eastern Front,’ Guderian retorted, ‘is like a house of cards. If the front is broken through at one point all the rest will collapse.’ Ironically, Goebbels had used exactly the same simile in 1941 about the Red Army.

Guderian returned to Zossen in ‘a very grave mood’. He wondered whether Hitler and Jodl’s lack of imagination had something to do with the fact that they both came from parts of the Reich — Austria and Bavaria — which were not threatened. Guderian was a Prussian. His homeland was about to be ravaged, and probably lost for ever. Hitler, to reward his great panzer leader for his successes early in the war, had presented him with the expropriated estate of Deipenhof in the Warthegau, the region of western Poland which the Nazis had seized and incorporated into the Reich. But now the imminent offensive across the Vistula threatened that too. His wife was still there. Watched closely by the local Nazi Party chiefs, she would not be able to leave until the very last moment.

Just over twenty-four hours later, Guderian’s staff at Zossen received confirmation that the attack was now hours rather than days away. Red Army sappers were clearing minefields at night and tank corps were being brought forward into the bridgeheads. Hitler ordered that the panzer reserves on the Vistula front should be moved forward, despite warnings that this would bring them within range of Soviet artillery. Some senior officers began to wonder whether Hitler subconsciously wanted to lose the war.

When General Chernyakhovsky launched his offensive against East Prussia on 13 January, political officers erected signs to arouse the troops: ‘Soldier, remember you are now entering the lair of the fascist beast!’

Chernyakhovsky’s attack did not get off to a good start. The commander of the Third Panzer Army, on the basis of good intelligence, withdrew his troops from the front line of trenches at the last moment. This meant that the massive bombardment was wasted. The Germans then launched some very effective counter-attacks. And in the course of the following week, Chernyakhovsky found, as he had feared, that German defence works on the Insterburg gap cost his armies very heavy casualties.

Chernyakhovsky, however, soon spotted an opportunity. He was one of the most decisive and intelligent of senior Soviet commanders. The 39th Army was making better progress on the extreme right, so he suddenly moved the 11th Guards Army round behind and switched the weight of the attack to that flank. This unexpected thrust between the River Pregel and the River Niemen caused panic in the Volkssturm militia units. It was accompanied by another attack across the Niemen in the area of Tilsit by the 43rd Army. Chaos mounted in the German rear, largely because the Nazi Party officials had forbidden the evacuation of civilians. By 24 January, Chernyakhovsky’s 3rd Belorussian Front was within striking distance of Königsberg, the capital of East Prussia.

As well as ignoring Stavka instructions when it was necessary, Chernyakhovsky, a tank commander and a ‘master of military science’, was also willing to change approved battle tactics. ‘Self-propelled guns became an integral part of the infantry after the crossing of the Niemen,’ Vasily Grossman noted. At thirty-seven years old, Ivan Danilovich Chernyakhovsky was much younger than most other Soviet commanders-in-chief. He was also something of an intellectual and used to recite romantic poetry with humorous panache to the writer Ilya Ehrenburg. Chernyakhovsky was intrigued by contradictions. He described Stalin as a living example of a dialectical process. ‘It’s impossible to understand him. All you can do is to have faith.’ Chernyakhovsky was clearly not destined to survive into the post-war Stalinist petrification. He was perhaps fortunate to die soon in battle, his faith intact.

Ilya Ehrenburg’s own mesmerizing calls for revenge on Germany in his articles in the Red Army newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda (Red Star) had created a huge following among the frontoviki, or frontline troops. Goebbels responded with loathing against ‘the Jew Ilya Ehrenburg, Stalin’s favourite rabble-rouser’. The propaganda ministry accused Ehrenburg of inciting the rape of German women. Yet while Ehrenburg never shrank from the most bloodthirsty harangues, the most notorious statement, which is still attributed to him by western historians, was a Nazi invention. He is accused of having urged Red Army soldiers to take German women as their ‘lawful booty’ and to ‘break their racial pride’. ‘There was a time,’ Ehrenburg retorted in Krasnaya Zvezda, ‘when Germans used to fake important documents of state. Now they have fallen so low as to fake my articles.’ But Ehrenburg’s assertion that the soldiers of the Red Army were ‘not interested in Gretchens, but in those Fritzes who had insulted our women’ proved to be wide of the mark, as the savage behaviour of the Red Army soon showed. And his frequent references to Germany as ‘the Blonde Witch’ certainly did not encourage a humane treatment of German and even Polish women.

When German generals addressed their men in familiar tones they called them ‘Kinder’ — children. This came from a Prussian sense of paternalism which extended to the whole state. ‘The soldier is the child of the people,’ said General von Blumentritt at the end of the war, but any idea of a family tie between military and civilian society was by then wishful thinking.

Anger was rising at the futile sacrifices. People were now prepared to shelter deserters. A Polish farmer who had been in Berlin on 24 January witnessed women shouting at the officers and NCOs marching a column of German soldiers through the streets, ‘Let our husbands come home! Make the Golden Pheasants [senior Nazis] fight instead!’ General staff officers in their uniforms with thick red stripes down their trousers started to attract cries of ‘Vampire!’ when spotted by civilians. But this did not mean that revolution was in the air, as in 1918, the year which so obsessed the Nazis. The Swedish military attaché observed that there would be no revolt before the food ran out. This was acknowledged in a popular Berlin saying, ‘The fighting will not stop until Göring fits into Goebbels’s trousers.’

Few had any illusions about what lay ahead. The Berlin health department ordered hospitals to provide another 10,000 bed spaces for civilians and another 10,000 for military use as ‘catastrophe beds’. This decree was typical of Nazi bureaucracy: it made no allowance for the effects of bombing and the scarcity of resources and trained medical staff. It was one thing to provide bed spaces, but doctors and nurses were already desperately overstretched, and they simply did not have the personnel to move patients down into cellars during the nightly air raids. Meanwhile, hospital administrators were having to waste time negotiating with different Nazi Party departments to allow their staff to be excused call-up for the Volkssturm militia.

The Volkssturm itself had been born the previous autumn out of Nazi ideology and petty power struggles. Hitler’s suspicions that the army’s leadership was both treacherous and defeatist made him determined that control of this mass militia should be kept out of its hands. Himmler, head of the Waffen SS and commander-in-chief of the Replacement Army since the July plot, was an obvious candidate, but the ambitious Martin Bormann was determined that the Volkssturm should be organized locally by the Nazi Party Gauleiters who came under him. Since almost all German males between seventeen and forty-five had already been called up, the Volkssturm was an amalgam of teenagers and the elderly.

Goebbels, now also Reich Defence Commissar for Berlin, whipped up a propaganda campaign with slogans such as ‘The Führer’s call is our sacred order!’ and ‘Believe! Fight! Win!’ Cinemas showed newsreels of marching men, elderly and young shoulder to shoulder, Volkssturm detachments receiving panzerfaust rocket-propelled grenades, then swearing the oath of allegiance to the Führer in massed ranks. The camera lingered on the faces of those listening to Goebbels’s speech. There were many believers, ignorant of military reality, who were convinced by this show of determination. ‘All the peoples of the world have hatched a plot against us, but we will show them what we are capable of,’ a wife wrote to her soldier husband. ‘Yesterday there took place here the swearing of the oath for everyone from the district. You should have seen it. I will never forget the impression of strength and pride. We don’t yet know when they will be sent into battle.’

The morale of soldiers at the front was not, however, raised by all this. Many were appalled to hear in letters from home that their father, in some cases grandfather, or young brother was being drilled and given weapon training every Sunday. In fact most Germans, with their innate respect for professional specialization, were deeply sceptical. ‘The people were predominantly of the opinion,’ General Hans Kissel later told his captors, ‘that if the Wehrmacht was unable to cope with the situation, then the Volkssturm would not be able to do so either.’

Most members of the Volkssturm guessed that they were to be thrown senselessly into battle for symbolic purposes and had no hope of making any impression on the Soviet onslaught. Some forty Volkssturm battalions raised in Silesia were allocated to defend their eastern and north-eastern frontiers. A few concrete emplacements were built, but since they had almost no anti-tank weapons, Soviet tank forces went straight through them.

By the fourth week in January, Berlin appeared to be in a state of ‘hysteria and disintegration’. There were two air-raid warnings a night, one at 8 and the next at 11. Refugees from the eastern territories passed on terrible accounts of the fate of those caught by the Red Army. Hungary, Germany’s last ally in the Balkans, was now siding openly with the Soviet Union and rumours of the rapid advance of Soviet tank armies led to predictions that the whole Eastern Front was disintegrating. Ordinary soldiers hoped that the enemy would shoot only officers and the SS, and workers and minor officials tried to convince themselves that the Russians would do them no harm.

The most accurate news of the situation on the Eastern Front filtered back through railway workers. They often knew how far the enemy had advanced before the general staff. More and more Germans took the risk of listening to the BBC to find out what was really happening. If denounced to the Gestapo by a neighbour, they faced a spell in a concentration camp. Yet many Hitler and Goebbels loyalists still passionately believed every word of the news according to the ‘Promi’, the Propaganda Ministerium.

Public transport was still repaired and people continued their struggle to work each day through the ruins. But more and more arranged to sleep in apartments closer to their work. A sleeping-bag had become one of the most essential items of equipment. Camp beds were also needed for relatives and friends fleeing from the east or who had been bombed out in Berlin. The well connected discussed different ways to escape the capital. Rumours of landowners shot out of hand by Soviet troops in East Prussia convinced them that the upper classes as a whole would be targets. Soviet propaganda was aimed almost as much at the eradication of ‘Junker militarism’ as at National Socialism.

Those attempting to get out had to be careful, because Goebbels had declared that leaving Berlin without permission was tantamount to desertion. First of all, they needed a travel permit, which could be obtained only with some story of essential work outside the capital. Many of those who really did have an official trip to make away from Berlin received murmured advice from envious colleagues, ‘Don’t come back. Stay there.’ Almost everyone dreamed of seeking sanctuary in a quiet corner of the countryside where farms still had food. Some even investigated the possibility of purchasing false passports, and foreign diplomats suddenly found themselves extremely popular. Members of ministries were fortunate. They were evacuated to the south over the next few weeks.

Most menacing of all was the wave of executions carried out by the SS on Himmler’s orders. On 23 January, with the Red Army now breaching the old frontiers of the Reich, several members of the German resistance linked to the July plot were put to death in Plötzensee prison. The victims included Count Helmuth James von Moltke, Eugen Bolz and Erwin Planck, the son of the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Max Planck.

Goebbels’s new slogan, ‘We shall win, because we must win’, provoked contempt and despair among non-Nazis, but the majority of Germans did not yet think to question it. Even though only fanatics now believed in ‘final victory’, most still held on because they could not imagine anything else. The strategy of Goebbels’s relentless propaganda, ever since the war in the east turned against Germany, had been to undermine any notion of choice or alternative.

Goebbels, as both Reich Commissar for the Defence of Berlin and minister for propaganda, appeared in his element as chief advocate of total warfare: visiting troops, making speeches, reviewing Volkssturm parades and haranguing them. The population at large saw nothing of Hitler. He had disappeared from the newsreels, and they heard only Hitler’s very last broadcast on 30 January, marking twelve years of Nazi government. His voice had lost all its strength and sounded completely different. It was hardly surprising that so many rumours circulated about his death or confinement. The public was not told whether he was at Berchtesgaden or in Berlin. And while Goebbels visited the victims of bombing, gaining considerable popularity as a result, Hitler refused even to look at his severely damaged capital.

The Führer’s invisibility was due partly to his own withdrawal from public life and partly to the difficulty of concealing the dramatic changes in his appearance. Staff officers visiting the Reich Chancellery bunker who had not seen him since before the 20 July bomb explosion were shaken. ‘He was sometimes hunched over so much,’ said Guderian’s aide, Major Freytag von Loringhoven, ‘that he almost had a hump.’ The once glittering eyes were dull, the pale skin now had a grey tinge. He dragged his left leg behind him on entering the conference room and his handshake was limp. Hitler often held his left hand with his right in an attempt to conceal its trembling. Still just short of his fifty-sixth birthday, the Führer had the air and appearance of a senile old man. He had also lost his astonishing grasp of detail and statistics, with which he used to batter doubters into submission. And he no longer received any pleasure from playing followers off against each other. Now, he saw treason all around him.

Officers of the general staff were all too aware of the anti-army atmosphere when they visited the Reich Chancellery bunker each day from Zossen. Guderian’s arrival in his large staff Mercedes was greeted by SS sentries presenting arms, but once inside, he and his aides had to offer up their briefcases to be searched. Their pistols were taken from them and they had to stand while SS guards examined the line of their uniform with a practised eye, searching for suspicious bulges.

Army officers also had to remind themselves before entering the Reich Chancellery that saluting in the traditional manner had now been banned. All members of the Wehrmacht had to use the ‘German greeting’, as the Nazi salute was known. Many found themselves raising their hand to the cap, then suddenly having to shoot the whole arm outwards. Freytag von Loringhoven, for example, was not in the most comfortable of positions in such surroundings. His predecessor had been hanged as part of the July plot, and his cousin Colonel Baron Freytag von Loringhoven, another conspirator, had committed suicide.

The Reich Chancellery was almost bare. Paintings, tapestries and furniture had been removed. There were huge cracks in the ceilings, smashed windows were boarded up and plywood partitions concealed the worst of the bomb damage. Not long before, in one of the huge marble corridors leading to the situation room, Freytag had been surprised to see two expensively dressed young women with permed hair. Such elegant frivolity seemed so out of place in the surroundings that he had turned to his companion, Keitel’s adjutant, to ask who they were.

‘That was Eva Braun.’

‘Who’s Eva Braun?’ he asked.

‘She’s the Führer’s mistress.’ Keitel’s adjutant smiled at his amazement. ‘And that was her sister, who’s married to Fegelein.’ The Wehrmacht officers attached to the Reich Chancellery had remained completely discreet. Hardly anyone outside had ever heard of her, even those who visited the place regularly from the army high command headquarters at Zossen.

Freytag certainly knew Fegelein, Himmler’s liaison officer. He thought him ‘a dreadful vulgarian with a terrible Munich accent, an arrogant air and bad manners’. Fegelein used to interrupt generals in mid-conversation, trying to involve himself in everything. But despite his intense dislike, Freytag summoned up his courage to ask a favour. A friend of his had been one of the many arrested in the wake of the July plot and was still held in the cellars of Gestapo headquarters. He told Fegelein that he was virtually certain that his friend had had nothing to do with the conspiracy, and asked if he could at least find out what charges were being laid against him. To his surprise, Fegelein agreed to look into it and his friend was released shortly afterwards.

Fegelein, an SS cavalry commander who had won the Knight’s Cross fighting partisans in Yugoslavia, was enamoured of his own rather louche good looks. He clearly enjoyed using his massive influence, which came partly from his position as Himmler’s representative and partly from his proximity to the Führer. He had become very close to Eva Braun, with whom he danced and rode. Some suspected an affair between them, but this was unlikely. She was genuinely devoted to Hitler, while he was probably too ambitious to risk a dalliance with the Führer’s mistress. On 3 June 1944, on the eve of the Allied invasion, Hitler had been chief witness at Fegelein’s marriage to Eva’s youngest sister, Gretl. It was the closest anyone could get to a dynastic marriage under National Socialism.

Hitler’s ostensibly military court managed to be both superficially austere and profoundly corrupt at the same time, a contradiction which the rhetoric of self-sacrifice failed to conceal. Incompetence and chaos between competing warlords and party functionaries were cloaked by a false unity of loyalty to their ideological godhead. The mentality of such an assembly, despite all its military uniforms, saluting and twice-daily situation conferences, could not have been further from the reality of the front. And while Hitler’s health visibly deteriorated, intrigues and jockeying for position increased as the Reich crumbled. Göring, Goebbels, Himmler and Bormann all visualized themselves as the Führer’s successor. Perhaps the true measure of the fantasy of Nazi leaders was the very notion that the world might accept any form of succession within the Third Reich, assuming that it had any territory left.

On the morning of 2 February, just as the first German counter-attacks were launched against the Oder bridgeheads, the USS Quincy reached Malta. ‘The cruiser which bore the President,’ wrote Churchill, ‘steamed majestically into the battle-scarred’ Grand Harbour of Valetta. He went on board to greet Roosevelt. Although Churchill did not acknowledge that the President was ill, his colleagues were shaken to see how exhausted he looked.

The reunion between the two men was friendly, if not affectionate, yet Churchill’s foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, was worried. Tension had continued to grow between the Western Allies over the invasion of Germany from the west. Now they were about to fly to Yalta in the Crimea to decide the post-war map of central Europe with Stalin. They were divided on this too, while the Soviet leader knew exactly what he wanted. Churchill and Eden were most concerned about the independence of Poland. Roosevelt’s main priority was the establishment of the United Nations for the post-war world.

In separate aircraft, the President and the Prime Minister took off in the early hours of 3 February. Escorted by long-range Mustang fighters, and with no cabin lights showing, they flew east towards the Black Sea, following a fleet of transport aeroplanes carrying the two delegations. They arrived after a flight of seven and a half hours at Saki near Eupatoria. There, they were met by Molotov and Vyshinsky, the former prosecutor at the show trials and now deputy foreign minister. Stalin, who suffered from a terrible fear of flying, did not arrive until the next morning, Sunday 4 February. He had travelled down from Moscow in his green railway carriage, still with some of its Art Nouveau decoration from Tsarist days.

The American chiefs of staff were housed in the Tsar’s former palace. General George C. Marshall found himself in the Tsarina’s bedroom, with a secret staircase allegedly used by Rasputin. Their British counterparts were in Prince Vorontsov’s Castle of Alupka, an extravagant mid-nineteenth-century mixture of Moorish and Scottish baronial. President Roosevelt, to save him any more journeys, was installed in the Livadia Palace, where the main discussions were to take place. So much had been wrecked during the fighting in the Crimea and the German withdrawal that major works, including complete replumbing, had been carried out at great speed by the Soviet authorities to make these palaces habitable. Amid the terrible war damage, no efforts were spared to entertain their guests with banquets of caviare and Caucasian champagne. Churchill could not resist calling this coast of ghostly summer palaces the ‘Riviera of Hades’. Not even he suspected that all their rooms had been bugged. The NKVD had also positioned directional microphones to cover the gardens.

Stalin visited Churchill that afternoon, keen to convey the impression that the Red Army could be in Berlin in no time. He then paid his respects to President Roosevelt. With Roosevelt, his manner became almost deferential and his version of events changed completely. Stalin now emphasized the strength of German resistance and the difficulty of crossing the River Oder. Roosevelt was certain that he, not Churchill, knew how to handle the Soviet leader and Stalin played up to this. Roosevelt believed that it was just a matter of winning Stalin’s trust, something which Churchill could never do. He even admitted openly his disagreements with the British over the strategy for the invasion of Germany. When he suggested that Eisenhower should have direct contact with the Stavka, Stalin encouraged the idea warmly. The Soviet leader saw the advantages of American frankness, while giving away little in return.

American leaders had another reason for not opposing Stalin. They did not yet know whether the atomic bomb would work, so they desperately wanted to bring Stalin into the war against Japan. It did not seem to occur to them that it was also very much to Stalin’s advantage to come in as a victor to the spoils after the fighting was virtually over.

At the first session, which began shortly afterwards, Stalin graciously proposed that President Roosevelt should chair the meetings. The Soviet leader was wearing the medal of Hero of the Soviet Union with his uniform of Marshal of the Soviet Union. The striped trousers were tucked into boots of soft Caucasian leather. These boots had built-up heels because he was extremely conscious of his short stature. Stalin also avoided bright lights wherever possible because they showed up the pockmarks on his face. All official portraits were heavily retouched to conceal such imperfections.

General Antonov, the Soviet chief of staff, gave an impressive-sounding account of the situation, but both American and British chiefs of staff sensed that it was short on detail. The British especially felt that information between allies appeared to be a one-way traffic. Antonov also claimed that the date of their great offensive had been brought forward to assist the Americans and British. General Marshall, for his part, underlined the effect of Allied bombing on German war industry, rail communications and fuel supplies, all of which had greatly assisted the Soviet Union in its recent successes. The mood of the meeting became almost ugly when Stalin deliberately twisted things said by Churchill, and Roosevelt had to intervene.

That evening at dinner, the generally amicable mood was again threatened by Soviet remarks demonstrating total contempt for the rights of small nations. Roosevelt, hoping to lighten the atmosphere, told Stalin that he was popularly known as ‘Uncle Joe’. Stalin, who had clearly never been informed of this by his own diplomats, was insulted by what he regarded as a vulgar and disrespectful nickname. This time, Churchill stepped in to rescue the situation with a toast to the Big Three — an expression of self-congratulation to which Stalin could not fail to respond. But he took this as another opportunity to re-emphasize the point that the Big Three would decide the fate of the world and that smaller nations should have no veto. Both Roosevelt and Churchill failed to see the implication.

The next morning, Monday 5 February, the American and British combined chiefs of staff met with the Stavka team led by General Antonov. The Stavka particularly wanted pressure to be exerted in Italy to prevent German divisions being withdrawn for use in Hungary. This was perfectly reasonable and logical in itself, but it may have also been part of the Soviet attempt to persuade the Americans and British to concentrate their efforts more to the south, well away from Berlin. But both General Marshall, the American army chief of staff, and Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, warned the Stavka quite openly that they could not prevent the movement of German formations from one front to another, apart from stepping up air raids on railways and communications centres.

The crux of the whole conference became apparent that afternoon and on the following day. The discussion began with the immediate post-war period and the treatment of defeated Germany. Victory was estimated to take place at any time from the summer onwards. Roosevelt talked about the European Advisory Commission and future zones of occupation. Stalin made it clear that he wanted Germany to be completely dismembered. Then Roosevelt announced without warning that United States forces would not remain in Europe for more than two years after Germany’s surrender. Churchill was privately appalled. This would only encourage Stalin to be more obdurate, and a war-ravaged Europe might well be too weak to resist Communist unrest.

Stalin also made clear that he intended to strip German industry as a down payment in kind towards the Soviet Union’s claim for $10 billion in reparations. He did not mention it at the conference, but government commissions composed of Soviet accountants looking very awkward in new colonels’ uniforms were closely following each army in its advance. Their task was ‘the systematic confiscation of German industry and wealth’. In addition, the NKVD group at each army headquarters had a team specialized in opening safes, preferably before a Soviet soldier tried to blast the door off with a captured panzerfaust, destroying everything inside. Stalin was determined to extract every ounce of gold he could.

The one issue which both Stalin and Churchill felt passionately about was Poland. The debate was not so much over the future frontiers of the country, but over the composition of its government. Churchill declared that a fully independent Poland, the very reason for which Great Britain had gone to war in September 1939, was a question of honour.

Stalin in his reply referred very obliquely to the secret clauses of the 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact, which had allowed the Soviet Union to invade and occupy the eastern part of Poland and the Baltic states while the Nazis seized the western half. ‘It is a question of honour,’ Stalin said, standing up, ‘because the Russians have committed many sins against the Poles in the past, and the Soviet government wishes to make amends.’ After this shameless opening, considering the Soviet oppression in Poland already under way, Stalin went to the heart of the matter. ‘It is also a question of security, because Poland presents the gravest of strategic problems for the Soviet Union. Throughout history, Poland has served as a corridor for enemies coming to attack Russia.’ He then argued that to prevent this, Poland had to be strong. ‘That is why the Soviet Union is interested in the creation of a mighty, free and independent Poland. The Polish question is a question of life and death for the Soviet state.’ The flagrant mutual contradiction of the last two sentences was obvious. Although it was never stated openly, the Soviet Union would accept nothing less than a totally subservient Poland as a buffer zone. Neither Churchill nor Roosevelt could fully appreciate the shock of the German invasion in 1941 and Stalin’s determination never to be surprised by another enemy. One could well argue that the origins of the Cold War lay in that traumatic experience.

Churchill nevertheless realized that he stood no chance when Stalin invoked the necessity of securing the Red Army’s lines of communications in the approaching battle for Berlin. The Soviet leader played his cards very cleverly. The provisional ‘Warsaw government’, as he insisted on calling it — the Americans and British still referred to these NKVD-controlled Communists as the ‘Lublin government’ — was in place and, he claimed, highly popular. As for democracy, he argued, the Polish government in exile in London possessed no more democratic support than De Gaulle enjoyed in France. One cannot know for sure whether Churchill properly decoded the unspoken message: you must not thwart me over Poland, because I have kept the French Communist Party under control. Your lines of communication have not been disturbed by revolutionary activity in France by the Communist-dominated resistance movement.

To rub in the point about respective spheres of influence, Stalin asked disingenuously how things were in Greece. The Soviet leader, on the basis of the so-called ‘percentage’ agreement of the previous October, apportioning spheres of influence in the Balkans, had undertaken not to cause trouble in Greece and to respect British control there. At Yalta, Stalin appears to have been signalling that both Poland and France should be considered as an extension of the percentage agreement, but the British Prime Minister failed to decipher the text. Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke suspected at the time that there was much that Churchill did not take in.

Stalin did not relax the pressure. He claimed that 212 Soviet soldiers had been killed by Poles. Churchill was forced to agree that attacks on the Red Army by the Polish non-Communist resistance, the Armia Krajowa, were utterly unacceptable. The Prime Minister did not know that the NKVD regiments in charge of rear area security were in most cases the aggressors, arresting any members of the underground and sometimes using torture to force them to reveal other names and the locations of their arms dumps. Roosevelt, clearly too ill and exhausted to intervene, could insist only on free elections in Poland, but that was a pious hope with the machinery entirely in Soviet hands. His chief aide, Harry Hopkins, estimated that Roosevelt had probably not taken in more than half of what was said.

Stalin was convinced that he had won. As soon as the Soviet delegates felt that there was no further challenge to their control of Poland, they suddenly dropped their opposition to the voting system proposed by the Americans for the United Nations. The other principal American concern, that Stalin would commit himself to the war against Japan within a short time of the defeat of Germany, was achieved at a private meeting on 8 February.

The Soviet leader was not gracious in victory. When Churchill expressed his fears at another meeting that such a massive change in Poland’s frontiers at Germany’s expense would cause an enormous shift in population, Stalin retorted that it would not be a problem. He spoke triumphantly of the huge wave of German refugees running away from the Red Army.

On 14 February, in East Prussia, a convoy of military vehicles with Red Army markings turned off the main route from Rastenburg to Angeburg. This side road led into dense pine forest. The whole region was imbued with an atmosphere of melancholy.

A tall barbed-wire fence surmounted by concertina wire became visible from the road. The vehicles soon reached a barrier with a sign in German: ‘Halt. Military Site. Entrance Forbidden to Civilians.’ This was the entrance to Hitler’s former headquarters, the Wolfsschanze.

The trucks carried frontier guard troops from the 57th NKVD Rifle Division. The officers in command of the convoy wore Red Army uniforms, yet they owed no allegiance to its chain of command. As members of SMERSH counter-intelligence, they were in theory answerable only to Stalin. Their feelings towards the Red Army at that time were not comradely. The dilapidated vehicles which they had been given came from army units who had taken the opportunity to rid themselves of their worst equipment. Although this was common practice, SMERSH and the NKVD did not appreciate it.

Their leader wore the uniform of a Red Army general. This was Commissar of State Security of the Second Rank, Viktor Semyonovich Abakumov. Beria had appointed him the first chief of SMERSH in April 1943, soon after the victory at Stalingrad. Abakumov occasionally followed his leader’s habit of arresting young women in order to rape them, but his chief speciality was taking part in the beatings of prisoners with a rubber truncheon. In order not to spoil the Persian carpet in his office, ‘a dirty runner bespattered with blood was rolled out’ before the unfortunate was brought in.

Abakumov, although still chief of SMERSH, had been sent by Beria ‘to carry out the necessary Chekist measures’ behind the advance of the 3rd Belorussian Front into East Prussia. Abakumov had ensured that the 12,000-strong NKVD forces directly under his command were the largest of all those attached to army groups invading Germany. They were larger even than those with Marshal Zhukov’s armies.

Wet snow lay all around. To judge from Abakumov’s report to Beria, the NKVD troops dismounted and blocked the road, while he and the SMERSH officers began their inspection. Since German booby traps had been reported in the Rastenburg area, they were no doubt cautious. To the right of the entrance barrier stood several stone blockhouses which contained mines and camouflage material. On the left-hand side there were barrack blocks where the guards had lived. The SMERSH officers found epaulettes and uniforms from the Führerbegleit battalion. Hitler’s fear the previous year of being captured by a surprise Soviet parachute drop had led ‘the Führer’s guard battalion to be increased to a mixed brigade’.

Following the road deeper into the forest, Abakumov saw signs on either side of the road. These were translated for him by his interpreter: ‘It is forbidden to step off the road’ and ‘Beware mines!’ Abakumov was clearly taking notes the whole time for his report to Beria, which he knew would be passed to Stalin. The Boss was obsessively interested in all details of Hitler’s life.

The most striking aspect of Abakumov’s report, however, is the degree of Soviet ignorance it reveals about the place. This is especially surprising when one considers how many German generals they had captured and interrogated between the surrender at Stalingrad and the beginning of 1945. They appear to have taken almost two weeks to find this complex, four kilometres square. Concealment from the air was indeed impressive. Every road and alley was covered with green camouflage nets. Straight lines were broken with artificial trees and bushes. All the exterior lights had dark blue bulbs. Even the observation posts, up to thirty-five metres high in the forest, had been made to look like pine trees.

When they entered the first inner perimeter, Abakumov observed the ‘ferro-concrete defences, barbed wire, minefields and large numbers of fire positions and barracks for guards’. At Gate No. 1 all the bunkers had been blown up after the Führer’s final departure on 20 November 1944, less than three months before, but Abakumov clearly had no idea when the complex had been abandoned. They came to a second perimeter fence of barbed wire, then a third. Within the central compound, they found bunkers with armoured shutters linked to an underground garage capable of taking eighteen cars.

‘We entered with great care,’ Abakumov wrote. They found a safe but it was empty. The rooms, he noted, were ‘very simply furnished’. (The place had once been described as a cross between a monastery and a concentration camp.) The SMERSH officers were only certain that they had found the right place when they discovered a sign on a door which read, ‘Führer’s Wehrmacht Adjutant’. Hitler’s room was identified by a photograph of him with Mussolini.

Abakumov did not reveal any emotion over the fact that they were standing at last in the place from where Hitler had directed his merciless onslaught against the Soviet Union. He seemed far more preoccupied by the ferro-concrete constructions and their dimensions. Deeply impressed, he appears to have wondered whether Beria and Stalin might like something similar constructed: ‘I think it would be interesting for our specialists to inspect Hitler’s headquarters and see all these well-organized bunkers,’ he wrote. Despite their imminent victory, Soviet leaders did not appear to feel so very much more secure than their arch-enemy.

In February and March, while bitter fighting continued for the Oder bridgeheads opposite Berlin, Zhukov and Rokossovsky crushed the ‘Baltic balcony’ of Pomerania and West Prussia. In the second and third weeks of February, Rokossovsky’s four armies across the Vistula pushed into the southern part of West Prussia. Then, on 24 February, Zhukov’s right-flank armies and Rokossovsky’s left flank forced northwards towards the Baltic to split Pomerania in two.

The most vulnerable German formation was the Second Army. It still just managed to keep open the last land route from East Prussia along the Frische Nehrung sandbar to the Vistula estuary. The Second Army, with its left flank just across the Nogat in Elbing and maintaining a foothold in the Teutonic Knights’ castle of Marienburg, was the most overstretched of all Army Group Vistula.

Rokossovsky’s attack began on 24 February. The 19th Army advanced north-westwards towards the area between Neustettin and Baldenburg, but its troops were shaken by the ferocity of the fighting and it faltered. Rokossovsky sacked the army commander, pushed a tank corps into the attack as well, and forced them on. The combination of the tank corps and the 2nd and 3rd Guards Cavalry Corps led to the rapid fall of Neustettin, the ‘cornerstone’ of the Pomeranian defence line.

Soviet cavalry played a successful part in the reduction of Pomerania. They captured several towns on their own, such as the seaside town of Leba, mainly by surprise. The 2nd Guards Cavalry Corps, which formed the extreme right of Zhukov’s 1st Belorussian Front, was commanded by Lieutenant General Vladimir Viktorovich Kryukov, a resourceful leader married to Russia’s favourite folk-singer, Lydia Ruslanova.

Zhukov’s attack northwards some fifty kilometres east of Stettin began in earnest on 1 March. Combining the 3rd Shock Army and the 1st and 2nd Guards Tank Army, it was a far stronger force. The weak German divisions did not stand a chance. The leading tank brigades dashed ahead, charging through towns where unprepared civilians stared at them in horror. The 3rd Shock Army and the 1st Polish Army coming behind consolidated their gains. On 4 March, the 1st Guards Tank Army reached the Baltic near Kolberg. Colonel Morgunov, the commander of the 45th Guards Tank Brigade, the first to reach the sea, sent bottles of saltwater to Zhukov and to Katukov, his army commander. It proved Katukov’s dictum. ‘The success of the advance,’ he had told Grossman, ‘is determined by our huge mechanized power, which is now greater than it has ever been. A colossal rapidity of advance means small losses and the enemy is scattered.’

The whole of the German Second Army and part of the Third Panzer Army were now completely cut off from the Reich. And as if to emphasize the Baltic catastrophe, news arrived that Finland, albeit under heavy pressure from the Soviet Union, had declared war on her former ally, Nazi Germany. Among those cut off to the east of Zhukov’s thrust was the SS Charlemagne Division, already greatly reduced from its strength of 12,000 men. Along with three German divisions, they had been positioned near Belgard. General von Tettau ordered them to try to break out north-westwards towards the Baltic coast at the mouth of the Oder. The Charlemagne commander, SS Brigadeführer Gustav Krukenberg, accompanied 1,000 of his Frenchmen on silent compass marches through snow-laden pine forests. As things turned out, part of this ill-assorted group of right-wing intellectuals, workers and reactionary aristocrats, united only by their ferocious anti-Communism, was to form the last defence of Hitler’s Chancellery in Berlin.

Hitler, however, demonstrated scant sympathy for the defenders of his Reich. When the commander of the Second Army, Colonel General Weiss, warned Führer headquarters that the Elbing pocket, which had cost so much blood already, could not be held much longer, Hitler simply retorted, ‘Weiss is a liar, like all generals.’

The second phase of the Pomeranian campaign began almost immediately, only two days after the 1st Guards Tank Army reached the sea. The 1st Guards Tank Army was transferred temporarily to Rokossovsky. Zhukov telephoned him to say that he wanted Katukov’s army ‘returned in the same state as you received it’. The operation consisted of a large, left-flanking wheel to roll up eastern Pomerania and Danzig from the west, while Rokossovsky’s strongest formation, the 2nd Shock Army, attacked up from the south, parallel to the Vistula.

The commander of the Soviet 2nd Shock Army, Colonel General Fedyuninsky, was keeping a close eye on the calendar. He had been wounded four times in the course of the war. Every time it happened on the 20th of the month, and so now he never moved from his headquarters on that day. Fedyuninsky did not believe that the looted resources of Prussia should be squandered. He made his army load livestock, bread, rice, sugar and cheese on to trains, which were sent to Leningrad to compensate its citizens for their suffering during the terrible siege.

Fedyuninsky’s advance cut off the German defenders of Marienburg castle, who had been assisted in their defence by salvoes fired from the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen, out in the Baltic. The castle was abandoned on the night of 8 March, and two days later Elbing fell, as Weiss had warned. The German Second Army, threatened from the west and the south, pulled in to defend Danzig and Gdynia to allow as many civilians and wounded as possible to be evacuated from the ports packed with refugees.

On 8 March, just two days after the start of the westward sweep on Danzig, Soviet forces occupied the town of Stolp unopposed, and two days later, the 1st Guards Tank Army and the 19th Army reached Lauenburg. A refugee column fleeing for the ports was overtaken by a tank brigade. Women and children fled, stumbling through the snow, to shelter in the forest while Soviet tanks crushed their carts under their tracks. They were more fortunate than other trek columns.

Not far from Lauenburg, Red Army troops discovered another concentration camp. This was a women’s camp, and their doctors immediately set to work caring for the survivors.

On 8 March, just when the Pomeranian operation was getting into full momentum, Stalin suddenly summoned Zhukov back to Moscow. It was a strange moment to drag a Front commander away from his headquarters. Zhukov drove straight from the central airport out to Stalin’s dacha, where the Soviet leader was recuperating from exhaustion and stress.

After Zhukov had reported on the Pomeranian operation and the fighting in the Oder bridgeheads, Stalin led him outside for a walk in the grounds. He talked about his childhood. When they returned to the dacha for tea, Zhukov asked Stalin if anything had been heard of his son Yakov Djugashvili, who had been a prisoner of the Germans since 1941. Stalin had disowned his own son then for having allowed himself to be taken alive, but now his attitude seemed different. He did not answer Zhukov’s question for some time. ‘Yakov is never going to get out of prison alive,’ he said eventually. ‘The murderers will shoot him. According to our inquiries, they are keeping him isolated and are trying to persuade him to betray the Motherland.’ He was silent for another long moment. ‘No,’ he said firmly. ‘Yakov would prefer any kind of death to betraying the Motherland.’

When Stalin referred to ‘our inquiries’, they were of course Abakumov’s inquiries. The most recent news of Yakov had come from General Stepanovic, a commander of the Yugoslav gendarmerie. Stepanovic had been released by Zhukov’s own troops at the end of January, but then grabbed by SMERSH for interrogation. Stepanovic had earlier been in Straflager X-C in Lübeck with Senior Lieutenant Djugashvili. According to Stepanovic, Yakov had conducted himself ‘independently and proudly’. He refused to stand up if a German officer entered his room and turned his back if they spoke to him. The Germans had put him in a punishment cell. Despite an interview printed in the German press, Yakov Djugashvili insisted that he had never replied to any question from anyone. After an escape from the camp, he was taken away and flown to an unknown destination. To this day, the manner of his death is not clear, although the most common story is that he threw himself at the perimeter fence to force the guards to shoot him. Stalin may have changed his attitude towards his own son, but he remained pitiless towards the hundreds of thousands of other Soviet prisoners of war who had in most cases suffered an even worse fate than Yakov.

Stalin changed the subject. He said that he was ‘very pleased’ with the results of the Yalta conference. Roosevelt had been most friendly. Stalin’s secretary, Poskrebyshev, then came in with papers for Stalin to sign. This was a signal for Zhukov to leave, yet it was also the moment for Stalin to explain the reason for the urgent summons to Moscow. ‘Go to the Stavka,’ he told Zhukov, ‘and look at the calculations on the Berlin operation with Antonov. We will meet here tomorrow at 13.00.’

Antonov and Zhukov, who evidently sensed that there was a reason for the urgency, worked through the night. Next morning, Stalin changed both the time and the place. He came into Moscow, despite his weak state, so that a full-scale conference could take place at the Stavka with Malenkov, Molotov and other members of the State Defence Committee. Antonov made his presentation. When he had finished, Stalin gave his approval and told him to issue the orders for detailed planning.

Zhukov acknowledged in his memoirs that ‘when we were working on the Berlin operation we took into account the action of our allies’. He even admitted their concern that ‘the British command was still nursing the dream of capturing Berlin before the Red Army reached it’. What he does not mention, however, was that on 7 March, the day before Stalin summoned him so urgently to Moscow, the US Army had seized the bridge at Remagen. Stalin had immediately seen the implications of the Western Allies breaching the Rhine barrier so quickly.

During the final phase of the Soviet onslaught on Pomerania, General von Tippelskirch gave an evening reception for foreign military attachés out at Mellensee. They went mainly because it offered a good opportunity to hear something other than the official version of events, which hardly anybody believed. The capital was obsessed with rumours. Some were convinced that Hitler was dying from cancer and that the war would end soon. Many whispered, with rather more justification, that German Communists were rapidly stepping up their activities as the Red Army approached. There was also talk of a mutiny among the Volkssturm.

German officers present that evening were discussing the Pomeranian catastrophe. They blamed it on their lack of reserves. According to the Swedish military attaché, Major Juhlin-Dannfel, conversations ended with German officers saying how much they hoped that serious negotiations would start with the British. ‘The British are partly responsible for the destiny of Europe,’ he was told. ‘And it is their duty to prevent German culture from being annihilated by a Red storm-flood.’ German officers still seemed to believe that if Britain had not been so tiresome holding out in 1940 and the whole might of the Wehrmacht had been concentrated on the Soviet Union in 1941, the outcome would have been decisively different. ‘Some of those present,’Juhlin-Dannfel concluded, ‘became very sentimental and the whole thing seemed quite sad.’

The delusions of the German officer class, although different from those of Hitler’s court circle, were no less deeply held. Their real regret about the invasion of the Soviet Union had been its lack of success. To the German Army’s shame, no more than a small minority of officers had been genuinely outraged by the activities of the SS Einsatzgruppen and other paramilitary formations. In the course of the last nine months, anti-Nazi feelings had developed in army circles partly because of the cruel repression of the July plotters, but mainly as a result of Hitler’s blatant ingratitude and prejudice against the army as a whole. His outright loathing of the general staff, and his attempts to shift the blame for his own catastrophic meddling on to the shoulders of field commanders were deeply resented. In addition, the preference given to the Waffen SS in weapons, manpower and promotion stirred strong feelings of resentment towards the Nazi praetorian guard.

A senior Kriegsmarine officer told Juhlin-Dannfel about a recent conference where senior military officers discussed the possibility of a last-ditch attack on the Eastern Front to force the Red Army back to the frontier of 1939. ‘If the attempt were successful,’ the naval officer said, ‘then this would provide the right opportunity to open negotiations. In order to do this, Hitler must be removed. Himmler would take over and be the guarantor of maintaining order.’ This idea revealed not just a stupendous lack of imagination. It also shows that Wehrmacht officers in Berlin seemed to have no understanding of the state of affairs at the front. The Vistula—Oder operation had smashed the German Army’s capacity to launch another sustained offensive. The only question which remained was the number of days it would take the Red Army to reach Berlin from the front along the Oder, the line which — they now heard to their horror — might become the future frontier of Poland.

On 3 April, Marshal Zhukov flew from Moscow’s central airfield back to his headquarters. Konev took off in his aeroplane almost at the same time. The race was on. The plan was to launch the offensive on 16 April and to take Berlin on 22 April, Lenin’s birthday. Zhukov was in constant touch with the Stavka, but all his communications with Moscow were controlled by the NKVD in the form of the 108th Special Communications Company attached to his headquarters.

‘The Berlin operation… planned by the genius commander-in-chief, Comrade Stalin’, as the political department of the 1st Ukrainian Front put it so diplomatically, was not a bad plan. The trouble was that the main bridgehead seized by the 1st Belorussian Front lay right under the best defensive feature in the whole region: the Seelow Heights. Zhukov admitted later that he underestimated the strength of this position.

The tasks facing the staffs of the two main Fronts involved in the operation were huge. Russian-gauge railways had been rapidly laid right across Poland and the temporary bridges over the Vistula to bring up the millions of tons of supplies required — including artillery shells and rockets, ammunition, fuel and food.

The Red Army’s principal raw material, its manpower, also needed restocking and refashioning. Casualties in the Vistula-Oder and the Pomeranian operations had not been heavy by Red Army standards, especially when considering the huge advances made. But Zhukov and Konev’s rifle divisions, averaging 4,000 men each, had never really had a chance to refill their ranks. By 5 September 1944, 1,030,494 criminals from the Gulag had been transferred to the Red Army. The term criminal also included those sentenced for failing to turn up at their place of work. Political prisoners, or zeky, accused of treason or anti-Soviet activities were deemed too dangerous for release even to shtraf companies.

Further transfers from the Gulag were made in the early spring of 1945, once again with the promise that a prisoner could expunge his crime with his blood. In fact, the need for reinforcements was deemed so great that at the end of March, just over two weeks from the offensive against Berlin, a decree of the State Defence Committee ordered a wide range of categories of prisoners to be produced from each oblast, NKVD department and from pending cases in front of procurators.

It is doubtful whether the idea of exchanging a Gulag death — ‘a dog’s death for dogs’, as it was called — for a hero’s death motivated a majority of these prisoners, even if five of them became Heroes of the Soviet Union, including one of the most famous heroes of the war, Aleksandr Matrosov, who reputedly threw himself against a German embrasure. Life in the camps had taught them to think no more than a day ahead. The only thing likely to inspire them was a complete change of routine and the chance of misbehaviour. Some of the ex-Gulag soldiers did indeed ‘redeem their guilt with their blood’, either with shtraf companies or in mine-clearing units. Those integrated with sapper companies appear, not surprisingly, to have fought much better than those sent to shtraf companies.

Liberated prisoners of war, those who had survived the appalling conditions of German camps, were treated little better. In October 1944, the State Defence Committee had decreed that, when liberated, they should be transferred to special reserve units of military districts for screening by NKVD and SMERSH. Those sent straight from reserve battalions to frontline units were often far from healthy after their ordeal. They were always treated as deeply suspect. Front commands did not hide their unease about reincorporating ‘soldiers who were Soviet citizens released from fascist slavery’. Their ‘morale’ had been considerably lowered by ‘false fascist propaganda’ during their long imprisonment. Yet the methods of political officers were hardly likely to cure them of their worst impulses. They read them orders of Comrade Stalin, showed them films of the Soviet Union and the Great Patriotic War, and encouraged them to recount ‘the terrible atrocities of the German bandits’.

‘These men were important to the army,’ the political department of the 1st Ukrainian Front wrote, ‘because they were full of burning hatred for the enemy, and because they longed for revenge for all the atrocities and abuses they had suffered. At the same time they were not yet accustomed to strict military order.’ This acknowledged that released prisoners tended to go in for rape, murder, looting, drunkenness and desertion. Like many of the Gulag criminals, they had been thoroughly brutalized by their experiences.

In the 5th Shock Army, the 94th Guards Rifle Division received a batch of forty-five former prisoners of war just five days before the Oder operation was due to take place. Political officers clearly did not trust them. ‘Each day,’ one of them wrote, ‘I spent two hours talking to them about the Motherland, about the atrocities of Germans, and about the law concerning betrayal of the Motherland. We distributed them among different regiments to exclude the possibility of having two people in the same company who might have been in Germany together or who came from the same region. Every day and every hour we were informed of their morale and behaviour. To make them hate the Germans we used photographs of Germans abusing our civilian population, including children, and we showed them the mutilated corpse of one of our soldiers.’

The distrust of former prisoners of war was based on the Stalinist fear that anybody who had spent time outside the Soviet Union, whatever the circumstances, had been exposed to anti-Soviet influences. The fact of being in a German prison camp meant that they had been ‘constantly influenced by Goebbels propaganda’: ‘They did not know the real situation in the Soviet Union and Red Army.’ This suggests that the authorities feared that memories of the catastrophe of 1941 and any association of it with the leadership of Comrade Stalin had to be eliminated at all costs. Political officers were also appalled by a question apparently ‘often asked’ by former prisoners of war: ‘Is it true that all the equipment used by the Red Army has been bought from the USA and England and that that’s the job of Comrade Stalin?’

The NKVD was also concerned. ‘Bad supervision and the unserious attitude of commanders’ had failed to control cases of indiscipline, the breaking of state laws and ‘immoral behaviour’. Even officers had been involved: ‘The territory liberated by the Soviet Army is full of enemy elements, saboteurs and other agents.’ The unserious attitude of commanders had extended to installing curtains which covered the side windows of staff cars. This presumably was done to conceal the presence of a senior officer’s ‘campaign wife’, a mistress usually selected from the signals or medical unit attached to their headquarters. Even though Stalin had tacitly permitted the institution of ‘campaign wives’, the NKVD ordered that ‘these [curtains] must be removed by checkpoints’.

Indoctrination was the highest priority, both for political officers and for the NKVD, which was in charge of ‘Checking Fighting Fitness for Battle’. ‘Political preparation’, according to this criterion, was the most important of all categories. Special propaganda seminars were arranged for non-Russian-speaking nationalities in the 1st Belorussian Front, following the arrival at the end of March of a new draft. These included Poles from the ‘western Ukraine’ and ‘western Belorussia’ and Moldavians. Many of these conscripts, however, had seen the mass arrests and deportations of 1939–41 by the NKVD and resisted their indoctrination, which concentrated on the Communist-inspired self-sacrifice of Red Army soldiers. ‘They regarded it quite sceptically,’ one political department reported with alarm. ‘After the conversation on the feat of Hero of the Soviet Union Sergeant Varlamov, who blocked the embrasure of an enemy firepoint with his body, there were comments that this cannot be possible.’

The quality of military training clearly left much to be desired. ‘A large number of non-operational losses are due to the ignorance of officers and their bad training of soldiers,’ an NKVD report stated. In one division alone, twenty-three soldiers were killed and sixty-seven wounded in a single month solely due to the mishandling of sub-machine guns: ‘This happens because they are piled or hung up with loaded magazines still on.’ Other soldiers were wounded when messing around with unfamiliar weapons and anti-tank grenades. Ill-informed soldiers put the wrong detonators into grenades, and some ‘hit mines and shells with hard objects’.

Red Army sappers, on the other hand, needed to take risks, often to make up for the shortage of supplies. They took pride in recycling the contents of unexploded shells and German mines lifted by night. Their private motto remained ‘One mistake and no more dinners.’ They used to extract the explosive, then warm it up and roll it out on the inside of their thighs, like girls in a Cuban cigar factory, and finally feed it into one of their own wooden mine cases, which could not be picked up by German mine detectors. The degree of danger depended on the stability of the explosive which they extracted. Their courage and skills were highly respected by both rifle units and tankists, who never usually conceded anything to another arm or service.

During early April, as Berlin awaited the final Soviet onslaught along the Oder, the atmosphere in the city became a mixture of febrile exhaustion, terrible foreboding and despair.

‘Yesterday,’ the Swedish military attaché reported to Stockholm, ‘the well-meaning von Tippelskirch invited us to another evening at Mellensee, and I went more out of curiosity than anything else. The expectation of hearing anything interesting was not high, since now everything happens from one moment to the next. The evening was quite tragic. The atmosphere was one of hopelessness. Most of them did not even pretend to keep up appearances, but showed the situation as it really was. Some became maudlin, seeking comfort in the bottle.’

Fanatical determination existed only among those Nazis who believed that surrender in any form meant execution. They, like Hitler, were determined to ensure that everyone else shared the same fate as themselves. In September 1944, when the Western Allies and the Red Army had been advancing towards the Reich with great speed, the Nazi leadership wanted to fight on against its sworn enemies even after defeat. It decided to set up a resistance movement to be known by the codename Werwolf.

The name Werwolf was inspired by a novel set in the Thirty Years War by Hermann Löns, an extreme nationalist killed in 1914 and revered by the Nazis. In October 1944, when the idea started to be put into effect, SS Obergruppenführer Hans Prützmann was appointed Generalinspekteur für Spezialabwehr — General Inspector for Special Defence. Prützmann, who had studied Soviet partisan tactics during his time in the Ukraine, was summoned back from Königsberg to establish a headquarters. But, as with many Nazi projects, rival factions wanted to create their own set-up or bring existing ones under their control. Even within the SS, there were to be two organizations, Werwolf and Otto Skorzeny’s SS Jagdverbände. The figure rises to three if you include the unactivated Gestapo and SD version to be known by the codename Bundschuh.

In theory, the training programmes covered sabotage using tins of Heinz oxtail soup packed with plastic explosive and detonated with captured British time pencils. A whole range of items and even garments made of Nipolit explosive were designed, including raincoats with linings made of explosive. Werwolf recruits were taught to kill sentries with a slip-knotted garrotte about a metre long or a Walther pistol with silencer. Captured documents showed that their watchword was to be, ‘Turn day into night, night into day! Hit the enemy wherever you meet him. Be sly! Steal weapons, ammunition and rations! Women helpers, support the battle of the Werwolf wherever you can.’ They were to operate in groups of three to six men, and were to receive rations for sixty days. ‘Special emphasis was put on gasoline and oil supplies’ as targets. The Nazi authorities ordered 2,000 radios and 5,000 explosive kits, but few were ready in time. American incendiary bombs dropped in bombing raids were collected and concentration camp inmates were forced to check them and extract the material for re-use.

On 1 April at 8 p.m., an appeal was broadcast to the German people to join the Werwolf.‘ Every Bolshevik, every Englishman, every American on our soil must be a target for our movement… Any German, whatever his profession or class, who puts himself at the service of the enemy and collaborates with him will feel the effect of our avenging hand… A single motto remains for us: “Conquer or die.”’ A few days later, Himmler issued a new order: ‘Every male in a house where a white flag appears must be shot. Not a moment must be wasted in executing these measures. By male persons who must be considered responsible for their actions this means everyone aged fourteen years and upwards.’

The true objective of Werwolf, as a document of 4 April confirmed, came from the Nazi obsession with 1918. ‘We know the plans of the enemy and we know that following a defeat there would be no chance. of Germany ever rising again like after 1918.’ The threat of killing anyone who collaborated with the allies was to prevent a ‘Stresemann-Politik’, a reference to Gustav Stresemann’s acceptance of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. The Nazi Party was rooted in the humiliation of that defeat and it brought Germany back there again with terrible interest.

Hitler Youth boys were sent off to their selected areas, where they were told to bury their explosive, then contact the local Nazi Kreisleiter for accommodation and rations. They were all given single unspecified missions, then told to go home as if nothing had happened. Towards the end, the training became very hurried, so many of them were more likely to blow themselves up rather than the enemy.

Ultimately, Werwolf achieved very little, apart from a couple of assassinations — the mayors of Aachen and Krankenhagen — and the intimidation of civilians. Hitler Youth chalked slogans on walls such as, ‘Traitor take care, the Werwolf is watching.’ Both Skorzeny and Prützmann seem to have become less enamoured of the project as the allies closed in — if one is to believe Skorzeny’s account in his interrogation. (Prützmann committed suicide after one brief interview.) In any case, Himmler also had a change of heart in mid-April, just when negotiations via Sweden were on his mind. He instructed Prützmann to change Werwolf activity ‘to that — exclusively — of propaganda’. The only problem was that the Werwolfsender radio transmitter, under the control of Goebbels, continued to order partisan action.

On the Eastern Front, the rapid advances of the Red Army from January to March meant that hardly any groups were trained or equipped in time, and the only stay-behind groups were usually Volkssturm members, who had been cut off. The Werwolf propaganda simply lent SMERSH and the NKVD rifle regiments an urgent focus to their usual paranoia. In the west, the Allies found that Werwolf was a fiasco. Bunkers prepared for Werwolf operations had supplies ‘for 10–15 days only’ and the fanaticism of the Hitler Youth members they captured had entirely disappeared. They were ‘no more than frightened, unhappy youths’. Few resorted to the suicide pills which they had been given ‘to escape the strain of interrogation and, above all, the inducement to commit treason’. Many, when sent off by their controllers to prepare terrorist acts, had sneaked home.

Some have pointed out that the whole Werwolf project did not fit with the national character. ‘We Germans are not a nation of partisans,’ wrote an anonymous woman diarist in Berlin. ‘We wait for leadership, for orders.’ She had travelled in the Soviet Union just before the Nazis came to power and, during long discussions on trains, Russians made jokes about the German lack of revolutionary spirit. ‘German comrades would storm a railway station,’ one said, ‘only if they could first of all buy platform tickets!’

Reports also indicate that, although not part of the Werwolf programme, members of the Gestapo had been transferred to the Kriminalpolizei on the grounds that the Western Allies were sure to reinstate them later once military government was installed. As the reality of final collapse sank in, supposedly fanatical believers turned rapidly to self-preservation. Some SS members, to avoid prosecution, simply snaffled for themselves the false documents prepared for Werwolf members. Others procured Wehrmacht uniforms and the pay-books of dead men to provide themselves with new identities. German soldiers were furious that while the SS had been carrying out random executions for desertion, many of their officers were preparing their own escape. German prisoners of war told their American interrogators that tailors had been ordered to stitch a large Ρ on jackets so that SS men trying to hide could masquerade as Polish workers.

The Nazi leadership did not just rely on the ‘flying courts martial’ and SS execution squads to terrorize soldiers into continuing the fight. The tales of atrocities from the propaganda ministry never ceased. Stories of women commissars castrating wounded soldiers, for example, were circulated. The ministry also had its own squads both in Berlin and close to the Oder front, painting slogans on walls as if they were the spontaneous expression of the civilian population, such as ‘We believe in victory!’, ‘We will never surrender’ and ‘Protect our women and children from the Red beasts!’ There was, however, one group who could demonstrate their feelings about the war without fear of reprisal. German wounded who had lost hands or arms would say ‘Heil Hitler!’ and ‘raise their stumps ostentatiously’.

As the allied armies approached the heart of Germany from both directions, Berliners claimed that optimists were ‘learning English and pessimists learning Russian’. The Nazi foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, who had no sense of humour, announced at a diplomatic dinner that ‘Germany had lost the war but still had it in her power to decide to whom she lost’. It was this idea that disturbed Stalin so profoundly at the beginning of April.

Once Model’s Army Group B with over 300,000 men was encircled in the Ruhr on 2 April, the divisions in Simpson’s US Ninth Army began racing for the Elbe opposite Berlin. They and their army commander were convinced that their objective was the Nazis’ capital. After the row with the British, Eisenhower had left open the capture of Berlin as a distinct possibility. In the second part of the orders to Simpson, the Ninth Army was told to ‘exploit any opportunity for seizing a bridgehead over the Elbe and be prepared to continue the advance on Berlin or to the north-east’.

Its 2nd Armored Division — dubbed ‘Hell on Wheels’ — was the strongest in the US Army. It contained a large number of tough southerners who had joined during the Depression. Its commander, Major General Isaac D. White, had planned his route to Berlin well in advance. His idea was to cross the Elbe near Magdeburg. The US Ninth Army would use the autobahn to the capital as its centre-line. His closest rival in the race was the 83rd Infantry Division, known as the ‘Rag-Tag Circus’ because of its extraordinary assortment of captured vehicles and equipment sprayed olive green and given a white star. Both divisions reached the River Weser on 5 April.

To their north the 5th Armored Division headed for Tangermünde, and on the extreme left of Simpson’s front, the 84th and 102nd Infantry Divisions pushed towards the Elbe on either side of its confluence with the Havel. The momentum of the advance was slowed momentarily by pockets of resistance, usually SS detachments, but most German troops surrendered in relief. The American crews stopped only to replenish or repair their vehicles. They remained dirty and unshaven. The adrenalin of the advance had almost replaced their need for sleep. The 84th Division was held up when ordered to take Hanover, but forty-eight hours later, it was ready to move on again. Eisenhower visited its commander, Major General Alexander Boiling, in Hanover on Sunday 8 April.

‘Alex, where are you going next?’ Eisenhower said to him.

‘General, we’re going to push on ahead. We have a clear go to Berlin and nothing can stop us.’

‘Keep going,’ the supreme commander told him, putting a hand on his shoulder. ‘I wish you all the luck in the world and don’t let anybody stop you.’ Boiling took this as clear confirmation that their objective was Berlin.

On the US Ninth Army’s left, the British Second Army of General Dempsey had reached Celle and was close to liberating Belsen concentration camp. Meanwhile, on Simpson’s right, General Hodges’s First Army headed for Dessau and Leipzig. General George Patton’s Third Army forced its way ahead the furthest, into the Harz mountains, bypassing Leipzig to the south. On Thursday 5 April, Martin Bormann jotted in his diary, ‘Bolsheviks near Vienna. Americans in the Thüringer Wald.’ No further comment was needed on the disintegration of Greater Germany.

The speed of Patton’s advance had an unintended side-effect. The SS, in many cases aided by the local Volkssturm, carried out a number of massacres of concentration camp prisoners and forced labourers. At the Thekla factory, which manufactured aircraft wings three kilometres north-east of Leipzig, 300 prisoners were forced into an isolated building by the SS and Volkssturm auxiliaries. All windows were fastened, then the SS threw in incendiary bombs. Those who managed to break out of the building were machine-gunned. Three Frenchmen survived. Over 100 allied prisoners — mainly French political prisoners — were executed in the courtyard of Leipzig prison. And a column of 6,500 women of many nationalities from the HASAG group of factories two kilometres north-east of Leipzig were marched towards Dresden. Allied air reconnaissance sighted them along their route. Prisoners too weak to march had been shot by SS guards and rolled into the ditch beside the road. Striped blue and white concentration camp garments ‘marked the route and the Calvary of these unfortunate women’.

In southern Germany, meanwhile, General Devers’s Sixth Army Group — consisting of General Patch’s Seventh Army and the French First Army under General de Lattre de Tassigny — was pushing across the Black Forest. Its left flank advanced into Swabia. After the capture of Karlsruhe, they moved towards Stuttgart. Eisenhower, still concerned about an Alpine Fortress, wanted the two armies to head south-eastwards for the area of Salzburg and meet up with Soviet forces in the Danube valley.

The Red Army, despite all its efforts and talent for camouflage, could not hope to conceal the huge attack about to be unleashed on the Oder and Neisse fronts. Zhukov’s 1st Belorussian Front and Konev’s 1st Ukrainian Front were to attack on 16 April. To the north, Rokossovsky’s 2nd Belorussian Front would follow on soon afterwards across the lower Oder. Soviet forces amounted to 2.5 million men. They were backed by 41,600 guns and heavy mortars as well as 6,250 tanks and self-propelled guns and four air armies. It was the greatest concentration of firepower ever amassed.

On 14 April, a fighting reconnaissance from the Küstrin bridgehead proved most successful. Chuikov’s 8th Guards Army managed to push the 20th Panzergrenadier Division back between two and five kilometres in places. Hitler is said to have been so angry that he gave orders to strip medals from all members of the division until they had been won back.

This extension of the bridgehead also helped the build-up of forces. That night the 1st Guards Tank Army began moving its brigades across the Oder under the cover of darkness. ‘During the night there was a constant flow of tanks, guns, Studebakers loaded with ammunition, and columns of soldiers.’ Young women traffic controllers waved their discs desperately, urging the tanks into the line marked by white tapes. Loud music and propaganda exhortations reverberated from 7th Department loudspeakers in an attempt to cover the noise of tank engines, but the Germans knew what was happening.

For the whole of 15 April, Red Army soldiers watched the German positions ‘until our eyes ached’, in case last-minute reinforcements were brought up or changes made. In the Oderbruch, April flowers had appeared on hillocks, but large chunks of ice still floated down the river, as well as branches and weed which caught on a wrecked railway bridge. In pine forests on the east bank, ‘mysteriously quiet’ by day, chopped branches camouflaged thousands of armoured vehicles and guns.

On the Neisse front, to the south, the 1st Ukrainian Front organized relentless political activity up to the last moment. ‘Active Komsomol members were teaching young soldiers to love their tanks and to try to use the whole potential of this powerful weapon.’ The Aleksandrov message had evidently not been digested, even by political departments. The message of revenge was clear in the latest slogan: ‘There will be no pity. They have sown the wind and now they are harvesting the whirlwind.’

The 1st Ukrainian Front was more preoccupied by bad radio discipline. Even NKVD regiments had recently been ‘transmitting in clear, using out-of-date codes and not answering signals’. No sub-units were allowed to use the radio: their sets had to be on receive and never on send. Concern about lapses of security was even greater on the night of 15 April, because the new wavelengths and codes up to the end of May 1945 were issued to headquarters.

Even though officers were told not to give out orders more than three hours before the attack, SMERSH was determined that there should be no last-minute desertions by Red Army soldiers who might warn the enemy. The SMERSH representative with the 1st Belorussian Front ordered all political officers to check every man in the front line and identify any who seemed suspicious or ‘morally and politically unstable’. In an earlier round-up, SMERSH had arrested those denounced for making negative comments about collective farms. A special cordon was put in place ‘so that our men will not manage to flee to the Germans’ and to prevent the Germans from seizing ‘tongues’. But all their efforts were in vain. On 15 April, a Red Army soldier south of Küstrin told his German captors that the great offensive was starting early the next morning.

Considering the proximity of defeat, the Germans had even stronger reasons to fear that their soldiers would desert or surrender at the first opportunity. Army Group Vistula issued orders signed by Heinrici that men from the same region should be split up, because they seldom did anything to prevent a comrade from home deserting. An officer of the Grossdeutschland guard regiment commanding a scratch battalion observed that his young soldiers had little intention of fighting for National Socialism. ‘Many wanted to be wounded so that they could be sent back to the field hospital.’ They stayed at their posts only out of a ‘corpse-like obedience’ inspired by fear of summary execution. After a Soviet loudspeaker broadcast across the lines, officers were appalled when soldiers began shouting back asking for details. Would they be sent to Siberia? How were civilians treated in the occupied areas of Germany?

Several German commanders in the Fourth Panzer Army facing Konev’s 1st Ukrainian Front confiscated white handkerchiefs to prevent their men using them as a sign of surrender. Soldiers caught trying to desert were, in some cases, forced to dig trenches in the open in no man’s land. Many longed to slip away into thick woodland to surrender out of sight to save their families from punishment decreed in Hitler’s order.

German company commanders tried almost any means to persuade their soldiers to hold fast. Some informed them of Roosevelt’s death on the evening of 14 April. This meant, they told them, that American tanks would no longer attack. In fact, they claimed, relations between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union had become so bad that the Americans and British would now join Germany in throwing back the Russians. Reservists in the 391st Security Division near Guben found SS troops from the 30. Januar Division coming over to lecture them on the connection between the death of Roosevelt and the miracle that saved Frederick the Great as though this were holy scripture. They were not convinced at all, but many German soldiers still held on because they expected a massive counter-attack on the Führer’s birthday, 20 April, with new secret ‘wonder weapons’.

Some angry and embittered officers managed to remind veterans of the horrors of the Eastern Front and what it would mean if the Russians broke through to Berlin. ‘You can’t imagine,’ a senior lieutenant wrote to his wife, ‘what a terrible hatred is aroused here. I can promise you that we’ll sort them out one day. The rapists of women and children will discover another experience. It is hard to believe what these beasts have done. We have sworn an oath that each man must kill ten Bolsheviks. God will help us achieve this.’

The bulk of the ill-trained young conscripts recently marched out to the front were far less likely to be persuaded. They just wanted to survive. In the 303rd Döberitz Infantry Division, a regimental commander gave one of his battalion commanders some advice. ‘We have to hold the front at any cost. You’re responsible. If a few soldiers start to run away, then you must shoot them. If you see many soldiers taking off, and you can’t stop them and the situation is hopeless, then you’d better shoot yourself.’

General Chuikov, the commander of the 8th Guards Army, had the best view of the Oderbruch and the Seelow Escarpment from his forward command post on the Reitwein Spur. He was not pleased when Marshal Zhukov decided to join him there to watch the opening bombardment and the attack. Chuikov ordered Captain Merezhko, a staff officer who had been with him since Stalingrad, to go back across the Oder and lead the Front commander and his retinue to the position.

To Chuikov’s fury, Zhukov’s convoy of vehicles with their headlights on could be seen approaching from a great distance. Chuikov had almost certainly been prejudiced against Zhukov since the winter of 1942. He seems to have felt that the heroic role of his 62nd Army in Stalingrad was overlooked, and too much attention paid to Zhukov. Much more recently, he resented the remarks made about the length of time he had taken to capture the fortress of Poznan. And his own comments about the failure to have pushed straight on to Berlin at the beginning of February had clearly angered Zhukov.

Below them on the Oderbruch, an officer remembered, the trenches were alive with rattling pots. They could all smell the soup being ladled out by cooks to feed the men before the attack. In the forward trenches dug into the cold, sodden earth, troops took sips from their vodka ration. In command posts field telephones rang constantly and runners came and went.

Zhukov arrived, accompanied by a retinue including General Kazakov, his artillery commander, and General Telegin, the head of the Front political department. They were led up a path round the side of the spur and reached the bunker dug by Chuikov’s engineers in the side of the small cliff below the observation post. ‘The hands of the clock had never gone round so slowly,’ Zhukov recorded later. ‘To fill the remaining minutes somehow, we decided to drink some hot, strong tea, which had been prepared in the same bunker by a girl soldier. I can remember for some reason that she had a non-Russian name, Margo. We drank the tea in silence, everyone occupied with his own thoughts.’

General Kazakov had 8,983 artillery pieces, with up to 270 guns per kilometre on the breakthrough sectors, which meant a field gun every four metres, including 152mm and 203mm howitzers, heavy mortars and regiments of katyusha rocket launchers. The 1st Belorussian Front had a stockpile of over 7 million shells, of which 1,236,000 rounds were fired on the first day. This artillery overkill and the overwhelming superiority of his forces had tempted Zhukov into underestimating the scale of the obstacle facing them.

Zhukov usually insisted on visiting the front line in person to study the terrain before a major offensive, but this time — mainly due to constant pressure from Stalin — he had relied largely on photo-reconnaissance. This vertical picture failed to reveal that the Seelow Heights, dominating his bridgehead on the Oderbruch, was a far more formidable feature than he had realized. Zhukov was also enamoured of a new idea. One hundred and forty-three searchlights had been brought forward, ready to blind the German defenders at the moment of attack.

Three minutes before the artillery preparation was due to start, the marshal and his generals filed out of the bunker. They went up the steep little path to the observation post, concealed by camouflage nets, on the top of the cliff. The Oderbruch below them was obscured by a pre-dawn mist. Zhukov looked at his watch. It was exactly 5 a.m. Moscow time, which was 3 a.m. Berlin time.

‘Immediately the whole area was lit by many thousands of guns, mortars and our legendary katyushas.’ No bombardment in the war had been so intense. General Kazakov’s artillerymen worked in a frenzy. ‘A terrible thunder shook everything around,’ wrote a battery commander with the 3rd Shock Army. ‘You would have thought that even us artillerists could not be scared by such a symphony, but this time, I too wanted to plug my ears. I had the feeling that my eardrums would burst.’ Gunners had to remember to keep their mouths open to equalize the pressure on their ears.

At the first rumble, some German conscripts in their trenches awoke thinking that it was just another ‘Morgenkonzert,’ as the early-morning harassing fire was called. But soldiers with real experience of the Eastern Front had acquired a ‘Landserinstinkt’ which told them that this was the great attack. NCOs screamed orders to take position immediately: ‘Alarm! sofort Stellung beZiehen!’ Survivors remember the feeling in their guts and their mouths going dry. ‘Now we’re in for it,’ they muttered to themselves.

Those few trapped in trenches in the target area who somehow survived the terrifying bombardment could describe the experience afterwards only in terms of’hell’ or ‘inferno’, or an ‘earthquake’. Many lost all sense of hearing. ‘In a matter of a few seconds,’ Gerd Wagner in the 27th Parachute Regiment recorded, ‘all my ten comrades were dead.’ When Wagner recovered consciousness, he found himself lying wounded in a smoking shell crater. He was only just able to struggle back to the second line. Few escaped alive from the artillery barrage which smashed trenches and buried their occupants, both alive and dead. Bodies are still being discovered well over half a century later.

Those to the rear who could feel the earth trembling grabbed their binoculars or trench periscopes. The commander of SS Heavy Panzer Battalion 502 gazed out through the periscope of his Tiger tank. ‘In the field of view the eastern sky was in flames.’ Another observer noted ‘burning farmhouses, villages, banks of smoke as far as the eye could see’. A headquarters clerk could only mutter, ‘Christ, the poor bastards up front.’

The days of the hearty German warrior — ‘Krieg ist Krieg und Schnaps ist Schnaps’ — were well and truly past. Survivors were often not just completely disorientated, but shattered emotionally and psychologically. After the bombardment, a war correspondent with an SS propaganda company found a dazed soldier wandering in a wood, having thrown away his weapon. Apparently this was his first experience of the Eastern Front, having spent the best part of the war ‘shaving officers in Paris’.

Yet even though almost every square metre of the German positions in front of the Seelow was churned up by shellfire, casualties were not nearly as high as they might have been. General Heinrici, helped by the interrogation of the Red Army soldier south of Küstrin, had pulled the bulk of Ninth Army’s troops back to the second line of trenches. On the sector south of Frankfurt an der Oder, facing the Soviet 33rd Army, some were less fortunate. Volkssturm and Hungarian detachments were sent to occupy the forward positions of the SS Division 30. Januar. ‘These men were sacrificed by headquarters as cannon fodder,’ Ober-sturmführer Helmuth Schwarz wrote later, to preserve the regular units. Most of the Volkssturm were veterans of the First World War. Many of them had no uniforms and no weapons.

After Stalin’s two midnight telephone conversations on 16 April, the race between Zhukov and Konev began in earnest. Konev, incited by Stalin, rose enthusiastically to the challenge. Zhukov, although rattled by the setback on the Seelow Heights, believed that Berlin was his by right.

The overcast sky and drizzle gave way to better weather on Tuesday 17 April. The Shturmoviks were able to attack the remaining German positions on the Seelow Heights with much greater accuracy. Down on the Oderbruch and up on the escarpment, small towns, hamlets and individual farmhouses still burned. The Soviet artillery and aviation had targeted any building in case it housed a command post. This resulted in an overpowering smell of charred flesh, mostly human in the villages and livestock on the farms. The shelling of farm buildings as likely depots and headquarters led to a terrible slaughter of animals unable to escape from being burned alive.

Behind the indistinct German lines, dressing stations were filled with wounded far beyond the capacity of the doctors. A stomach wound was as good as a death sentence under the system of triage, since the surgery it required took too long. The first priority for treatment were those capable of further combat. Specially detailed officers trawled the field hospitals for walking wounded capable of firing a gun.

The Feldgendarmerie at their improvised roadblocks were always on the lookout for stragglers, whether fit or lightly wounded, who could be forced back into scratch companies. As soon as a reasonable number had been assembled, they were marched into the line. Soldiers called the Feldgendarmerie not only ‘chain-hounds’, but also ‘Heldenklauen’, or ‘hero-stealers’, a play on the Nazi term ‘Kohlenklau’ used to attack those who stole government coal for use at home.

In their brutal zeal, the Feldgendarmerie often grabbed men who were genuinely trying to rejoin their battalions. They then found themselves mixed in with stragglers and fifteen- or sixteen-year-old Hitler Youth, some of whom were still in shorts. A smaller size of steel helmet had been manufactured for boy soldiers, but not nearly enough were produced. Their tense, pale faces could barely be seen under helmets that dropped over their ears. A group of Soviet sappers from the 3rd Shock Army called forward to clear a minefield were taken by surprise when a dozen Germans emerged from a trench to surrender. Suddenly a boy appeared from a bunker. ‘He was wearing a long trench-coat and a cap,’ recorded Captain Sulkhanishvili. ‘He fired a burst with his sub-machine gun. But then, seeing that I didn’t fall over, he dropped his sub-machine gun and started to sob. He tried to shout, “Hitler kaputt, Stalin gut!” I laughed. I hit him only once in the face. Poor boys, I felt sorry for them.’

The most dangerous of the Hitler Youth were often those whose homes and families had been ripped apart in the east by the Red Army. The only course for them seemed to be death in battle, taking as many hated Bolsheviks with them as possible.

Friday 20 April was the fourth fine day in a row. It was Adolf Hitler’s fifty-sixth birthday. A beautiful day on this date used to prompt greetings between strangers in the street about ‘Führer weather’ and the miracle that this implied. Now only the most besotted Nazi could still hint at Hitler’s supernatural power. There were still enough diehards left, however, to attempt to celebrate the event. Nazi flags were raised on ruined buildings and placards proclaimed, ‘Die Kriegsstadt Berlin grüsst den Führer!’

In the past, a mass of birthday greetings flooded the Reich Chancellery on the Führer’s birthday. Six years earlier, Professor Doctor Lutz Heck of the Berlin Zoological Garden had sent the Führer, ‘with heartiest congratulations’, an ostrich egg weighing 1,230 grams to make scrambled eggs. But in 1945, there were very few letters and parcels, and not just because the postal system had collapsed. The Berlin Zoo was also half-destroyed, with many of the animals starving.

American and British bomber forces were well aware of the date. Sirens sounded in the morning as massed squadrons approached to greet the Führer’s birthday with a particularly heavy raid. It was almost a double celebration for the USAAF and RAF bomber crews. With Soviet forces approaching Berlin, this was their second-last raid on the capital of the Reich.

Göring had woken that morning at Karinhall, his country house north of Berlin, to the opening bombardment of Rokossovsky’ offensive. A convoy of Luftwaffe trucks, although desperately needed for more urgent duties, was ready, loaded with his looted treasures. A motorcycle detachment would escort them south. Göring addressed the men briefly and watched them leave. The engineer officer, who had laid the explosives to blow up Karinhall, then escorted the Reichsmarschall over to where the plunger stood ready. Göring had insisted on blowing the place up himself. The explosion blasted vast clouds of dust outwards, then this over-extended monument to vanity collapsed in on itself. Göring, apparently without looking back, walked to his enormous limousine to be driven to Berlin. He needed to be at the Reich Chancellery at noon to congratulate the Führer on his birthday.

Himmler had returned to the sanatorium at Hohenlychen the night before and ordered champagne at midnight to toast the Führer’s birthday. He had just arranged separate meetings with Count Folke Bernadotte of the Red Cross and Norbert Masur, the representative of the World Jewish Congress, who had been flown secretly into Tempelhof aerodrome earlier in the day. Bernadotte and Masur assumed that he wanted to discuss the possible release of prisoners, but for Himmler, the purpose was to establish a line of communication to the Western Allies. The Reichsführer SS, while still convinced of his own loyalty to Hitler, felt that he alone could replace him. He would become the leader with whom the Western Allies could negotiate. What he had to do was to convince the Jews that the Final Solution was something that both sides needed to put behind them.

Goebbels, the only leading Nazi planning to stay in Berlin with Hitler until the bitter end, broadcast a birthday speech that morning. He called on all Germans to trust blindly in the Führer, who would lead them out of their difficulties. ‘I wondered whether he was mad,’ wrote Ursula von Kardorff in her diary, ‘Or whether he was playing some sort of cold-blooded trick.’

Göring, Ribbentrop, Dönitz, Himmler, Kaltenbrunner, Speer, Keitel, Jodl and Krebs were driven to the Reich Chancellery before noon. There, they trooped through the huge rooms faced in polished marble, with doors almost to the ceiling. This quasi-cinematic monument to conspicuous power now looked tawdry in its half-wrecked state, yet it remained deeply sinister.

Many of the celebrants offering their birthday wishes that day thought that Hitler looked at least twenty years older than he was. They urged their leader to take the road to Bavaria while there was still time. Hitler stated with conviction that the Russians were about to suffer their bloodiest defeat before Berlin. Dönitz, whom Hitler had ordered to take command in the north of Germany, received an affectionate farewell. But Göring, who claimed that he would organize resistance in Bavaria, was treated in a distant manner. Hitler, Speer observed to his American interrogators less than a month later, was ‘disappointed by the cowardice of Goring and the others’. He had always persuaded himself that his close followers were men of courage.

During the situation conference that day, the main question was how soon the Reich would be cut in two south of Berlin. The territory still unoccupied was diminishing every day. The British were on the Luneburg Heath, heading towards Hamburg. The Americans were on the middle Elbe, on the borders of Czechoslovakia and moving into Bavaria. The French First Army was advancing into southern Germany. To the south-east, the Red Army was west of Vienna and the Allies in Italy were moving north across the Po valley. Again the subject of the Nazi hierarchy abandoning Berlin came up. ‘To the surprise of nearly everyone present,’ Speer stated, ‘Hitler announced that he would stay in Berlin until the last minute and only then fly to the south.’ His entourage was surprised that ‘discussion of evacuation had been general’. After the meeting, the rest of the leadership began to invent ‘all manner of excuses’ to leave Berlin on official business. Himmler, Ribbentrop and Kaltenbrunner departed in different directions. A number of the Reich Chancellery staff were detailed to leave for the Berghof the next day. ‘Führer’s birthday but unfortunately no mood for celebration,’ Bormann noted in his diary. ‘The advance party is ordered to fly to Salzburg.’

That afternoon, in the ruined Reich Chancellery garden, the Führer worked his way slowly down a line of Hitler Youth, some of whom had received the Iron Cross for attacking Soviet tanks. Hitler could not present any medals himself. To prevent his left arm shaking too obviously, he walked gripping it behind his back with his right hand. For brief moments, he could afford to release it. With what looked like the intensity of the repressed paedophile, he lingered to cup a cheek and tweak an ear, unconscious of his leering smile.

After receiving members of the close entourage that evening in the tiny sitting room in the bunker, Hitler retired to bed much earlier than usual. Eva Braun led the others up to the Reich Chancellery. With Bormann and Dr Morell among them, it was a strange and inauspicious group for a party. One of the large round tables designed by Speer was laid with food and drink. They drank champagne and made a pretence of dancing, but there was only one record for the gramophone: ‘Blood-red Roses Tell You of Happiness’. According to Hitler’s secretary, Traudl Junge, there was much hysterical laughter. ‘It was horrible; soon I couldn’t stand it and went back down to bed.’

On the morning of Saturday 21 April, just after the last Allied air raid had finished, General Reymann’s headquarters on the Hohenzollerndamm swarmed with brown uniforms. Senior Nazi Party officials had rushed there to obtain the necessary authorization to leave Berlin. For once the ‘Golden Pheasants’ had to request permission from the army. Goebbels, as Reich Commissioner for Berlin, had ordered that ‘no man capable of bearing arms may leave Berlin’. Only the headquarters for the Defence of Berlin could issue an exemption.

‘The rats are leaving the sinking ship’ was the inevitable reaction of Colonel von Refior, Reymann’s chief of staff. Reymann and his staff officers received a fleeting satisfaction from the sight. Over 2,000 passes were signed for the Party ‘armchair warriors’, who had always been so ready to condemn the army for retreating. Reymann said openly that he was happy to sign them since it was better for the defence of the city to be rid of such cowards.

This idea was echoed strongly two days later by the Werwolfsender, Goebbels’s special transmitter at Königs Wusterhausen, when it broadcast appeals to the ‘Werwölfe of Berlin and Brandenburg’ to rise against the enemy. It claimed that all the cowards and traitors had left Berlin. ‘The Führer did not flee to southern Germany. He stands in Berlin and with him are all those whom he has found worthy to fight beside him in this historic hour… Now, soldiers and officers of the front, you are not only waging the final and greatest decisive battle of the Reich, but by your fight you are also completing the National Socialist revolution. Only the uncompromising revolutionary fighters have remained.’ This deliberately ignored the far larger numbers of reluctant Volkssturm and conscripts forced to fight on with the threat of a noose or a firing squad.

An intensive artillery bombardment of Berlin began at 9.30 a.m., a couple of hours after the end of the last Allied air raid. Hitler’s SS adjutant, Otto Günsche, reported that the Führer, a few minutes after having been woken, emerged unshaven and angry in the bunker corridor which served as an anteroom. ‘What’s going on?’ he shouted at General Burgdorf, Colonel von Below and Günsche. ‘Where’s this firing coming from?’

Burgdorf answered that central Berlin was under fire from Soviet heavy artillery. ‘Are the Russians already so near?’ asked Hitler, clearly shaken.

General Kazakov had pushed forward his breakthrough artillery divisions and all the other heavy gun batteries with 152mm and 203mm howitzers. More messages had been daubed on the shells — ‘For the rat Goebbels’, ‘For Stalingrad’, ‘For the fat belly of Göring’ and ‘For orphans and widows!’ The gun crews were encouraged into a frenzied rate of fire by political officers. Senior artillery officers felt especially proud and made self-satisfied remarks about ‘the bloody god of war’, which had become an almost universal euphemism for Soviet gunnery. From that morning until 2 May, they were to fire 1.8 million shells in the assault on the city.

The casualties among women especially were heavy as they still queued in the drizzling rain, hoping for their ‘crisis rations’. Mangled bodies were flung across the Hermannplatz in south-west Berlin as people queued outside the Karstadt department store. Many others were killed in the queues at the water pumps. Crossing a street turned into a dash from one insecure shelter to another. Most gave up and returned to their cellars. Some, however, took what seemed like the last opportunity to bury silver and other valuables in their garden or a nearby allotment. But the relentlessness of the bombardment and the random fall of shells soon forced the majority of the population back underground.

In the cellars and air-raid shelters distinctive subcultures had grown up during two years of heavy air raids from ‘die Amis?’ by day and ‘die Tommys’ by night. The ‘cellar tribe’, as one diarist called these curious microcosms of society, produced a wide variety of characters, whether in markedly rich or poor districts. Each cellar always seemed to have at least one crashing bore, usually a Nazi trying to justify his belief in the Führer and final victory. A number of Berliners, for some reason, had suddenly started to refer to Hitler as ‘that one’, and it was not necessarily a term of abuse.

People clung to lucky charms or talismans. One mother brought with her the spare artificial leg of a son still trapped in the siege of Breslau. Many cellar tribes developed a particular superstition or theory of survival. For example, some believed that they would survive an almost direct hit by wrapping a towel round their head. Others were convinced that if they bent forward at the first explosion, this would prevent their lungs from tearing. Every eccentricity of German hypochondria seems to have received full expression. When the all-clear sounded after a bombing raid, cellars and shelters echoed with nervous laughter and compulsive jokes. A favourite among older, more raucous women was, ‘Better a Russki on the belly than an Ami on the head.’

On 23 April, the Nazi-controlled radio station in Prague claimed that the Führer’s decision to stay in the capital of the Reich gave ‘the battle a European significance’. The same morning, the headline of the newspaper of the 3rd Shock Army read, ‘Motherland Rejoice! We are on the streets of Berlin!’ National Socialism had laid claim to an international cause, while international Communism had become unashamedly patriotic.

For the civilians of Berlin, ideological causes made little difference any more. Survival was what counted under the bombardment. Worse was to come. General Kazakov was bringing in 600mm siege guns on specially widened tracks along the line leading to the Schlesicher Bahnhof in the east of the city. Each shell weighed half a ton.

Apart from the three flak towers, one of the largest refuges in Berlin was the Anhalter Bahnhof bunker, next to the main station. Built in ferro-concrete, with three storeys above ground and two below, its walls were up to four and a half metres thick. Pine seats and tables had been provided by the authorities, as well as emergency supplies of tinned sardines, but neither lasted long when both fuel and food were in such short supply. The Anhalter bunker’s great advantage was its direct link to the U-Bahn tunnels, even though the trains were not running. People could walk the five kilometres to the Nordbahnhof, without ever being exposed.

The conditions in the bunker became appalling, with up to 12,000 people crammed into 3,600 square metres. The crush was so great that nobody could have reached the lavatory even if it had been open. One woman described how she spent six days on the same step. For hygienic Germans, it was a great ordeal, but with water supplies cut, drinking water was a far higher priority. There was a pump which still worked outside the station, and young women near the entrance took the risk of running with a pail to fetch water. Many were killed, because the station was a prime target for Soviet artillery. But those who made it back alive earned eternal gratitude from those too weak to fetch it for themselves, or they bartered sips for food from those who lacked the courage to run the gauntlet themselves.

At the anti-tank barriers set up at major intersections, the Feldgendarmerie checked papers, ready to arrest and execute any deserters. In cellars, a growing trickle of German officers and soldiers began to appear in civilian clothes. ‘Desertion suddenly seems quite natural, almost creditable,’ a woman diarist noted on that morning of Monday 23 April. She thought of Leonidas’s 300 Spartans at Thermopylae, about whom they had heard so much at school. ‘Maybe here and there 300 German soldiers would behave in the same way: 3 million would not. The greater the crowd, the less the chance for schoolbook heroism. By nature, we women don’t appreciate it much either. We’re sensible, practical, opportunistic. We prefer men alive.’

When she went in search of coal later that morning along the S-Bahn tracks, she found that the tunnel to the south was already blocked against the Russians on the southern rim of the city. She heard from bystanders that a man accused of desertion had been hanged at the other end of the tunnel. Apparently he had been hanged with his feet not very far off the ground and some boys had been amusing themselves by twisting the corpse round and making it spin back.

On her way home she was horrified by the sight of ‘soft-faced children under huge steel helmets… so tiny and thin in uniforms far too large for them’. She wondered why she was so outraged by ‘this abuse of children’, when if they had been just a few years older, she would have been far less upset. She concluded that some rule of nature, which protected the survival of the species, was being broken by throwing immature humans into battle. To take that step was ‘a symptom of madness’.

Perhaps as a side-effect of this law linking death with sexual maturity, the arrival of the enemy at the edge of the city made young soldiers desperate to lose their virginity. Girls, well aware of the high risk of rape, preferred to give themselves to almost any German boy first than to a drunken and probably violent Soviet soldier. In the broadcasting centre of the Grossdeutscher Rundfunk on the Masurenallee, two-thirds of the 500-strong staff were young women — many little more than eighteen. There, in the last week of April, a ‘real feeling of disintegration’ spread, with heavy drinking and indiscriminate copulation amid the stacks of the sound archive. There was also a good deal of sexual activity between people of various ages in unlit cellars and bunkers. The aphrodisiac effect of mortal danger is hardly an unknown historical phenomenon.

A Norwegian journalist, describing the atmosphere in the city, claimed that boys and girls in uniform simply gave in ‘to their impulses’ in ‘a hectic search for pleasure’. But this showed a lack of understanding, especially for the girls facing the prospect of rape. In any case, apart from those coupling round the Zoo bunker and in the Tiergarten’s rhododendron bushes, which were just coming into flower amid the wreckage, many others simply cuddled each other in a desperate need for reassurance.

The other instinct of the moment was to hoard like a squirrel. Gerda Petersohn, a nineteen-year-old secretary with Lufthansa, was at home in Neukölln, not far from an S-Bahn station, when word spread in the neighbourhood that a Luftwaffe rations wagon was stranded on the track. Women rushed down to loot it. They plunged into boxes and crates to grab at anything. Gerda saw a woman nearby with her arms full of lavatory paper just as Russian planes attacked, strafing with machine-gun fire and dropping small bombs. Gerda rolled under a wagon. The woman with lavatory paper in her arms was killed. ‘What a thing to die for,’ Gerda thought. The last thing she grabbed before running back to their apartment building was a packet of pilot’s emergency rations, containing Schoka-Cola and small malt tablets. These tablets were to prove very useful in an unexpected way.

There has been a dramatic account of the looting of the Karstadt department store in the Hermannplatz, where queuing shoppers had been blown to pieces during the first artillery bombardment on 21 April. According to this story, SS troops allowed civilians to take what they wanted before they blew the place up. The explosion was said to have killed many over-eager looters. But in fact when the SS Nordland Division took over the store several days later, they did not want to blow it up. They needed Karstadt’s twin towers as observation posts to watch the Soviet advance on Neukölln and the Tempelhof aerodrome.

Once the electricity supply failed and wirelesses ceased working, the rumour mill became the only news available. More false stories than true ran around Berlin. One claimed that Field Marshal Model had not committed suicide, he had been secretly arrested by the Gestapo. The regime’s own smokescreen of lies made almost anything believable, however inaccurate.

Frightened Berliners could not resist believing Goebbels when he promised that Wenck’s army was coming to save them. They were also encouraged to believe in the rumour that the Americans were joining in the battle against the Russians. Many heard aircraft fly over the city during the night of 23 April without dropping bombs. These planes, they told each other, must have been American, and perhaps they were dropping paratroops. But the two US Airborne divisions had never emplaned.

Just about the only troops coming to Berlin at this time were neither American nor German, but French. At 4 a.m. on Tuesday 24 April, Brigadeführer Krukenberg was woken in the SS training camp near Neustrelitz, where remnants of the ‘Charlemagne’ Division had been based since the Pomeranian disaster. The telephone call was from Army Group Vistula headquarters. Evidently, General Weidling had informed Heinrici that he insisted on removing Brigadeführer Ziegler from command of the Nordland. Krukenberg was told that he was to move to Berlin immediately. No reason was given. He was simply told to report to Gruppenführer Fegelein in the Reich Chancellery. The staff officer also advised him to take an escort, as he might have trouble getting through to Berlin.

Henri Fenet, the surviving battalion commander, was woken immediately and he roused his men. Krukenberg was dressed in the long grey leather greatcoat of a Waffen SS general when he addressed the assembled officers and men. He asked for volunteers to accompany him to Berlin. Apparently, the vast majority wanted to go. Krukenberg and Fenet chose ninety, because that was all that the vehicles available could carry. Many were officers, including the divisional chaplain, Monsignor Count Mayol de Lupé. After the war, Krukenberg claimed that none of them were National Socialists. This may well have been true in the strict sense of the term, but French fascism was probably closer to Nazism than to the Italian or Spanish varieties. In any case, these volunteers ready to die in the ruins of the Third Reich were all fanatical anti-Bolsheviks, whether they believed in New Europe or ‘vieille France’.

The volunteers selected filled their pockets and haversacks with ammunition and took the battalion’s remaining panzerfausts. At 8.30 a.m., as they formed up by the road to climb into their vehicles, they suddenly saw the Reichsführer SS driving himself in an open Mercedes. Himmler passed right through them without even acknowledging his troops. He had no guards and no escort. Only several years later did Krukenberg realize that Himmler must have been returning to his retreat at Hohenlychen from Lübeck. He had met Count Bernadotte, the Swedish Red Cross representative, the night before.

The column of two armoured personnel carriers and three heavily laden trucks set off for Berlin. They had heard that Soviet tanks had already reached Oranienburg, so Krukenberg decided to take a more westerly route. It was not going to be easy to reach Berlin. Everyone was going in the other direction, whether formed detachments, stragglers, refugees or foreign workers. Many Wehrmacht soldiers jeered at the ‘Charlemagne’ volunteers, telling them that they were headed in the wrong direction. Some tapped their temples to indicate that they were crazy. Others shouted that the war was as good as over. They even encountered the signals detachment of the Nordland Division. Its commander claimed that he had received orders to move to Schleswig-Holstein. Krukenberg, having been out of touch, had no way of verifying this. Also he knew nothing of the row between Ziegler and Weidling.

After a strafing attack by a Soviet fighter, which killed one man, and on hearing artillery fire in the middle distance, Krukenberg directed the vehicles along small roads which he had known as an officer in Berlin before the war. Taking advantage of the pine forests, which hid them from enemy aviation, they came closer to the city. The route, however, became increasingly difficult with barricades and blown bridges, so Krukenberg ordered the trucks to return to Neustrelitz. He retained the two armoured personnel carriers, but the vast majority of the French volunteers had to continue on foot for another twenty kilometres.

They reached the area of the Reichssportfeld, next to the Olympic stadium, at 10 p.m. The exhausted men discovered a Luftwaffe supply store, but most of them drank a special pilot’s cocoa laced with benzedrine. Few managed to sleep. Krukenberg, accompanied by his adjutant, Captain Pachur, then set out across an apparently deserted Berlin to report to Fegelein in the Reich Chancellery. A rumour spread among the French volunteers that Hitler himself was coming out to review them there.

The civilians to be administered by Beria’s deputies had little idea of the realities of Soviet rule. They also had more urgent preoccupations as the battle was fought out on their streets, in their apartments and even through the cellars in which they sheltered. The only benefit in the early hours of Thursday 26 April was a thunderstorm, with such heavy rain that it put out some of the fires. Strangely enough, that seemed to increase the smell of burning, not diminish it.

Civilian casualties had been heavy already. Like Napoleonic infantry, the women standing in line for food simply closed ranks after a shellburst decimated a queue. Nobody dared lose their place. Some claimed that women just wiped the blood from their ration cards and stuck it out. ‘There they stand like walls,’ noted a woman diarist, ‘those who not so long ago dashed into bunkers the moment three fighter planes were announced over central Germany.’ Women queued for a handout of butter and dry sausage, while men emerged only to line up for an issue of schnapps. It seemed to be symbolic. Women were concerned with the immediacy of survival while men needed escape from the consequences of their war.

The failure of mains water meant more dangerous queues. Women waited in line with pails and enamel jugs at their nearest street pump, listening to the constant metallic squeaking from the rusty joint of its handle. They found that they had changed under fire. Swearwords and callous remarks which they would never have uttered before now slipped out quite naturally. ‘Over and over again during these days,’ the same diarist wrote, ‘I’ve been noticing that not only my feelings, but those of almost all women towards men have changed. We are sorry for them, they seem so pathetic and lacking in strength. The weakly sex. A kind of collective disappointment among women seems to be growing under the surface. The male-dominant Nazi world glorifying the strong man is tottering, and with it the myth “man”.’

The Nazi regime, which had never wanted women to be sullied by war, or indeed anything which interfered with child-rearing, now claimed in its desperation that young women were fighting alongside men. On one of the very few radio stations still on the air, there was an appeal to women and girls: ‘Take up the weapons of wounded and fallen soldiers and take part in the fight. Defend your freedom, your honour and your life!’ Germans who heard this appeal far from Berlin were shocked at this ‘most extreme consequence of total war’. Yet only a very few young women took up weapons. Most were auxiliaries attached to the SS. A handful, however, found themselves caught up in the fighting, through either extraordinary circumstances or an ill-judged rush of romanticism. In order to stay with her lover, Ewald von Demandowsky, the actress Hildegard Knef put on uniform and joined him at Schmargendorf, defending the freight yards with his scratch company.

‘Who would ever have thought,’ noted a battalion commander of the Scharnhorst Division as they advanced to Beelitz, ‘that it would be just a day’s march from the Western Front to the Eastern Front! It says everything about our situation.’

General Wenck’s XX Corps had started its attack eastwards on 24 April to break through to meet the Ninth Army encircled in the forests beyond Konev’s supply lines. That evening, the Theodor KörnerDivision of Reich Labour Service youths attacked General Yermakov’s 5th Guards Mechanized Corps near Treuenbrietzen. On the next day, the Scharnhorst Division approached Beelitz. They had no idea of what lay ahead as they moved through a mixture of thick young plantations and mature, well-spaced pine forest. The operation, observed the battalion commander, ‘had the character of an armed reconnaissance’. A few kilometres before Beelitz, they came upon the hospital complex at Heilstätten.

The nurses and patients, who had been looted very thoroughly the day before by Soviet troops and liberated slave labourers, heard artillery. Nobody knew where this battle was coming from. A shell hit one of the blocks. The children were taken down into the cellars. The nurses asked each other whether this could be the Americans arriving. Later, they suddenly saw German troops arriving from the west in skirmishing formation, dashing forwards from tree to tree. Two of the nurses ran outside towards them, screaming, ‘Blast the Russians away!’ As the battle intensified, the director of the hospital, Dr Potschka, decided to make contact with the Americans on the Elbe. The Swiss clearly could not help them.

The battle for Beelitz continued for several days. In the course of the fighting and the earlier outrages, seventy-six civilians were killed, including fifteen children. ‘It was fought with great bitterness,’ the battalion commander of the Scharnhorst wrote, ‘and no prisoners were taken.’ He and his men were appalled when the Soviets captured a house in which all their wounded comrades were lying in the cellar. The young soldiers — some of them were so young that civilians in Beelitz referred to them as ‘Kindersoldaten’ — suffered ‘tank fright’ on first encountering T-34 and Stalin tanks. But within a couple of days confidence returned when four Stalin tanks were knocked out with panzerfausts. Peter Rettich, the battalion commander, hailed his young soldiers’ ‘fantastic acts of bravery’ and their ‘dedication’ and then added that it was ‘a crying shame and a crime to throw such boys into this all-destructive hell’.

On 28 April, the 3,000 wounded and sick children were loaded by men of the Ulrich von Hutten Division on to a shuttle of goods trains which took them slowly off towards Barby. There the Kinderklinik was re-established and the Americans accepted the wounded as prisoners of war. Wenck, however, had set the Twelfth Army more important missions. One was the drive up towards Potsdam with the bulk of the Hutten Division to open up an escape corridor. The other was to help the Ninth Army save itself.

During the withdrawal into the centre of Berlin, the SS execution squads went about their hangman’s work with an increased urgency and cold fanaticism. Around the Kurfürstendamm, SS squads entered houses where white flags had appeared and shot down any men they found. Goebbels, terrified of the momentum of collapse, described these signs of surrender as a ‘plague bacillus’. Yet General Mummert, the commander of the Müncheberg Panzer Division, ordered the SS and Feldgendarmerie squads out of his sector round the Anhalter Bahnhof and Potsdamerplatz. He threatened to shoot executioners on the spot.

The conditions for those involved in the fighting became progressively worse. German troops could seldom get near a water pump. They had to quench their thirst, exacerbated by the smoke and dust, with water from canals. There were also more and more cases of nervous breakdowns from the combination of exhaustion and constant artillery fire. The number of wounded in the Anhalter bunker had grown so much that young women had made a Red Cross flag, using sheets and lipsticks. This was a wasted effort. Even if the Soviet artillery observers had seen the Red Cross symbol through the smoke and masonry dust, they would not have diverted their battery fire. A bunker was a bunker. The fact that it contained civilians was irrelevant. Numbers inside were diminishing rapidly, however, as women and children escaped along the U-Bahn and S-Bahn tunnels during the night of 27 April. Troops from the 5th Shock Army and the 8th Guards Army were literally at the door.

The 5th Shock Army, advancing from the east on the north side of the Landwehr Canal, had fought back the remnants of the Nordland and the Müncheberg from Belle-Allianceplatz and carried on to the Anhalter Bahnhof. The 61st Rifle Division of the 28th Army also arrived there from a different direction. The 5th Shock Army then found the 8th Guards Army attacking from the south across the canal into their left rear flank. The commander of the 301st Rifle Division, Colonel Antonov, immediately called in his corps commander, General Rosly. They at once set off in a jeep. ‘Rosly, who is usually very calm, looked worried,’ wrote Antonov. ‘He thought the situation over and said, “How on earth can we get them back over the Landwehr Canal? Don’t let your order of battle get mixed up with the Guards. Continue advancing along the Wilhelmstrasse and the Saarlandstrasse. Storm Gestapo headquarters, the aviation ministry and the Reich Chancellery.”’ Antonov did not waste time, but it took Zhukov’s headquarters nearly thirty hours to sort out the muddle and establish new boundaries between the different armies. Soon the majority of Konev’s troops were pulled out of Berlin — ‘like a nail,’ they said, to emphasize their resentment at being denied the prize — and diverted towards Prague.

Also by 28 April, troops of the 3rd Shock Army, advancing from the northern districts, were in sight of the Siegessäule column in the Tiergarten. Red Army soldiers nicknamed it the ‘tall woman’ because of the statue of winged victory on the top. The German defenders were now reduced to a strip less than five kilometres in width and fifteen in length. It ran from Alexanderplatz in the east to Charlottenburg and the Reichssportsfeld in the west, from where Artur Axmann’s Hitler Youth detachments desperately defended the bridges over the Havel. Weid-ling’s artillery commander, Colonel Wöhlermann, gazed around in horror from the gun platform at the top of the vast concrete Zoo flak tower. ‘One had a panoramic view of the burning, smouldering and smoking great city, a scene which again and again shook one to the core.’ Yet General Krebs still pandered to Hitler’s belief that Wenck’s army was about to arrive from the south-west.

To keep resistance alive Bormann, like Goebbels and Ribbentrop, spread the false rumour of a deal with the Western Allies. ‘Stand fast, fight fanatically,’ he had ordered Gauleiters early in the morning of 26 April. ‘We are not giving up. We are not surrendering. We sense some developments in policy abroad. Heil Hitler! Reichsleiter Bormann.’ The lie was soon underlined by the reaction of Hitler and Goebbels to Himmler’s attempts to seek a genuine cease-fire with the western powers.

Truman and Churchill had immediately informed the Kremlin of the approach through Count Bernadotte. ‘I consider your proposed reply to Himmler… absolutely correct,’ Stalin replied to Truman on 26 April. Nobody in the bunker had any inkling of what was afoot, and yet a general suspicion of betrayal had certainly gripped Bormann. On the night of Friday 27 April, he wrote in his diary, ‘Himmler and Jodl stop the divisions that we are throwing in. We will fight and we will die with our Führer, to whom we will remain devoted until the grave. Many are going to act on the basis of “higher motives”. They are sacrificing their Führer. Phooee! What swine. They have lost any honour. Our Reich Chancellery is turning into ruins. “The world is now hanging by a thread.” The Allies are demanding unconditional surrender. This would mean a betrayal of the Fatherland. Fegelein has degraded himself. He tried to run away from Berlin in civilian clothes.’ Bormann rapidly distanced himself from his close companion.

Hitler had suddenly noticed Hermann Fegelein’s absence early in the afternoon at the situation conference. Bormann, probably from their mutual bragging in the sauna, knew of the apartment in Charlottenburg which he used for his affairs. A group of Hitler’s Gestapo bodyguards were sent to bring him back. They found Fegelein, apparently drunk, with a mistress. His bags, containing money, jewels and false passports, were packed ready for departure. He insisted on ringing the bunker and demanded to speak to his sister-in-law, but Eva Braun, shocked that he too had tried to desert her beloved Führer, refused to intervene. She did not believe him when he claimed that he was only trying to leave to be with Gretl, who was about to give birth. Fegelein was brought back under close arrest. He was held in a locked room in the Reich Chancellery cellar.

On 28 April, in the middle of the afternoon, Hitler was told of a report on Stockholm radio that Himmler had been in touch with the Allies. The idea that ‘der treue Heinrich’ could be attempting to make a deal seemed ludicrous, yet Hitler had begun to suspect the SS after Steiner’s failure to relieve Berlin. He rang Dönitz, who spoke to Himmler. The Reichsführer SS denied it completely. But that evening, Lorenz, Hitler’s press attaché, arrived with a copy of confirmation of the story from Reuters. All Hitler’s resentments and suspicions exploded. He was white with anger and shock. Fegelein was interrogated, apparently by Gruppenführer Müller, the chief of the Gestapo. He admitted that he had known of Himmler’s approach to Bernadotte. Freytag von Loringhoven saw Fegelein being marched upstairs under heavy SS escort. All badges of rank, his Knight’s Cross and other insignia had been torn from his uniform. Fegelein’s swagger had disappeared. He was executed in the Reich Chancellery garden. Hitler was now convinced that the SS had been seething with plots against him, just like the army the year before.

Hitler went straight to the bunker room where the newly promoted Marshal Ritter von Greim lay nursing his wounded leg. He ordered him to fly out of Berlin to organize Luftwaffe attacks on the Soviet tanks which had reached the Potsdamerplatz and to ensure that Himmler did not go unpunished. ‘A traitor must never succeed me as Führer,’ he shouted at Greim. ‘You must go out to ensure that he does not!’ No time was wasted. Hanna Reitsch was summoned to help Greim up the concrete staircase on his crutches. An armoured vehicle was waiting to take them to an Arado 96 trainer, specially ordered from outside and now ready for take-off near the Brandenburg Gate. Soviet soldiers from the 3rd Shock Army who had just fought their way into the Tiergarten stared in amazement as the aircraft took off before their eyes. Their immediate fear, on recovering their military reactions, was that Hitler had escaped them. But the rather tardy explosion of anti-aircraft and machine-gun fire failed to find the target. Ritter von Greim and Hanna Reitsch escaped.

This mouvementé night in the Führer bunker was not over. It held an even greater surprise. Adolf Hitler proceeded to marry the sister-in-law of the man he had just had executed. Goebbels had brought to Hitler’s private sitting room a Herr Walter Wagner, an official of the Gau of Berlin, who had the authority to perform a civil wedding ceremony. Wagner, bemused and overawed by his responsibilities, had come from guard duty in his brown Nazi Party uniform and Volkssturm armband. Hitler was in his usual tunic. Eva Braun wore a long black silk taffeta dress, one which he had often complimented her upon. Its colour was rather suitable in the circumstances. A very nervous Wagner then had to ask both the Führer and Fräulein Braun whether they were of pure Aryan descent and free from hereditary diseases. The proceedings took no more than a couple of minutes under the wartime formula of simple declarations. Then came the signing of the register, with Goebbels and Bormann as witnesses. Eva Braun began to write her usual name, but stopped, scratched out the ‘B’ and corrected the entry to ‘Eva Hitler, geb[orene]. Braun.’ Hitler’s signature was totally illegible, his hand was shaking so much.

The married couple emerged into the anteroom corridor which served as the bunker conference room. Generals and secretaries congratulated them. They then retired to the little sitting room for a wedding breakfast with champagne for the new Frau Hitler, as she now insisted on being called by servants. She had finally been rewarded for her loyalty in a world of betrayal. They were later joined by Bormann, Goebbels and his wife, Magda, and the two remaining secretaries, Gerda Christian and Traudl Junge. Hitler took Traudl Junge away to another room, where he dictated his political and personal testaments. She sat there in nervous excitement, expecting to hear at last a profound explanation of the great sacrifice’s true purpose. But instead a stream of political clichés, delusions and recriminations poured forth. He had never wanted war. It had been forced on him by international Jewish interests. The war, ‘in spite of all setbacks,’ he claimed, ‘will one day go down in history as the most glorious and heroic manifestation of a people’s will to live’.

Grand Admiral Dönitz, the head of the Kriegsmarine, was appointed Reich President. The Army, the Luftwaffe and the SS had either failed or betrayed him. The loyal Dönitz — ‘Hitlerjunge Quex’ — had emerged in front of schemers. Yet Goebbels was appointed Reich Chancellor, while ‘my most faithful Party comrade, Martin Bormann’ became Party Chancellor as well as executor of his private will. Hitler clearly wanted to continue his policy of divide and rule from beyond the grave, even on the most spectral administration ever assembled. Perhaps the most bizarre appointment was for Gauleiter Karl Hanke to replace Himmler as Reichsführer SS. Hanke, a pre-war lover of Magda Goebbels, was still trapped in Breslau, directing his own provincial performance of enforced suicide on a city. Goebbels, meanwhile, wrote his own will. He believed it his duty — ‘in the delirium of treachery which surrounds the Führer in these most critical days of the war’ — to refuse Hitler’s order to leave Berlin and ‘stay with him unconditionally until death’. One of the copies of Hitler’s testament was sent by a trusted officer to Field Marshal Schörner, the new commander-in-chief of the army. The covering letter from General Burgdorf confirmed that ‘the shattering news of Himmler’s treachery’ was for Hitler the final blow.

The rather sedate wedding party deep in the bunker was overtaken by much wilder behaviour closer to the surface. When Traudl Junge was finally released from her typing at around 4 a.m. on Sunday 29 April, and the Führer and Frau Hitler retired, she went upstairs to find some food for the Goebbels children. The scenes which she encountered, not far from where the wounded lay in the Reich Chancellery’s underground field hospital, shocked her deeply. ‘An erotic fever seemed to have taken possession of everybody. Everywhere, even on the dentist’s chair, I saw bodies locked in lascivious embraces. The women had discarded all modesty and were freely exposing their private parts.’ SS officers who had been out searching cellars and streets for deserters to hang had also been tempting hungry and impressionable young women back to the Reich Chancellery with promises of parties and inexhaustible supplies of food and champagne. It was the apocalypse of totalitarian corruption, with the concrete submarine of the Reich Chancellery underworld providing an Existentialist theatre set for hell.

The assault on the Reichstag was planned for dawn on 30 April. Soviet commanders were desperate to capture it in time for the May Day parade in Moscow. Yet the pressure for results came from those in the chain of command who assumed that nothing had changed, not from Stalin. It is noticeable that once the city had been completely surrounded, preventing any American access, Stalin had relaxed and made no attempt to interfere in decisions on the ground. The Reichstag, nevertheless, remained the chosen symbol for victory over the ‘fascist beast’, and so it was naturally the main focal point for Soviet propaganda.

A war correspondent, summoned to the headquarters of the 150th Rifle Division just a few hours before, was told to hand over his pistol. He did so, horrified that he was being sent home for some misdemeanour. But the captain who had taken it from him put his mind at rest when he came back into the room with a fresh weapon. ‘The order has come through,’ he said, ‘that everyone going to the Reichstag must be armed with a sub-machine gun.’

Amid sporadic fire, the journalist was taken on a zigzag route to ‘Himmler’s House’ — the Ministry of the Interior. Fighting still continued on the upper floors, as the explosions of grenades and the rattle of sub-machine guns made clear. In the basement, however, battalion cooks, with almost as much noise, were preparing breakfast for the assault groups. On the first floor, Captain Neustroev, a battalion commander about to lead the assault on the Reichstag, was trying to orientate himself. He kept glancing down at his map and then up at the grey building ahead. His regimental commander, impatient at the delay, appeared.

‘There’s a grey building in the way,’ explained Neustroev. The regimental commander grabbed the map from him and studied their position again. ‘Neustroev!’ he replied in exasperation. ‘That is the Reichstag!’ The young battalion commander had not been able to imagine that their final objective could be so close.

The journalist also peered from a window. The Königsplatz outside was ‘covered with flashes and fire and exploding shells and the interrupted lines of tracer bursts’. The Reichstag lay less than 400 metres beyond. ‘If there had been no fighting,’ he wrote, ‘this distance could be crossed in a few minutes, but now it seemed impassable, covered with shell holes, railway sleepers, pieces of wire and trenches.’

The German defenders had dug a network of defences all round the Reichstag. Most daunting of all, a water obstacle ran right across the middle of the Königsplatz. This was a tunnel which had collapsed from bombing and filled with water seeping in from the Spree. It had been dug as part of exploratory work for Albert Speer’s vast Volkshalle, the centrepiece of the new Nazi capital of Germania. In this devastated, ‘Hieronymus Bosch landscape’, practical jokers had propped up on stones the heads of caryatids blasted by Allied bombs off the Reichstag’s façade.

Once breakfast was dished up, ‘everyone started checking their weapons and spare magazines’. Then at 6 a.m., the first company charged out. They had ‘hardly gone fifty metres when the hurricane of fire from the enemy made them lie down’. Two rather reduced battalions made a dash forward soon afterwards, but many were killed. Heavy fire was also coming from the Kroll Opera House, on the west side of the Königsplatz, as well as from the Reichstag itself. With the assault force trapped in the crossfire, another division was rapidly deployed to deal with the Kroll Opera House, but first it had to clear the buildings behind on the embankment. More self-propelled guns and tanks were also brought over the Moltke bridge during the course of the morning to support the infantry on the Königsplatz. The smoke and dust from the bombardment were so thick that the soldiers never saw the sky.

With heavy artillery and tank fire supporting them, the 150th Rifle Division battalions reached the water-filled tunnel soon after 11 a.m. But when another huge effort was made two hours later, heavy fire came from their right rear. The German anti-aircraft guns on the top of the Zoo bunker, two kilometres away, had opened up on them. They were forced to take cover again and wait until nightfall. During the afternoon, the 171st Rifle Division continued clearing buildings of the diplomatic quarter on the north side of the Königsplatz and more self-propelled guns and tanks moved up. Some ninety guns, including 152mm and 203mm howitzers, as well as katyusha rocket launchers, fired continuously at the Reichstag. It says much for the solidity of its construction fifty years before, during the Second Reich, that it withstood such a pounding.

The dawn of May Day in the centre of Berlin revealed exhausted Soviet soldiers sleeping on pavements up against the walls of buildings. Rzhevskaya, the interpreter awaiting the capture of the Reich Chancellery, saw one soldier sleeping in the foetus position, with a piece of broken door as a pillow. Those who had awoken were retying their foot bandages. They had no idea of Hitler’s suicide the afternoon before. Some of them still called ‘Gitler durak!’ — ‘Hitler’s a blockhead’ — at any German prisoners.

The Führer’s death was kept a closely guarded secret on the German side throughout the night and into the next morning, when just a few senior officers were informed. SS Brigadeführer Mohnke, taking Krukenberg into his confidence, could not forgo the crass pomposity of Nazi rhetoric. ‘A blazing comet is extinguished,’ he told him.

Officers awaited word of the negotiations, but the suddenly renewed storm of fire in the middle of the morning spoke for itself. General Krebs had failed to achieve a cease-fire. The Soviet commanders insisted on unconditional surrender and Goebbels had refused. The massed artillery and katyusha launchers of the 3rd Shock Army, the 8th Guards Army and the 5th Shock Army blasted away again at semi-ruined buildings.

Soon after 1 a.m. on 2 May, General Chuikov had been woken yet again. Red Army signals units had picked up repeated transmissions from the German LVI Panzer Corps requesting a cease-fire. Emissaries would come under a white flag to the Potsdamer bridge. Colonel von Dufving, accompanied by two majors, appeared. He held discussions with one of Chuikov’s commanders, then returned to General Weidling. Weidling surrendered with his staff at 6 a.m. and was taken to Chuikov’s headquarters, where he prepared an order to the garrison to capitulate.

On that chilly dawn, the last prisoners of the Gestapo left in its Prinz-Albrechtstrasse headquarters still did not know whether they were about to be liberated by the Red Army or murdered by their captors. Pastor Reinecke was the only priest to be spared from the massacre of a week before. ‘What I experienced as sadism during those last one and a half weeks,’ he wrote in a letter, ‘cannot be described here.’

The survivors were a mixed group. One of his cell companions was the Communist Franz Lange, who said afterwards that, despite having had nothing to do with the Church since the age of sixteen, he would never forget Reinecke’s ability to find the strength to survive through silent prayer. Another was Joseph Wagner, a former Gauleiter of Silesia, who had fallen out with the regime because of his Catholicism. The Gestapo had arrested him after the July plot.

On 1 May, their cell door had been thrown open to shouts of ‘Raus! Raus!’ They had been chased downstairs by the SS guards, who had killed one of their number, a Wehrmacht ΝCO, on the way. The remaining six were then locked in another cell, provided with food and water, next to the SS guards’ own quarters. Lange heard the Sturmbannführer in charge explain to one of his men with the unique logic of the SS, ‘We’re sparing these ones as proof that we shot no prisoners.’ During the afternoon the six survivors heard the guards preparing to pull out. By nightfall, they were left in the darkness of the building Berliners had dubbed the ‘House of Horror’ when it became known that prisoners were strapped in manacles diagonally across the walls of its cellars like a medieval torture chamber.

Not long after dawn on 2 May they heard voices. The flap on their cell window opened. A voice asked them in Russian for the key to open the door. ‘No key,’ replied Lange, the Communist, who knew a little of the language. ‘We are prisoners.’ The soldier went away and a few minutes later they heard the sound of axes crashing into the door. Soon it swung open. They found themselves looking into the face of a smiling young Red Army soldier.

He and his comrades took them into the SS guards’ canteen to offer them food. One of their guns went off by accident, a tragically common occurrence in the Red Army. Joseph Wagner, the former Gauleiter, fell dead at Pastor Reinecke’s side.

Other Red Army soldiers wasted little time upstairs. The silk panels lining the walls of Himmler’s grand reception room were slashed from their battens and bundled into packs, ready for the next five-kilo parcels to be sent home.

Stalin saw the capture of Berlin as the Soviet Union’s rightful reward, but the yield was disappointing and the waste terrible. A key target was the Reichsbank in Berlin. Serov accounted for 2,389 kilos in gold, twelve tons of silver coin and millions in banknotes from countries which had been occupied by the Axis. Yet the bulk of Nazi gold reserves had been moved westwards. Serov, however, was later accused of having also held back a certain proportion of the proceeds for the NKVD’s ‘operational expenses’.

The main objective was to strip Germany of all its laboratories, workshops and factories. Even the NKVD in Moscow provided a shopping list of items wanted from police forensic laboratories. The Soviet atomic programme, Operation Borodino, had the very highest priority of all, but considerable efforts were also made to track down V–2 rocket scientists, Siemens engineers and any other skilled technicians who could help the Soviet armaments industry catch up with the United States. Only a few, such as Professor Jung and his team who refused to help on nerve gas, managed to resist Soviet pressure. Most of the others enjoyed comparatively privileged conditions and the right to bring their families with them to the Soviet Union.

German scientific equipment, however, turned out to be rather less tractable than its human designers. The vast majority of items taken back to Moscow were of no use because they required an environment suitable for precision engineering and the purest raw materials. ‘Socialism cannot benefit itself,’ observed one of the Soviet scientists involved in stripping Berlin, ‘even when it takes the whole of another country’s technological infrastructure.’

Most of the programme of stripping laboratories and factories was marked by chaos and disaster. Red Army soldiers who discovered methyl alcohol drank it and shared it with their comrades. The contents of workshops were ripped out by working parties of German women, then left in the open, where they rusted. Even when finally transported back to the Soviet Union, only a small proportion was ever put to good use. Stalin’s theory of industrial expropriation showed itself to be worse than futile. And this came on top of the Red Army’s less than enlightened attitude towards German property in general. French prisoners of war were astonished at ‘the systematic destruction of machinery in good repair which could be reused’. It was a huge dissipation of resources and condemned Soviet-occupied Germany to a backwardness from which it never recovered.

Personal looting continued to be just as wasteful as it had been in East Prussia, although it now became more exotic. Soviet generals behaved like pashas. Vasily Grossman described one of Chuikov’s corps commanders during the last few days of the battle. This general had acquired ‘two dachshunds (nice fellows), a parrot, a peacock and a guinea fowl which travel with him’, he jotted in his notebook. ‘It’s all very lively at his headquarters.’

Most of a general’s loot consisted of presents from subordinate commanders, who quickly grabbed the best items for their superiors when a schloss or fine house was taken. Zhukov was given a pair of Holland & Holland shotguns. They were later to form part of Abakumov’s attempt to discredit him, almost certainly on Stalin’s instructions. These two guns became, with that Stalinist compulsion to multiply everything in a denunciation, ‘twenty unique shotguns made by Golland & Golland [sic]’.

At the other end of the chain of command, Red Army soldiers accumulated an interesting array of plunder. Young women soldiers were interested in assembling a trousseau ‘from some Gretchen’, hoping that they still might find a husband in a world short of men. Married soldiers collected cloth to send back to their wives, but also looted ‘Gretchen knickers’. This sort of present confirmed the worst jealousies at home. Many Soviet wives were convinced that German women in Berlin were seducing their husbands.

Most soldiers, however, concentrated on items for rebuilding at home, despite the fact that they were too heavy for their five-kilo allowance. An officer told Simonov that his men removed panes of glass, then fastened a bit of wood on each side and bound them up with wire to send home. He recounted the scene at the Red Army post department.

‘Come on, take it!’ the soldier said. ‘Come on, Germans smashed my house. Come on, take the parcel. If you don’t, you’re not the post department.’

Many sent a sack of nails. Someone brought a saw, rolled into a circle. ‘You could at least have wrapped it in something,’ a soldier in the post department told him.

‘Come on, take it! I’ve no time. I’ve come from the front line!’

‘And where’s the address?’

‘On the saw. Here, see?’ The address was written in indelible pencil on the blade.

Other soldiers bribed German women with bread to sew their booty up in a sheet to make a parcel. It was a matter of pride to distribute gifts of distinction to family and friends at home, such as hats or watches. The obsession with watches prized them above far more valuable items. Soldiers would often wear several timepieces, with at least one on Moscow time and another on Berlin time. It was for this reason that they continued to prod civilians in the stomach with their sub-machine guns, demanding, ‘Uri, uri!’ well after the surrender. And Germans would try to explain in the Soviet version of pidgin-German that their watches had already been taken: ‘Uhr schon Kamerad’ — ‘watch already surrender’.

Russian boys, some as young as twelve, turned up in Berlin to loot. Two of them, when arrested, admitted that they had come all the way from Vologda, well to the north of Moscow. Less surprisingly, foreign workers, in a carnival atmosphere, were responsible for a ‘considerable amount of looting’ in all liberated areas, a US Army report stated. ‘The men head for the wine cellars, the women for the clothing shops and both gather whatever food they can on the way.’ But ‘much of the looting attributed to foreigners is actually being carried out by the Germans themselves’.

The German loathing and fear of forced labourers were visceral. They were horrified when the Western Allies insisted that they should be fed first. ‘Even the Bishop of Munster,’ Murphy wrote to the Secretary of State on 1 May, ‘is quoted as referring to all displaced persons as Russians and demanding that the Allies should afford Germany protection from these “inferior peoples”.’ Contrary to German expectations, however, forced labourers were responsible for surprisingly little violence, when one considers how they had suffered after their deportation to Germany.

In Berlin, the feelings of the civilian population were very mixed. While embittered by the looting and rape, they were also astonished and grateful for the Red Army’s major efforts to feed them. Nazi propaganda had convinced them that they would be systematically starved. General Berzarin, who went out and chatted with Germans queuing at Red Army field kitchens, soon became almost as much of a hero to Berliners as he was to his own men. His death in a drunken motorcycle accident soon afterwards provoked widespread sadness and rumours among the Germans that he had been murdered by the NKVD.

Germans were surprised by a less altruistic form of food aid. Soviet soldiers turned up with chunks of meat and told housewives to cook it for them in return for a share. Like all soldiers, they wanted ‘to get their feet under a table’ in a real kitchen in a real home. They always brought alcohol with them too. Everyone would drink solemnly to peace after eating, and then the soldiers would insist on a toast ‘to the ladies’.

Soviet soldiers seemed to suffer from survivor guilt without knowing it. When they thought of all their comrades who had died, it felt slightly bewildering to be one of those alive at the end. They had ‘hugged each other like brothers’ in relieved congratulation, but many could not sleep well for weeks after the guns had fallen silent. The unaccustomed quietness unnerved them. They also needed to digest what had happened during all those moments when they had not dared to think too much.

There was no doubt that what they had been through was the most important period not just of their own lives, but also of world history. They thought of their homes and girlfriends and wives and how they would be respected members of the community. For women soldiers, however, the prospects were far less promising. There were fewer men to go round. Those who were pregnant knew that they would have to put a brave face on it. ‘So, Ninka,’ a young woman soldier wrote to her friend, ‘you have got a daughter, and I will have a baby and let’s not be sad about not having husbands.’ Most of them had their child and returned home, claiming that their husband had been killed at the front.

The war was an extraordinary experience in other ways. It had provided an exhilarating taste of freedom after the purges of 1937 and 1938. Hopes for a complete end to the terror had arisen. Fascism was defeated. Trotsky was dead. Agreements were being made with the western powers. There seemed no reason for the NKVD to be paranoid any more. But back in the Soviet Union, people had already started to realize from the sudden arrest of friends that the informer was at work again, with NKVD squads on their early-morning calls.

The nearness of death at the front had done much to remove the Stalinist conditioning of fear. Officers and soldiers had become quite outspoken, especially about their aspirations for the future. Those from rural areas wanted to do away with the collective farms. Officers, having been given primacy over the political officers in the autumn of 1942, believed that it was now time for the Soviet bureaucratic élite, the nomenklatura, to face similar reform. In the most cynical fashion, Stalin had encouraged rumours of this sort during the war, hinting at greater freedom while all the time intending to crush it the moment the fighting was over.

With the approach of victory, Red Army officers had indeed started to become over-confident in the eyes of SMERSH and the NKVD. And political officers had not forgotten the insults of Red Army counterparts when they had been downgraded at the time of the battle of Stalingrad. They were also extremely concerned again by soldiers’ letters comparing conditions in Germany with those at home. Abakumov’s SMERSH was afraid of a new ‘Decembrist’ mood among officers.

The Soviet authorities were acutely aware that the soldiers of the Russian army which had invaded France in 1814 compared life there with their miserable existence at home. ‘At that time,’ one report explained, ‘the influence of French life was a progressive one because it gave Russian people the opportunity to see the cultural backwardness of Russia, Tsarist oppression and so forth. From this, the Decembrists [who attempted a liberal coup d’état in 1825] drew their conclusions on the need to fight Tsarist autocracy. Nowadays, it is a very different thing. Perhaps some landowner’s estate is richer than some collective farm. From this, a man who is politically backward draws a conclusion in favour of a feudal economy against the socialist variety. This kind of influence is regressive. This is why a merciless fight is necessary against these attitudes.’

Political departments were also horrified by the ‘anti-Soviet comments’ of soldiers complaining that their families were treated badly at home. ‘We don’t believe that life is getting better in the rear,’ one soldier is reported to have said. ‘I’ve seen it with my own eyes.’ They were also aware of how badly they had been treated themselves at the front. Some units in the Red Army came close to mutiny just before the end of the war when an instruction specified that the bodies of dead soldiers were to be stripped even of their undergarments. Only officers could be buried fully clothed. There were also apparently an increasing number of cases of unpopular officers being shot in the back by their own men.

SMERSH arrests for ‘systematic anti-Soviet talk and terroristic intentions’ increased dramatically during the last months of the war and just after the surrender. Even the chief of staff of an NKVD rifle battalion was arrested for having ‘systematically carried out counter-revolutionary propaganda among the troops’. He had ‘slandered leaders of the Party and the Soviet government’ and had praised life in Germany and ‘slandered the Soviet press’. A military tribunal of NKVD troops condemned him to eight years in Gulag labour camps.

The proportion of political arrests in the Red Army doubled from 1944 to 1945, a year when the Soviet Union was effectively at war for little more than four months. In that year of victory, no fewer than 135,056 Red Army soldiers and officers were condemned by military tribunals for ‘counter-revolutionary crimes’. Similarly, the Military Board of the Supreme Court of the USSR condemned 123 senior officers in 1944 and 273 in 1945.

These figures also do not take into account the treatment of Red Army soldiers captured by the Germans. On 11 May 1945, Stalin ordered that each Front should organize camps for holding ex-prisoners of war and Soviet deportees. One hundred camps holding 10,000 people each were planned. Ex-prisoners were to be ‘screened by NKVD, NKGB and SMERSH’. Of the eighty Red Army generals captured by the Wehrmacht, only thirty-seven survived until released by the Red Army. Eleven of them were then arrested by SMERSH and sentenced by tribunals of NKVD forces.

The entire repatriation process was not completed until 1 December 1946. ‘By then 5.5 million people had returned to the USSR, of which 1,833,567 had been prisoners of war.’ Over 1.5 million members of the Red Army captured by the Germans were sent either to the Gulag (339,000 of them), or to labour battalions in Siberia and the far north, which was hardly better. Civilians taken by force to Germany were ‘potential enemies of the state’ to be kept under NKVD watch. They were also forbidden to go within 100 kilometres of Moscow, Leningrad and Kiev, and their families remained suspect. Even as recently as 1998, declaration forms for joining a research institute in Russia still contained a section demanding whether any member of the applicant’s family had been in an ‘enemy prison camp’.

Stalin and his marshals paid little regard to the lives of their soldiers. The casualties for the three Fronts involved in the Berlin operation were extremely high, with 78,291 killed and 274,184 wounded. Russian historians now acknowledge that these needlessly high losses were partly due to the race to get to Berlin before the Western Allies and partly to packing so many armies into the assault on Berlin that they were bombarding each other.

The treatment of those mutilated when fighting for their country was equally heartless. The lucky ones had to queue ‘long hours for artificial limbs which looked like those pieces of wood on which men who lost a leg at Borodino stumped around’. But soon the authorities in the major cities decided that they did not want their streets disfigured by limbless ‘samovars’. So they were rounded up and deported. Many were sent to Belaya Zemlya in the far north as if they too were Gulag prisoners.

Endpapers

German prisoners of war being marched past the Brandenburg Gate on their way to captivity.

AKG London: 3, 6, 7, 8, 9, 13, 17, 22, 24, 26, 28, 34, 37, 40, 42

Alexander Ustinov/Bildarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin: 27

Bildarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin: 16, 21, 39, 43

Bundesarchiv Bild, Koblenz: 2 (146/85/22/20), 47 (183/K0907/310)

Chronos, Berlin: 18, 19, 36

Hilmar Pabel/Bildarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin: 15

Hulton Getty: 46

Imperial War Museum, London: 10 (FLM 3345), 29 (FLM 3351), 30 (FLM 3349), 31 (FLM 3348), 32 (FLM 3346), 33 (FLM 3350)

Jürgen Stumpff/Bildarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin: 45

National Archives and Records Administration, Maryland: 20 (111-SC-205221), 41 (111-SC-205367), 49 (306-NT-885-C2)

PK-Benno Wundshammer/Bildarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin: 1

Private Collection/Novosti/Bridgeman Art Library: 23, 25

Ullstein Bild, Berlin: 4, 5, 11, 12, 14, 38, 44

Victor Tiomin: Endpapers, 35

Every effort has been made to contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be glad to make good in future editions any errors or omissions brought to their attention.

AGMPG Archiv zur Geschichte der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Berlin

AWS Art of War Symposium, ‘From the Vistula to the Oder: Soviet Offensive Operations’, Center for Land Warfare, US Army War College, 1986

BA-B Bundesarchiv, Berlin

BA-MA Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv, Freiburg-im-Breisgau

BLHA Brandenburgisches Landeshauptarchiv, Potsdam

BZG-S Bibliothek für Zeitgeschichte (Sammlung Sterz), Stuttgart

GARF Gosudarstvenny Arkhiv Rossiiskoy Federatsii (State Archive of the Russian Federation), Moscow

HUA-CD Humboldt Universitätsarchiv (Charité Direktion), Berlin

IfZ Institut für Zeitgeschichte, Munich

IMT Trials of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal (Nuremberg)

IVMV Istoriya vtoroi mirovoi voiny, 1939–1945 Vol. x, Moscow, 1979

KA-FU Krigsarkivet (Försvarsstaben Utrikesavdelningen), Stockholm

LA-B Landesarchiv-Berlin

MGFA Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt library, Potsdam

NA National Archives II, College Park, Maryland

PRO Public Record Office, Kew

RGALI Rossiisky Gosudarstvenny Arkhiv Literatury i Iskusstva (Russian State Archive for Literature and the Arts), Moscow

RGASPI[6] Rossiisky Gosudarstvenny Arkhiv Sotsialno-Politikeskoi Istorii (Russian State Archive for Social-Political History), Moscow

RGVA Rossiisky Gosudarstvenny Voenny Arkhiv (Russian State Military Archive), Moscow

RGVA-SAf[7] The ‘Special Archive’ of captured German documents in the RGVA

SHAT Service Historique de l’Armée de Terre, Vincennes

TsAMO Tsentralny Arkhiv Ministerstva Oborony (Central Archive of the Ministry of Defence), Podolsk

TsKhlDK Tsentr Khraneniya i Izucheniya Dokumentalnykh Kollektsy (Centre for the Conservation and Study of Historic Document Collections), Moscow

ViZh Voenno-istoricheskii Zhurnal

VOV Velikaya Otechestvennaya Voina (The Great Patriotic War), Moscow, 1999, Vols. III and IV

Shalva Yakovlevich Abuladze (captain, 8th Guards Army); Gert Becker (Berlin civilian, Steglitz); Richard Beier (newsreader, Grossdeutscher Rundfunk); Nikolai Mikhailovich Belyaev (Komsomol organizer, 150th Rifle Division, 5th Shock Army); Klaus Boeseler (Deutsche Jungvolk, Berlin); Ursula Bube, geb. Eggeling (student, Berlin); Hardi Buhl (civilian, Halbe); Henri Fenet (battalion commander, SS Charlemagne Division); Anatoly Pavlovich Fedoseyev (magnetron and electronics expert sent to Berlin); Edeltraud Flieller (secretary, Siemens); Generalleutnant a.D. Bernd Freiherr Freytag von Loringhoven (military assistant to General Krebs in Fuhrer bunker); Vladimir Samoilovich Gall (captain, 7th Department, 47th Army Headquarters); Hans-Dietrich Genscher (soldier, Twelfth Army); Elsa Holtzer (Berlin civilian); Oberst a.D. Hubertus Freiherr von Humboldt-Dachroeden (Ia, headquarters, Twelfth Army); Svetlana Pavlovna Kazakova, (headquarters, 1st Belo-russian Front); Oberst a.D. Wolfram Kertz (captain, Grossdeutschland Wachtregiment, 309th Berlin Infantry Division); Major General I. F. Klochkov (senior lieutenant, 150th Rifle Division, 5th Shock Army); Ivan Varlamovich Koberidze (captain, 1st Ukrainian Front artillery); Ivan Leontievich Kovalenko (signaller, headquarters 3rd Belorussian Front); Anatoly Kubasov, (3rd Guards Tank Army); R. W. Leon (Intelligence Corps attached to US Ninth Army CIC); Erica Lewin (Rosenstrasse survivor); Generalmajor a.D. Rudolf Lindner (Fahnenjunker Regt 1241, Division Kurmark); Lothar Loewe (Hitler Youth); Hans Oskar baron Löw-enstein de Witt (Rosenstrasse survivor); General Ulrich de Maizière (general staff colonel, OKH); Georgy Malashkia (captain, 9th Tank Corps); Nikolai Andreevich Maltsev (lieutenant, 3rd Guards Tank Army); General Anatoly Grigorievich Merezhko (captain, headquarters 8th Guards Army); Rochus Misch (Oberscharführer, SS Leibstandarte in Führer bunker); Gerda Petersohn (secretary, Lufthansa, Neukölln); Oberst a.D. Günther Reichhelm (chief of staff, Twelfth Army); Frau Helga Retzke (student, Berlin-Buch); Sergei Pavlovich Revin (junior sergeant, 4th Guards Tank Army); Yelena Rzhevskaya (Kogan) (interpreter SMERSH department, 3rd Shock Army); Alexander Saunderson (captain, war crimes investigator and Jowett’s aide at Nuremberg); Erich Schmidtke (Berlin Volkssturm evader); Ehrhardt Severin (civilian); Shota Shurgaya (junior lieutenant, 16th Aviation Army); Wolfgang Steinke (lieutenant, 391st Security Division, Ninth Army); Shota Sulkhanishvili (captain, 3rd Shock Army); Frau Waltraud Süssmilch (schoolgirl); Frau Marlene von Werner (civilian, Wannsee); Magda Wieland (actress); General a.D. Markus Wolf (Ulbricht Group); General a.D. Wust (lieutenant, Luftwaffe training battalion, 309th Berlin Infantry Division, Ninth Army).

There are also three other interviewees whose contributions must remain anonymous.

Alanbrooke, Field Marshal Lord, War Diaries 1939–1945, London, 2001

Albrecht, Günter, and Hartwig, Wolfgang (eds.), Ärzte: Erinnerungen, Erlebnisse, Bekentnisse, Berlin (East), 1982

Altner, Helmut, Berlin Dance of Death, Staplehurst (UK), 2002

Ambrose, Stephen, Eisenhower and Berlin: The Decision to Halt at the Elbe, New York, 1967

Andreas-Friedrich, Ruth, Der Schattenmann: Tagebuchaufzeichnungen 1938–1945, Frankfurt am Main, 1983

– Schauplatz Berlin: Tagebuchaufzeichnungen 1945–1948, Frankfurt am Main, 1984

Annan, Noel, Changing Enemies: The Defeat and Regeneration of Germany, London, 1995

Anonymous, A Woman in Berlin, London, 1955

Antonov, V. S., ‘Poslednie dni voiny’, ViZh, No. 7, July 1987

Arnold, Dietmar, ‘Die Flutung des Berliner S-Bahn Tunnels in den letzten Kriegstagen’, in Nord-Süd-Bahn: Vom Geistertunnel zur City-S-Bahn, Berlin, 1999

Abakumov, Viktor, 16, 96–8, 136, 389, 422

and Ehrenburg, 197, 198

and plot against Zhukov, 407, 426, 427, 428

Adlerhorst HQ, 6, 7, 8, 12, 18, 26

Adlon Hotel, 48, 323, 391

Agranenko, Zakhar, 28, 30, 34, 87, 106, 122, 124, 125

Akhmatova, Anna, 169

Aleksandrov, G. F., 36, 46

and Pravda reply to Ehrenburg, 197–8, 207

Alexander, Field Marshal Sir Harold, 193

Alexanderplatz, 340, 348, 393

Allenstein, 26, 28, 29, 30

Alpine Fortress (National Redoubt), 141, 146, 192, 195–6

Anhalter Bahnhof, 280, 296, 319, 339, 340, 367, 371

Antonov, Gen. A. I., 79, 101, 137, 140, 145, 146, 147, 211, 232–3, 305, 400

Antwerp, 5

Appel, Reinhard, 181, 270

Ardenne, Prof. Baron v., 325

Ardennes offensive, 5–6, 7, 8, 83, 84, 91, 142, 192

Armia Krajowa, 20, 99, 100, 199

Atrocity propaganda, xxxiv, 3–4, 19, 25, 166–7, 169–70

Red Army ‘revenge scores’, 170, 176, 199, 244

Auguste-Viktoria hospital, 224–5

Axmann, Reichsjugendführer Artur, 180–81, 245, 340, 382, 383

Baklanov, Gen. Gleb V., 305

‘Baltic balcony’, see Pomeranian campaign

Barby, 202, 329

Bärenfänger, Maj. Gen. Erich, 384

Baruth, 256, 265, 331, 332, 333, 337

Bastogne, 6

Baumbach, Col., 159

Baumgart, Eberhard, 72, 73, 182

Baur, Hans, 388

Beelitz, 224, 272, 286, 298, 328, 329, 337, 377, 378

Below, Col. Nicolaus v., 8, 188, 254, 262

Bendlerstrasse and ‘Bendlerblock’, 320, 353, 358, 364, 367

Berchtesgaden, 275, 276, 278, 288–9, 290

Berghof, see Berchtesgaden

Beria, Lavrenty, xxxiv, 15, 20, 68, 69, 368, 391, 400

and East Prussia, 29, 36, 419

and atomic bomb, 138, 324–5

and Poles, 199, 420

and NKVD control in Germany, 307–9, 420

and Red Army commanders, 309, 423, 425, 426

Berlin, Gen. Wilhelm, 229

Berlin Philharmonic, 188–9

Bernadotte, Count Folke, 150, 250, 275, 292–3, 341, 342

Bernau, 248, 259, 263

Berzarin, Col. Gen. Nikolai, 64, 69, 149, 150, 220, 226, 236, 256, 389, 400

as commandant of Berlin, 321, 392, 393, 409, 416, 419

Bewilogua, Dr Ludwig, 325

Blumentritt, Gen. Günther, 3, 39, 429

Bogdanov, Gen. S. I., 17, 64, 222, 223, 235, 255, 315, 404

Boldt, Capt. Gerhard, 265, 299, 351

Boiling, Maj. Gen. Alexander, 191

Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 181

Bonin, Col. Bogislaw v., 21, 22

Bormann, Reichsleiter Martin, 19, 22

and Volkssturm, 39

and Himmler, 42, 293

and diary, 75, 191, 251, 341, 350

and ambitions, 154, 343, 361–2

and Eva Braun, 155

and concealing Nazi loot, 155

and Gauleiters, 157, 209, 340

and raising troops, 160

in Führer bunker, 251, 252, 276, 278, 288, 289, 341, 343, 359, 361–2, 364, 369, 379

and attempted escape, 381–2, 383

Bradley, Gen. Omar N., 141, 202, 203–4, 305, 401

Brandt, Dr Karl, 252–3

Bräuer, Gen. Bruno, 236–7, 243

Braun, Eva, 19, 47, 59, 75

and return to Berlin, 155, 252

and Hitler, 253–4, 278, 289, 341, 342–3, 350, 357, 358, 359

and Speer, 288, 290

Braun, Ilse, 48

Braun, Margarete, see Fegelein, Gretl

Bremen, 203

Breslau, 48, 61, 62, 91, 92–3, 230

surrounded, 125–6

siege of, 343

Brezhnev, Leonid, 428

British Army, 192–3

21st Army Group, 140–41, 144

Second Army, 191, 203, 247, 251, 400

1st Airborne Div., 194

Britz, 287, 297, 302

Bromberg, 64, 68

Brooke, Field Marshal Sir Alan, 80, 82, 84, 138, 139, 141–2

Budapest, fighting for, 8

fall of, 82–3

Budyonny, Marshal S. M., 427

Bulganin, Lt. Gen. Nikolai A., 100

Bull, Maj. Gen. Harold, 98, 107

Bunyachenko, Maj. Gen. S. K., 183

Burgdorf, Gen. Wilhelm, 7, 152, 154, 225, 262, 266, 268, 275, 344, 351, 359, 362, 382, 387

Busse, Gen. Theodor, 88, 132, 135, 151, 152, 160

and Oder battle, 183, 228, 237, 242, 243, 263

and withdrawal to Spreewald, 256, 270

and joining Twelfth Army, 285, 329, 330, 331, 337, 362, 378

Cairncross, John, 138

Canaris, Admiral Wilhelm, 181

Casablanca conference, 194

Celle, 191

Charité hospital, 9, 224–5, 382

Charlottenbrücke (Spandau), 384, 385

Charlottenburg, 340, 341, 356, 358, 416

Chemical weapons, 171–2, 376–7

Chernyakhovsky, Col. Gen. Ivan D., 17, 24–5, 26, 27, 33, 49

Christen, Lt. Col. v., 22

Christian, Gerda, 278, 343, 358, 359, 382, 388

Chuikov, Col. Gen. Vasily I., 44, 64, 65, 70, 71, 88, 91, 149, 150, 206, 321

and Oder battle, 216–17, 220, 222, 227, 229, 242

and Berlin fighting, 317–18, 319, 353

and German surrender, 367–8, 386, 392

Churchill, Winston S., 5, 19, 20

and Poland, 69, 77, 80–82, 143

and Yalta, 77–82, 145

and Eisenhower, 84, 141–2, 143, 195

and Berlin, 138, 195

and Dulles, 142

and post-war fears, 143, 364, 400

and surrender negotiations, 194, 341, 400

Clark Kerr, Sir Archibald, 145, 196

Clay, Maj. Gen. Lucius, 309

Combined Chiefs of Staff, 143

Cottbus, 239, 245

Courland encirclement (Army Group North), 12, 89, 152, 180, 241, 402

Courts martial, summary (Standgericht), 130–31, 176

Crimean conference, see Yalta

Dahlem, 232, 324, 326, 384

Danzig, 37, 49, 50, 88, 93, 94

Anatomical Medical Institute, 94–5

defence of, 117, 120–22, 145

Deane, Maj. Gen. John R., 140, 145, 210, 211

Dekanozov, Vladimir, 304

Demmlhuber, SS-Obergpfh., 89

Dempsey, Lt. Gen. Sir Miles, 191

Dessau, 191, 196, 201, 263

Dethleffsen, Maj. Gen., 304

Devers, Gen. Jacob L., 192

Dietrich, SS-Oberstgpfh. Sepp, 5, 90

Djugashvili, Yakov, 136

Dneper flotilla, 297

Döberitz, 201, 267

Doberke, SS-Oberstmbannfh., 294

Dohnanyi, Hans v., 181

Dönitz, Grand Admiral Karl, 50, 83, 154, 159, 188, 201, 250–51, 288, 289, 298, 341, 343, 361, 368, 369, 381, 402

Dresden, bombing of, 83, 146, 192, 211, 244, 325

Dufving, Col. Theodor v., 364, 367, 386

Dulles, Allen, 142, 194, 195

Eberswalde, 246, 267

Edelsheim, Gen. Maximilian Freiherr v., 395, 396

Eden, Anthony, 77

Ehrenburg, Ilya, 25, 28, 36, 169, 194, 195–6, 425

Einsiedel, Heinrich Graf v., 36, 197

Eisenhower, Gen. Dwight, 78

and Rhine crossing, 83–4

and British, 84, 139–40, 141–2, 143

and Soviet Union, 139–40, 141, 143, 145, 147, 194, 210–11, 306, 400

and SCAF-252, 141, 143, 145

and Berlin, 141, 142–4, 191, 195, 202–3, 204, 304

and German surrender, 294, 305, 400

and Zhukov, 425–6

Eismann, Col. Hans Georg, 53, 54, 89, 150, 159, 160, 242

Elbing, 26, 28, 50, 115, 116, 117, 119

Elser, Johann Georg, 181

Elsholz, 377, 378

Erkner, 265

Fedyuninsky, Gen. 1.1., 117

Fegelein, Gretl (Margarete Braun), 19, 59, 75, 253, 290, 341

Fegelein, SS-Gpfh. Hermann, 59, 60, 75, 154–5, 253, 290, 293, 341

Feldgendarmerie, 123, 132, 163, 234–5, 247, 258, 264, 281, 339

Fenet, Henri, 291, 292, 302, 303, 352, 379, 382

Ferch, 353

Ferchland, 396

Förster, Gauleiter Albert, 94, 120

Frankfurt am Main, 152

Frankfurt an der Oder, 27, 70, 71, 150, 183, 228

garrison of, 260, 270, 329

Frederick the Great, 204, 208, 390

Free Germany (Freies Deutschland), see National Committee for a Free Germany

Freisler, Roland, 74–5

Fremde Heere Ost (Foreign Armies East), 6

French First Army, 192, 251, 402

Freytag v. Loringhoven, Maj. Bernd

Freiherr, 12, 42, 58, 59, 151, 152, 153, 277, 278, 299, 350

Friedeburg, Admiral Hans Georg v., 400, 403, 404, 405

Friedrichshain flak tower, 287, 323

Friedrichstrasse, 380

station, 3, 48–9, 382

Fuchs, Dr Klaus, xxxiv, 138

Fuchs, Maj. Gen., 238

Fürstenwalde, 330

Gall, Capt. Vladimir S., 214, 373–6

Gatow, 323

Gdynia (Gotenhafen), 50, 88, 117

defence of, 120–21, 145

Gehlen, Maj. Gen. Reinhard, 6, 7, 26

Genscher, Hans-Dietrich, 83, 286

German Army, see also Waffen SS

ARMY GROUPS

Centre, 11, 92, 241, 244

North, 19, 152

‘A’, 21

‘B’, 190, 200, 201

Vistula, 52, 54, 68, 88, 91, 130, 132, 150, 153, 159–60, 188, 189, 207, 228, 242–3, 256, 267, 291, 320, 337

ARMIES

Second, 26, 49, 50, 88, 90, 115, 119, 402

Fourth, 50, 88

Ninth, 22, 54, 88, 151, 160;

on Oder front, 162, 188, 267;

and defence of Berlin, 179;

and Oder battle, 219, 221, 223, 225, 243, 246;

and withdrawal to south-west, 256, 260, 270, 276;

and breakout to Twelfth Army, 298, 328, 329, 337, 362, 377–9, 395–8;

and Hitler’s fantasies, 304

Twelfth, 201, 202, 263, 276, 284, 291, 298, 304, 328, 329, 353, 377–9, 395–8

Seventeenth, 60, 61, 126

Twenty-First, 400

First Panzer, 132

Third Panzer, 50, 88, 160, 243, 337–8, 400

Fourth Panzer, 125, 208, 239, 241, 329

Fifth Panzer, 5

CORPS

Grossdeutschland, 18, 26, 45, 119, 126

V Corps, 329

XX Corps, 284, 328

XIV Panzer, 126

XLI Panzer, 379

LVI Panzer, 225, 237, 246, 259, 264, 286, 386

CI Corps, 225, 229, 236, 246, 248, 259, 263, 267

DIVISIONS

Grossdeutschland, 11, 121

168th Inf., 129

169th Inf., 62

303rd Döberitz Inf., 73, 163, 209

359th Inf., 126

Ulrich von Hutten, 202, 329

Friedrich Ludwig Fahn, 260

Theodor Körner, 328

Scharnhorst, 263, 264, 286, 328, 329, 395, 398, 403

7th Pz., 243

16th Pz., 17

19th Pz., 18

20th Pz., 127

21St Pz., 232, 330

25th Pz., 18

Kurmark Pz., 235, 246, 330, 362, 377–8

Müncheberg Pz., 286, 303, 319, 339, 340, 384

18th Pzgren., 257, 286, 296, 384

20th Pzgren., 206, 286, 296

391st Security, 208

REGIMENTS

Grossdeutschland Gd Regt, 72, 208, 226, 263

Kurmark Pz., 71

Potsdam, 161–2, 236

11th Training Bde, 223

German Communist Party (KPD), 181, 321, 346, 372, 417–18

Gestapo and SD (Sicherheitsdienst), 42, 56, 154, 155, 283, 386

headquarters Prinz-Albrechtstrasse, 22, 74, 340, 351, 379–80, 382, 386–7

Bundschuh resistance groups, 174

and Kriminalpolizei, 176

and deserters, 260

Hitler’s bodyguards, 341

Giesebrechtstrasse, 345, 346

Goebbels, Reichsminister Joseph, xxxiv, 1, 4, 5, 28

and Volkssturm, 39

as Gauleiter and Reich Commissar for Defence, 57, 58, 133, 245, 261, 268

as Minister of Propaganda, 70, 100, 133, 135, 175, 180, 224, 229, 250, 253, 261, 291, 339, 340

and Cossacks, 73–4

and Dresden, 83

and Lauban, 126–7

and Berlin, 139, 177, 245, 347

and Kamarilla rivalries, 154, 289

and death of Roosevelt, 204

in Führer bunker, 276, 288, 343, 359, 361, 362, 364

and surrender, 368, 370, 379

and suicide, 380, 381, 390

Goebbels, Magda, 276, 278, 289–90, 343, 359, 361, 380, 381, 390

Goebbels children, 278, 279, 344, 357, 361, 380–81, 398

Gordov, Gen. V. N., 245, 330–31

Goring, Reichsmarschall Hermann, 8, 12, 42, 43, 90, 154, 201, 236, 356

and destruction of Karinhall, 249–50

and Hitler, 251, 289, 350

Görlitz, 126, 244

Goya hospital ship, sinking of, 188

Greim, Col. Gen. Robert Ritter v., 322, 342

Greiser, Gauleiter Arthur, 63, 64, 68, 158

Grishin, Maj., 373–6

Grossdeutscher Rundfunk, 282, 384, 385, 416–17, 418

Grossman, Vasily, 14, 23, 32, 44, 64, 65, 66, 67, 86, 105, 108, 116, 273

and Berlin, 295, 301, 321, 393, 394, 407, 413

and Black Book, 425

Groves, Maj. Gen. Leslie, 138

Grunewald, 322, 324

Guben, 208

Guderian, Col. Gen. Heinz, 6, 7, 8, 12–13, 18, 19, 43, 50, 58, 60

rows with Hitler, 89–90, 149–52, 275

and resignation of Himmler, 131–2

and National Socialist Party, 134–5

and Himmler on peace negotiations, 150

sacking of, 152–3

Gulag

transfer of prisoners to Red Army, 165–6

transfer of Poles to army, 199

Günsche, Otto, 262, 358, 359, 389

Gusakovsky, Col. I. I., 18, 21, 43, 69

Haase, Prof. Werner, 391

Hahn, Dr Otto, 325

Halbe, 331, 332, 333, 334, 335, 337, 378

Haider, Col. Gen. Franz, 177

Hamburg, 141, 247, 364, 381, 384

Hanke, Gauleiter Karl, 92, 93, 125, 343

Hanover, 191

Harpe, Col. Gen. Josef, 12, 21, 61, 249–51

Harriman, Averell, 101, 145, 194, 211

Hase, Col. Gen. Paul v., 346

Hassleben (Army Group Vistula HQ), 130, 131, 132, 158, 159, 160, 338

Heerstrasse, 353, 356

Heiligenbeil Kessel, 50, 88, 93

Heilstätten, 224, 272, 298, 328

Heinrici, Col. Gen. Gotthardt, 132, 158, 180, 183, 188, 207

and Oder battle, 218–19, 223, 225, 228, 241, 256

and defence of Berlin, 245, 248, 267, 268, 291, 337, 338

Heisenberg, Prof. Werner, 325

Hela, port of, 121

Hermannplatz, 262, 282, 302

Heydrich, SS-Obergpfh. Reinhard, 346

Hildebrandt, Gauleiter, 159

Himmler, Ernst, 384, 385

Himmler, Heinrich, 6, 7, 42

and death marches, 38

and Volkssturm, 39

and Army Group Vistula, 52, 53–4, 68, 88–9, 90, 130, 131–2

and peace negotiations, 150, 175, 250, 275, 290, 292, 293–4, 341, 342, 350, 368

and SS divisions in Hungary, 151, 293

and rivalries, 154, 155, 289, 361

and orders for total warfare, 174, 240

and Vlasov, 182

and Hitler, 250–51, 293

and battle for Berlin, 275, 341

in north Germany, 361

Hitler, Adolf, xxxiii, xxxiv, 225

and Ardennes offensive, 5, 6, 7, 8

and Vistula offensive, 7, 8, 11, 12, 13, 15, 18, 22

and loss of Warsaw, 21, 22

and East Prussia, 26, 50

and Volkssturm, 39

and refugees, 52

and German Army, 54, 58, 89, 91, 116, 135, 142, 149, 151

withdrawal from public view, 58

last broadcast, 67

and defence of Berlin, 74, 177

and Eva Braun, 75, 253–4, 278, 289, 342–3

and bombing of Dresden, 83

and SS divisions in Hungary, 151

and self-identification with German people, 153, 276

and ‘Nero Order’, 155–8, 202

and Wehrmachthelferinnenkorps, 181

and Oder front, 188, 189, 241

and death of Roosevelt, 204

and birthday, 249–52

and decision to stay in Berlin, 251, 275, 288–9

and battle of Berlin, 266, 267, 268

and Frederick the Great, 268, 275

and Ninth and Twelfth Armies, 285, 288, 295, 330, 331

and Speer, 288, 290

and fantasies of rescue, 295, 304, 322, 331, 340, 350

and breakout plans, 320

and last days in Reich Chancellery, 322, 341, 357

remains of, 399, 400, 431

Hitler Youth, and Panzerjagd units, 74

and defence of Berlin, 180, 189, 265, 270, 272, 275–6, 281, 301, 316, 340, 346, 356, 384

‘Hitler Youth Division’, 180–81

and Oder battle, 235, 245, 247, 257, 338

‘Hiwis’, 112–14, 367, 396–7

Hodges, Lt. Gen. Courtney H., 141, 191

Hohenlychen, 131–2, 292, 338

Hohenschönhausen, 265

Hohenzollerndamm, HQ of Berlin Defence Area, 224, 261, 301, 320

Holste, Lt. Gen., 379

Hölz, Maj. Gen. Artur, 179

Hossbach, Gen. Friedrich, 50

Humboldt-Dachroeden, Col. Hubertus Freiherr v., 21, 22, 201, 285, 397

Humboldthain flak tower, 287, 323

Irwin, Virginia, 305–7

Japan, war against, 78, 82, 139, 211

Jews and other concentration camp prisoners, persecution and murder of, 38, 49

Warsaw ghetto, 23

death marches, 38, 155

discovery of Auschwitz, 45–6

Lódź ghetto, 63–4

Stutthof, 94–5, 122

Lauenburg, 117

Nikolayev and Odessa, 169

forced to rework US incendiary bombs, 174

Belsen, 191

massacres in Leipzig area, 191–2

Eisenhower’s reactions and caring for prisoners, 203

Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg, 274, 290

Schulstrasse transit camp, 294–5

in Berlin, 346–7, 393, 419

Ravensbrück, 363

and view of Wermacht generals, 429

Jodl, Col. Gen. Alfred, 7, 13, 83, 152, 201, 250, 275, 276, 288, 295, 331, 338, 341, 350, 402

Juhlin-Dannfel, Maj. C. H., 132, 148, 149, 173, 181

July Plot (20 July 1944), 7, 8, 58, 153, 154, 198, 320, 346, 386

executions, 57, 74, 75, 181

Jung, Prof. Dr Gerhard, 374–7, 406

Junge, Gertrud (Traudl), 252, 278, 343, 344, 358, 359, 361, 382, 388

Jüterbog, 92, 200, 238, 256

Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics, Dahlem, 139, 210, 232, 324–5

Kaltenbrunner, SS-Gpfh. Dr Ernst, 22, 42, 75, 160, 194, 250, 251, 346

Kardorff, Ursula v., 2, 74, 205, 250, 410, 411, 414, 415

Karlshorst, 179, 269–70, 404, 405, 428

Karlsruhe, 192

Karpov, Gen. V. V., 61

Kassel, 195

Katowice, 22, 60

Katukov, Col. Gen. M. I., 64, 116, 118, 121, 222, 223, 229, 235, 255, 265, 296, 297

Katyn massacre, 99

Kazakov, Col. Gen. V. I., 216–17, 262, 280

Kee, Robert, 41

Keitel, Field Marshal Wilhelm, 6, 7, 12, 52, 83, 90, 127, 152, 250, 275, 276, 284–5, 288, 295, 337, 338, 357, 403, 404, 405

Kempka, Erich, 358

Khrulev, Col. Gen. A. V., 324

Khrushchev, Nikita, 428

Kiel, 361, 364

Kielce, 17, 18

Kienitz, 69, 70

Kinzel, Lt. Gen. Eberhardt, 158, 179, 400

Kissel, Gen. Hans, 40

Klochkov, Capt., 226

Knef, Hildegard, 1, 311

Knesebeck, Lt. Col. von dem, 22

Koblenz, 140

Koch, Dr Edgar, 374–7

Koch, Gauleiter Erich, 27, 50, 64, 68, 75, 187

Köhler, Gen. Carl-Erik, 284

Kolberg, 116, 124

Koller, Gen. Karl, 267, 275, 289

Komsomol, Central Committee and rape of Soviet women, 108–9, 365

Konev, Marshal Ivan, 16, 17, 41, 44, 45

in Silesia, 60, 125–6, 129–30, 132

and Berlin operation, 146–7, 165, 206, 229, 230, 234, 238, 239, 244, 255–6, 265, 271, 295, 296, 297, 305, 329, 330, 333, 362, 401

Königsberg, 24, 25, 28, 37, 50, 75, 86, 87, 88, 91, 93, 149, 174

fall of, 187–8, 235

Königsplatz, 355, 356

Königswusterhausen, 261

Kopelev, Lev, 28, 30, 35

Köpenick, 269, 297

Köslin, 125

Kosmodemyanskaya, Zoya, 212–13

Kraków, 44, 60, 112

Krampnitz, 266, 276

Krasnaya Zvezda (Red Star), 25, 194, 196–8

Krasovsky, Gen. S. A., 230

Krebs, Gen. Hans, 91, 150, 152

appointed Chief of General Staff, 153

and Bormann’s circle, 154

and Oder front, 188, 225

and Hitler, 250

and threat to Zossen, 265–6

and battle for Berlin, 268, 275, 277, 286, 299, 304, 322, 337, 340, 350, 351, 359, 362, 364

and surrender, 367, 368, 369, 370

and suicide, 382, 387

Kriegsmarine, 120–21, 149, 343, 402

Sprengboote, 159

scratch troops, 159–60, 298, 322

SHIPS

Admiral Hipper, 51

Admiral Scheer, 88

Leipzig, 120

Lützow, 88

Prinz Eugen, 117, 120

Schlesien, 120

Krüger, Elsa, 278

Krukenberg, SS-Brigfh. Gustav, 116, 291–3, 299, 301, 303, 304, 322, 352, 370

and blowing up S-Bahn tunnel, 370–72, 382, 383, 384

Kryukov, Gen. Vladimir, 116, 427–8

Kummersdorf, 333, 362, 377

Kunz, Dr Helmuth, 361, 380, 381, 391

Kurchatov, Prof. Igor, 138, 325

Kurfürstendamm, 339, 345

Küstrin, 69, 70, 132, 142, 149, 152, 185, 206, 207, 219, 220

Kuznetsov, Gen. V. I., 384

Lammerding, SS-Brigfh., 54, 131

Landsberg, 273

Lange, Franz, 386, 387

Lange, Lt. Col. Heiner, 238

Lauban, 126

Lauenburg, 117, 122, 247

Lasch, Gen. Otto, 87

Lattre de Tassigny, Gen. Jean de, 192, 404

Laue, Dr Max v., 325

League of German Officers (BDO), 69, 198

Leba, 125

Leipzig, 146, 191, 203

Lelyushenko, Gen. D. D., 17, 62, 126, 229, 232, 245, 256, 265, 298

Lend-Lease, 66

Leningrad, 117

Lichtenberg, 416

Lichtenrade, 271

Lichterfelde, 416

Linge, Heinz, 359

Lódź, 44, 64

Loewe, Lothar, 2

Lohbeck, Col., 179

Lorenz, Heinz, 299, 341–2

Lötzen, 50

Löwenstein de Witt, Hans Oskar Baron, 294–5

Lübben, 147, 232, 296

Lübeck, 137, 141, 292, 294, 400

‘Lublin government’, 20, 81

Luchinsky, Gen. A. A., 298, 318, 333

Luckenwalde, 256, 306

Luftwaffe, 131, 249–50, 430

and attacks on Oder bridges, 133, 159, 237–8

paratroopers, 159

scratch troops, 159–60, 323

and Oder battle, 237–8, 243

and Elbe front, 263

and battle for Berlin, 266, 267, 287, 342

1st Flak Division, 178–9

9th Parachute Division, 159, 223, 236, 243, 246–7, 286, 385, 388

25th Parachute Regiment, 92, 117

27th Parachute Regiment, 218, 223, 237

Leonidas squadron, 238

Luttwitz, Gen. Smilo Freiherr v., 22

Lvov, 100

Magdeburg, 190, 196, 202, 431

Magnuszew bridgehead, 17

Mahlsdorf, 269

MaiziAre, Col. Ulrich de, 89, 153, 203, 243, 276, 277

Makhnev, Col. Gen., 324, 325

Malchow, 265

Malenkov, G. M., 108, 137, 325

Malinin, Gen. M. S., 230

Manhattan Project, xxxiv, 78, 138, 324

Mannheim, 195

Manteuffel, Gen. Hasso v., 5, 160, 248, 304, 337, 338, 400

Manzialy, Constanze, 278, 358, 382, 388

Marienburg, 49, 115, 117

Mariendorf, 296

Marshall, Gen. George C., 78, 79, 80, 142, 195, 364

Masur, Norbert, 250

Matrosov, Aleksandr, 166

Memel, 121

Merezhko, Capt. Anatoly, 216

Meseritz line, 63, 66, 68

Meshik, Gen. P. Ya., 44–5, 61, 308

Misch, Rochus, 359, 360

Moabit, 347

Mobilization of German civilians, 106–7, 185

Model, Field Marshal, 142–3, 156, 190, 200, 201, 283

Mohnke, SS-Bdefh., 287, 322, 357, 366, 370, 379, 382, 383, 388, 389

Molotov, Vyacheslav, 77, 137, 143

Montgomery, Field Marshal Sir Bernard, 84, 140, 141, 146, 195

and looting, 193

and surrender, 400–401

Morell, Dr Theodor, 252, 275, 277, 359

Müller, SS-Gpfh. Heinrich, 22, 342

Müllrose, 270

Mummert, Maj. Gen. Werner, 339

Müncheberg, 228, 243, 246, 254, 256, 259

Munich, 350, 402

Murphy, Robert, 84–5, 409

Mussolini, Benito, 98, 357

National Committee for a Free Germany, 36, 69, 181, 197, 363

National Redoubt, see Alpine Fortress

National Socialist Party, 131, 134

and Freikorps Adolf Hitler, 134–5, 160

and obsession with 1918, 174–5, 428

and Werwolf, 175

and defence of Berlin, 178–9, 356

and departure of senior officials, 251, 252, 261

and legacy, 430

Nauen, 274, 290, 384

Nehring, Gen. Walther, 45, 62

Neisse, German Army executions in, 127

Nemmersdorf, 28, 118

‘Nero Order’, 155–8, 202

Neuhardenberg, 222, 223, 242, 243, 244

Neukölln, 282, 297, 303, 312–13, 323, 352

Neustrelitz, 291, 293

Neustroev, Capt., 349, 354, 365, 372

NKVD, 16, 20, 421–2

rear area troops, 29, 30, 36, 38, 45, 61, 82, 97, 98–100, 102–6, 113, 199, 207, 260, 273, 308, 415, 419–20

postal censorship, 34

at Yalta, 78

prisoners, 166, 185, 422

and Soviet prisoners of war, 167–8, 402

and Red Army discipline, 168, 184, 273

and deserters, 184

arrest of Polish political leaders, 195

and arrests for contacts with foreigners, 307

commanders, 308–9, 420

and Operation Borodino, 324–5

and chemical weapons, 377

NKVD DIVISIONS

57th Rifle Division, 96–7

NKVD REGIMENTS

105th Frontier Guards, 308

127th Frontier Guards, 102

157th Frontier Guards, 308

217th Frontier Guards, 107

333rd Frontier Guards, 308

108th Special Communications Company, 165

Novikov, Marshal A. A., 298

Oderbruch (Oder flood plain), 70, 71, 72, 132, 161, 207, 216, 225–6, 232, 236, 248

Office of Strategic Services (OSS), 142

Ohlau bridgehead, 61, 125, 129

OKH HQ Zossen, 7, 12, 13, 89, 151

bombing raid on, 150–51, 152, 153, 200

and Red Army offensive, 225, 240, 241, 243, 265–7

OKW HQ, 241, 304

Oldershausen, Libussa von, 118–19, 123

Operation Barbarossa, 91, 98, 138, 147, 301, 304

Operation Borodino, xxxiv, 138, 324–6, 406

Operation North Wind, 8

Operation Plunder, 192

Operation Seraglio, 276–7

Operation Sonnenwende, 90–91, 125, 200

Oppeln, 60, 62, 112, 127, 129

Oranienburg, 194, 269, 274, 292

Osnabruck, 195

Oster, Maj. Gen. Hans, 181

Ostermayr, Herta, 252, 254, 278

Pachur, Capt., 293

Papen, Franz v., 364

Patton, Gen. George S. Jnr, 141, 146, 152, 191, 325–6, 364

Paulus, Field Marshal Friedrich, 68, 69

Pehrsson, SS-Hauptstfh., 302, 323

Perkhorovich, Lt. Gen. F. I., 373, 375, 376

Petersohn, Gerda, 282, 312–13

Pichelsdorf bridge, 356

Pieck, Wilhelm, 417

Pillau, 37, 50, 88, 93

Plön, 361

Plötzensee, 246

Poland, 65, 66

Soviet policy towards, 20, 69, 77, 80–82, 84, 99–101, 185, 420

NKVD arrest of Polish leaders, 195, 401

political unrest in Polish formations, 199–200

Pomeranian and West Prussian campaign, 87, 89, 90, 91–2, 115–22, 165

Popov, Col. Gen., 184

Potsdam

bombing of, 204–5, 224

children’s clinic, 224, 272, 298, 328

and Berlin operation, 256, 258, 266, 268, 276, 285, 294, 329, 353, 377

Potsdamerplatz, 339, 342, 347

Poznan (Posen), 44, 64, 65, 66, 67, 91–2, 158, 216, 317

Prenzlauerberg, 323, 388

Prisoners

Allied, 85, 86, 295

German, 106, 283

Soviet civilians, 107–12, 165–6, 273, 295, 395, 423–4

French, 179, 192, 269, 271, 272, 273, 295, 314, 346

Prisoners of war, Soviet, 41, 85–6, 110–12, 113, 166, 272, 423, 424, 429

Prague, 225, 280, 297, 340, 364, 401, 402

Propaganda Ministry, 56

Prützmann, SS-Obergpfh. Hans, 173–4, 175

Pukhov, Gen. N. P., 230

Pulawy bridgehead, 17, 18

Puttkamer, Jesco Freiherr v., 47, 55, 118–19

Puttkamer, Admiral v., 276–7

Radom, 60

Rape by Red Army

in East Prussia, 28–32, 118, 188, 326, 410

of Soviet women, 65, 67, 107–9

and sack of Schwerin, 67

abortion after, 157–8, 412

Ehrenburg on, 197

in Berlin, 274, 295, 300, 312–13, 314, 326–7, 345–6, 409–12, 414, 418

Ratibor, 60, 129, 130, 132

Rattenhuber, Hans, 388, 389

Ravensbrück concentration camp, 363

Red Army, 11, 13–14

and SMERSH, 128, 421–4

and hygeine, 128–9

and discipline, 184–5, 346, 413

and tactics in Berlin street-fighting, 316–18

FRONTS

1st Belorussian, 15, 17, 44, 63, 64, 67–8, 87, 93, 111, 115, 145, 147, 184, 206, 210, 216–23;

and battle for Berlin, 268, 283, 296, 330, 369, 375, 399

2nd Belorussian, 15, 25, 26, 28, 35, 36, 87, 100, 102–3, 104, 106, 115, 145, 206, 248, 304, 337–8, 363

3rd Belorussian, 17, 24, 25, 28, 33, 50, 97

1st Ukrainian, 12, 41, 44, 60, 61;

in Silesia, 108, 110, 111, 125–30, 145, 147, 165, 167, 169;

and Neisse-Berlin operation, 206, 207, 225, 230–32, 256, 296, 330, 340

3rd Ukrainian, 82–3

4th Ukrainian, 129

ARMIES

3rd Guards, 239, 245, 271, 330

5th Guards, 61, 232, 238, 239, 245, 307

8th Guards, 17, 44, 65, 66, 67, 71, 87, 149, 150, 151, 163, 206, 210, 220, 222, 227, 242, 246;

and assault on Berlin, 265, 269, 271, 287, 297, 303, 316, 319, 324, 339, 340, 352, 353, 356, 357, 367, 370, 372

11th Guards, 24, 187

2nd Shock, 117

3rd Shock, 64, 116, 172, 184, 211, 215, 217, 219, 226, 235, 236, 242, 243, 255, 260, 265, 269, 280, 283, 300, 301, 317, 323, 342, 356;

and assault on Reichstag, 347, 348, 354–6, 357, 365–6, 370, 384, 389

5th Shock, 17, 44, 69, 149, 167, 220, 222, 226, 227, 242, 243, 244, 256, 265, 269, 287, 297, 300, 339–40, 370, 388, 389

3rd Army, 34, 105, 303, 323, 330

13th Army, 230, 238, 245

19th Army, 29, 30, 117

21st Army, 60, 129, 164

28th Army, 245, 298, 318, 330, 340

33rd Army, 183, 219, 220, 228, 242, 330

39th Army, 24

43rd Army, 24, 29, 187

47th Army, 18, 21, 64, 220, 236, 242, 259, 265, 269, 271, 323, 373–6, 402

48th Army, 50

49th Army, 184

52nd Army, 232, 244, 245

59th Army, 60, 129

60th Army, 45, 60, 129–30

61st Army, 64, 220, 242

69th Army, 186, 220, 225, 242, 330

70th Army, 184

1st Polish, 18, 64, 116, 220, 242

2nd Polish, 232, 245

1st Guards Tank, 18, 44, 64, 66, 116, 117, 118, 206, 220, 235, 242, 246, 255;

and Berlin operation, 265, 269, 287, 296, 303, 316, 319, 372

2nd Guards Tank, 17, 18, 44, 91, 116, 220, 235, 242, 255, 259, 265, 269, 299, 315, 323, 356, 384, 404

3rd Guards Tank, 17, 60, 108, 126, 232, 239, 241, 245, 255–6, 260, 270, 271, 296;

storms Teltow Canal, 296–7, 303;

in Berlin fighting, 318, 319, 324

4th Guards Tank, 17, 62, 126, 130, 186, 213, 232, 239, 241, 256, 260, 265, 271, 284, 298, 323, 378

5th Guards Tank, 26, 37, 305

CORPS

26th Guards Rifle, 226

28th Guards Rifle, 226

32nd Guards Rifle, 307

50th Guards Rifle, 331

79th Guards Rifle, 372

96th Guards Rifle, 331

3rd Rifle, 172

9th Rifle, 388

79th Rifle, 255

125th Rifle, 259

1st Guards Cavalry, 307

2nd Guards Cavalry, 115, 116, 330

3rd Guards Cavalry, 26, 115

4th Guards Tank, 307

6th Guards Tank, 105, 271

7th Guards Tank, 271

5th Guards Mechanized, 272, 328

11th Tank, 235

25th Tank, 401

DIVISIONS

12th Guards Rifle, 220

27th Guards Rifle, 227

48th Guards Rifle, 296

50th Guards Rifle, 333

54th Guards Rifle, 331

58th Guards Rifle, 305

89th Guards Rifle, 69

94th Guards Rifle, 167

61st Rifle, 340

107th Rifle, 45

150th Rifle, 347, 348, 349, 354, 355, 365

171st Rifle, 348, 349, 356

200th Rifle, 184

230th Rifle, 73

248th Rifle, 226, 227, 243

266th Rifle, 227

301st Rifle, 227, 340, 351

RED ARMY AVIATION

2nd Air Army, 230, 298, 331, 334

16th Air Army, 221, 298, 334

18th Air Army, 221, 298, 334

Refior, Col. Hans, 177, 178, 179, 180, 224, 286, 301, 320, 364, 367

Refugees

from East Prussia, 36, 37, 47–8, 50, 93

treks, 46–7

statistics, 48

arrival in Berlin, 48–9

by sea, 50, 88, 93, 94, 188

treatment by Nazi authorities, 52, 75, 76

in Brandenburg, 53, 256, 258, 264, 337, 395, 396, 397, 398

from Breslau and Silesia, 62–3, 83

Stalin’s satisfaction, 82, 93

in Pomerania, 117–19

Nazi Party and abortions for rape victims, 157–8

Reich Labour Service (RAD), 70, 260, 284, 287n, 303, 328

Reichenau, Field Marshal Walter v., 276

Reichhelm, Col. Günther, 200, 201, 284, 285, 378, 379, 397

Reichsbank, 406

Reichssportsfeld and Olympic Stadium, 180, 293, 340, 384, 391

Reichstag, xxxiii, 210, 319, 324, 347, 348, 349, 350

assault on, 354–6, 365–6, 372, 388, 394,. 426

Reinecke, Pastor, 386, 387

Reinhardt, Col. Gen. Hans, 12, 50

Reinickendorf, 180, 299

Reitsch, Hanna, 322, 342

Reitwein Spur, 71, 163, 216–17, 222, 379

Remagen, Rhine bridge at, 84, 137, 140, 141, 151, 179

Rettich, Capt. Peter, 264–5, 286, 328, 395, 398

Reymann, Lt. Gen. Helmuth, 158, 176–8, 179, 180, 224, 245, 261, 268, 353, 377

Ribbentrop, Reichsminister Joachim v., 83, 190, 237, 250, 251, 289, 304, 340

ROA (Russian Liberation Army), 73–4, 85, 112, 113, 401, 402

1st Division, 182–3

Rodimtsev, Gen. A. I., 307

Rogatin, Lt. Gen., 104

Rokossovsky, Marshal K. K., 15, 16, 17, 25, 26, 28

Order No. 006, 30, 49, 50, 87

SMERSH investigation, 100, 106

and Pomeranian campaign, 115, 117, 145

and Berlin operation, 186, 206, 229, 242, 248, 249, 304, 337–8, 400

and victory parade, 426, 427

Rommel, Field Marshal Erwin, 7

Roosevelt, President Franklin D., 5

and Yalta, 77–82, 143

and Stalin, 84–5, 145, 195

and surrender negotiations, 194, 195

mortally ill, 196

death of, 204, 208

Rosly, Gen. I. P., 340

Rosslau (Twelfth Army HQ), 201

Rudel, Col. Hans-Ulrich, 9

Rüdersdorf, 258, 265

Ruhr encirclement, 138, 142, 156, 190, 200, 201

Rundstedt, Field Marshal Gerd v., 42

Rusakov, Maj. Gen. Vladimir, 305

Ruslanova, Lydia, 116, 428

Russian Liberation Army, see ROA

Rybalko, Col. Gen. P. S., 17, 60, 61, 229, 232, 239, 245, 255, 256, 296, 319, 324, 326

Rzhevskaya, Yelena, 360, 363, 370, 390, 391, 399, 400, 403, 426, 431

Sachsenhausen, 181, 274, 325

Salzburg, 155, 192, 251, 275

Samland Peninsula, 88

Sandomierz bridgehead, 16

Saucken, Gen. Dietrich v., 45, 62, 119–20, 122, 402

Schaub, Julius, 277

Schellenberg, SS-Gpfh. Walter, 275, 293–4, 346

Schlesicher Bahnhof, 280

Schmidtke, Erich, 3, 180

Schmundt, Maj. Gen. Rudolf, 7

Schneidemühl, 53, 55, 64, 91

Schönhausen, 396, 397, 398, 403

Schörner, Field Marshal Ferdinand, 52, 61, 92, 93, 126, 127, 225, 241, 244–5, 304, 344, 350, 402

Schwägermann, Günther, 381

Schwedt, 248

Schwerin, sack of, 67

Sebelev, Col. Pyotr, 185–6, 226, 315–16

Seelow, 222, 229, 243, 246, 254

Seelow Heights, 70, 71, 165, 209, 216, 222, 223, 225, 228, 229, 234, 241, 243, 256, 273

Seidemann, Gen., 12

Selivanovsky, Gen., 420

Semyonov, Gen. Vladimir Semyonovich, 418

Serov, Gen. I. A., 64, 99–100, 107

and Polish forces, 199, 200

and Berlin, 307, 308, 309

and uranium, 325–6

and surrender, 404, 405

and aftermath, 406, 415, 420

Seydlitz-Kurzbach, Gen. Walther v., 68, 69, 198

‘Seydlitz-truppen’ (German ‘anti-fascists’), 283, 337

Shatilov, Maj. Gen. V. M., 347, 365

Shcheglov, Dmitri, 34, 37

Shtemenko, Gen. S. M., 146

Siegessäule column, 340, 395

Siemensstadt, 269, 323

Simonov, Konstantin, 14, 212, 213, 336, 391–2, 403, 404, 408

Simpson, Gen. William H., 141, 190, 191, 203, 204, 396

Skorzeny, SS-Stbnfh. Otto, 174, 175

SMERSH, 15, 16, 28, 33, 35, 96, 98, 102–3, 416–17

and Red Army, 128, 185, 207, 228, 422, 423

and Yakov Djugashvili, 136

and screening of prisoners of war, 166, 185, 402

and Polish formations, 199–200

and Werwolf, 260, 415–16

and hunting German officers, 300, 415–16

and Reich Chancellery and death of Hitler, 360, 380, 389, 390, 391, 398, 399

and post-war, 422, 423

Sokolovsky, Gen. V. D., 368, 369, 403

Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, 34, 35, 112

Spaatz, Gen. Carl, 403, 404

Spandau, 323, 356, 384, 385

citadel of, 323, 373–7

Speer, Albert, xxxiii, 9, 10, 60, 171, 431

and Hitler, 149, 157, 250, 251

and ‘Nero Order’, 156–8

and defence of Berlin, 180, 245

and Berlin Philharmonic, 188–9

and return to Berlin, 288–90

on Himmler, 293

and Germania, 355

Spremberg, 239, 245

SS

camp guards, 86, 155

Einsatzgruppen, 149

execution of political prisoners, 181

massacres in Leipzig area, 191–2

split in leadership over continuing the war, 194

Stadtmitte U-Bahn station, 371

Stalin, Joseph, V., xxxiv, 5, 15, 17, 19, 20, 29, 32, 34, 111, 413

and East Prussia, 28, 37

and Holocaust, 38, 46

and Red Army commanders, 63, 87, 127, 136, 309, 407, 423

and Yalta, 77–82, 87, 137, 143, 420

and Poland, 77, 80–82, 99–101, 143, 195, 295–6, 420

and rear areas, 107

summons Zhukov to Moscow, 136–7

and Soviet prisoners of war, 137, 166, 423

and race for Berlin, 137, 138–9, 142–5, 193–4, 210–11, 229, 232, 234, 240, 242, 265, 296, 307, 354

and Western Allies, 142, 144, 145–6, 147, 193–4, 195, 210–11, 232–3, 263, 295, 304, 307, 341, 354, 399

and change of policy on revenge, 197–8

and Oder Neisse battles, 222, 229–30, 232, 239–40, 242, 248

and assault on Berlin, 265, 296, 354, 365

and death of Hitler, 364, 369, 389, 390, 399, 400

and surrender, 368, 369, 402, 406

and fear of Zhukov, 407, 425–6, 427

and post-war Soviet Union, 422

Stalin, Col. Vasily, 427

Stalingrad, battle of, xxxiii, 1, 65, 69, 87–8, 91, 97, 138, 178, 216, 230, 316, 317, 392

Stargard tank battle, 90–91, 125

State Defence Committee, 137, 166, 325

Stauffenberg, Col. Claus Schenk Graf v., 7, 320

Stavka, 15, 25, 26, 78, 79, 80, 83, 86, 137, 144, 146, 147, 165, 211

and Oder battle, 220, 222, 229, 232, 242

and battle for Berlin, 256, 298, 390, 391

and surrender, 304, 369, 400

Steglitz, 416

Steinau bridgehead, 62, 125

Steiner, SS-Obergpfh. Felix, 89, 241, 267, 268, 269, 275, 298, 341

Stendal, 396

Stettinius, Edward R. Jnr, 401

Stolp, 47, 55, 117, 118

Strausberg, 256, 257, 260

Strecker, Gen. Karl, 68

Striegau, 126–7, 128

Stumpfegger, Dr Ludwig, 252, 357, 380, 381, 383

Stumpff, Col. Gen., 404, 405

Stürz, Gauleiter, 159

Stuttgart, 192

Sulkhanishvili, Capt. Shota, 214–15, 219, 235, 389

Supreme Headquarters Allied

Expeditionary Force Europe

(SHAEF), 146, 195–6, 202, 304, 305, 402, 429

Susloparov, Maj. Gen. Ivan, 402

Swedish diplomats and embassy, 132, 148, 173, 181, 302

Swiss Red Cross, 298, 329

Tangermünde, 191, 202, 396

Tedder, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur, 19, 20, 98, 140, 141, 142, 143, 403, 404, 405

Tegel, 385

Telegin, Lt. Gen. K. F., 216–17, 390

Tempelhof, 283, 287, 302, 303, 319, 321, 367, 403, 417

Teupitz, 330, 336

Thiessen, Prof. Peter, 325

Tiergarten, 282, 294, 319, 323, 340, 342, 356, 372, 384, 394, 395

Tilsit, 24

Tippelskirch, Gen. Kurt v., 148, 173, 400

Tolbukhin, Marshal F. I., 82–3

Torgau, 305, 306, 307, 374

Treptow, 297, 303, 324

Treuenbrietzen, 286, 298, 328

Truman, President Harry S., 196, 295, 305, 341, 364

Tsanava, Gen. L. F., 102, 308

Tully, Andrew, 305–7

Ulbricht, Walter, 418

Unter den Linden, 304

UPA (Ukrainian nationalist partisans), 100

US Air Force, 100–101, 403

and Red Army aviation incidents, 142, 296

on Elbe front, 202, 263, 285

last raids on Berlin, 249, 262

US Army

6th Army Group, 192

12th Army Group, 141

ARMIES

First, 5, 137, 140, 141, 191, 203

Third, 141, 146, 191, 200, 203, 325, 364

Seventh, 192

Ninth, 141, 190, 200, 202, 203, 204, 396, 397

DIVISIONS

82nd Airborne, 194, 291

101st Airborne, 194, 291

69th Infantry, 305

83rd Infantry, 190–91, 202, 203

84th Infantry, 191

102nd Infantry, 191

2nd Armored, 190, 203

5th Armored, 191, 202

Vadis, Lt. Gen. Aleksandr, 390, 391, 399

Vasilevsky, Marshal Aleksandr, 33, 188

Vienna, 189, 195, 251

Vishnevsky, Vsevolod, 367, 368

Vistula offensive, 7, 8, 10, 12–13, 15, 16–18, 19, 20, 84, 165

Vlasienko, Sergeant, 212

Vlasov, Gen. Andrey, 72, 182–3, 297, 401, 402

Vlasovtsy, see ROA Volkssturm

in East Prussia, 24, 27, 37, 98–9, 102, 103, 175

recruitment and organization, 39, 40

in Silesia, 41, 98–9, 175

guarding and execution of camp prisoners, 41, 155, 191–2

in Pomerania, 55

in Berlin and Brandenburg, 70–71, 134, 148, 248

and defence of Berlin, 178, 209, 245, 262, 271, 287, 296, 300–301, 308, 315, 316, 323, 356

on Oder front, 182, 219, 221, 240, 258, 265

Voss, Vice-Admiral, 398

Vyshinsky, Andrei, 77, 403

Waffen SS, 8, 39, 42, 54, 86

and relationship with Army, 72, 241, 333, 334–5, 339

execution of deserters, 123, 129, 176, 247, 339, 344

and débâcle in Hungary, 151, 293

scratch troops, 160

Fagdverbände, 174

foreigners in, 257–8, 322–3, 352, 356, 366, 367, 389, 392, 397

ARMIES

Sixth SS Panzer, 5, 21, 82, 195

Eleventh SS Panzer, 88, 89

CORPS

III SS Germanische Panzer, 241, 267, 268

V SS Mountain, 225, 228, 241, 242, 260, 270, 329

XI SS Panzer, 225, 229, 246, 247, 260, 270, 329

DIVISIONS

Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, 72, 151, 276, 387

Das Reich, 54

Feldherrnhalle, 71

11th SS Nordland, 241–2, 246, 256, 257, 264, 269, 283, 286, 291, 301, 319, 323, 352, 367, 382

SS Nederland, 241, 397

30. Fanuar, 72, 133, 182, 208, 219, 242, 270

Charlemagne, 116

20th (Estonian), 129

35th SS Police Grenadier, 332

36th SS Grenadier, 334

REGIMENTS AND UNITS

‘Danmark’, 257, 258, 302

‘Norge’, 257, 258, 302

‘Charlemagne’, 291–3, 302, 319, 321–2, 323, 352, 356–7

Latvian Bn, 322

Reichsführer SS guard bn, 294

Heavy Panzer Bn 502, 218, 223, 330

Heavy Panzer Bn 503, 322, 352 ‘Hermann von Salza’ Heavy Panzer Bn, 297, 319, 357

Wagner, Gerd, 218

Wagner, Gauleiter Joseph, 386, 387

Warsaw, 18, 21, 22–3

uprising, 20, 99

ghetto, 23

Wartheland, 22, 63

Wedding, 346

Weidendamm bridge, 382

Weidling, Gen. Helmuth and Oder battle, 225, 228, 229, 237, 242, 245, 246, 256, 259

and defence of Berlin, 267, 269, 286, 287, 291, 292, 301, 304, 320, 358

and breakout plans, 320, 353, 358, 382

and surrender, 386

Weiss, Lt. Col. Rudolf, 351

Weiss, Col. Gen. Walter, 116, 117, 118

Weissensee, 301

Weizsäcker, Dr Gerlag v., 325

Wenck, Gen. Walther, 21, 90, 150, 200, 201, 276, 284, 285, 286, 298, 328, 329, 330, 350, 378, 379, 395, 397, 398

Werwolf, 173–6, 260, 261, 412, 415, 416

Werwolfsender, 261, 285

White, Maj. Gen. Isaac D., 190

Wiesbaden, 203

Wilhelm Gustloff, sinking of, 51, 88

Wilhelmstrasse, 304, 322, 347, 351, 352, 356, 366

Winant, John G., 84

Wittenberge, 202

Wöhlermann, Col. Hans-Oscar, 228, 229, 237, 340

Wolf, Friedrich, 214

Wolf, Koni, 214, 373, 402

Wolf, Markus, 214, 373, 417–18

Wolff, SS-Obergpfh. Karl, 142, 144, 194

Wolfsschanze HQ 6, 7, 96–8

Woltersdorf, 240, 248

Wriezen, 134, 242, 243, 246

Yalta conference, 20, 77–82, 83, 99, 100, 143, 364, 420

Yermakov, Maj. Gen. I. P., 328

Yushchuk, Maj. Gen. I.I., 235–6

Zavenyagin, Gen. Avraami, 324, 325

Zehlendorf, 232

Zerbst, 203, 232, 284

Zhadov, Gen. A. S., 239, 245

Zhukov, Marshal G. K., 15, 16, 18, 21, 26, 44, 63, 64, 65, 87, 88

and Poland, 99

and Pomeranian campaign, 115–16

summoned to Moscow by Stalin, 136–7

and ‘Berlin operation’, 144–5, 146–7, 165, 186, 206

and arrest of Polish leaders, 195

and battle for see low Heights, 216–23, 226, 227, 228, 229–30, 235, 242, 243, 269

and rivalry with Konev, 222, 230, 232, 242, 255, 256, 265, 296, 319

and battle for Berlin, 255, 268, 269, 319, 384

and surrender, 368, 369, 403, 404–5

and death of Hitler, 389, 399, 400, 426, 428

and Red Army discipline, 413

and Stalin, 425, 426, 427, 428

Ziegler, SS-Brigfh. Joachim, 241, 242, 269, 291, 292, 301–2, 366, 382, 383

Zoo flak tower and bunker, 2, 268, 282, 287, 340, 355, 356, 372–3, 384, 391–2, 394

Antony Beevor was educated at Winchester and Sandhurst. A regular officer in the 11th Hussars, he served in Germany and England. He has published several novels, while his works of non-fiction include The Spanish Civil War, Crete: The Battle and the Resistance, which won the 1993 Runciman Award, Stalingrad and Berlin: The Downfall 1945. With his wife, Artemis Cooper, he wrote Paris After the Liberation: 1944–1949. Stalingrad was awarded the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-fiction, the Wolfson History Prize and the Hawthornden Prize in 1999. It became a number-one bestseller both in hardback and paperback, the UK edition alone selling over half a million copies. It is being published around the world in twenty-four translations. Berlin: The Downfall 1945 was also a number-one bestseller and is being translated into twenty-four languages. Most of his titles are published by Penguin.

Antony Beevor is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Chevalier de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France. In 2003, he received the first Longman-History Today Trustees’ Award. He was the 2002–2003 Lees-Knowles lecturer at Cambridge and is a visiting professor at Birkbeck College, University of London.

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First published by Viking 2002

First published in Penguin Books 2003

This edition published 2007

Medical personnel had such a terrible time that a very large proportion gave up medicine at the end of the war.

In October 1944, after Brandt had accused Dr Morell of providing Hitler with dangerous drugs, the dispute had been solved by making Brandt Reich Commissioner for sanitation and health. The allies later held him responsible for euthanasia killings and medical experiments on prisoners and rejected his defence that he had had no control over the establishments where this had happened.

Soviet estimates put the German strength at 180,000. This was because the Red Army included all those they took prisoner afterwards, including unarmed Volkssturm, city police, railway officials and members of the Reich Labour Service. Propaganda naturally played a part too.

Soviet sources claim that Busse’s force in the forest amounted to 200,000 men, with 300 tanks and 2,000 guns, a preposterous exaggeration for propaganda purposes. One detailed US Army report, however, puts the figures even lower, at around 40,000.

Some historians appear to think that the poison used in all cases was prussic acid, not cyanide, but prussic acid is in fact a form of cyanide. In any case, the Soviet autopsy report on Adolf and Eva Hitler states, ‘The remains of glass ampoules which had contained cyanide compound were found in the oral cavities. These were identical to those found in the mouths of Goebbels and his wife.’

Formerly RTsKhIDNI (Rossiisky Tsentr Khraneniya i Izucheniya Dokumentov Noveishei Istorii)

The ‘Special Archive’ of captured German documents comes from the 194,000 Nazi Party, Reich Chancellery, SS and Gestapo files discovered by the 59th Army of the Red Army at a castle in Lower Saxony (probably Schloss Furstenstein near Waldenburg, rather than the Schloss Althorn mentioned in some accounts)