For a time it appeared that Konev might earn this distinction. Both his and Zhukov’s forces crossed the Oder on April 16 with a total strength of 2.5 million troops, 6,250 tanks, and 42,000 artillery pieces and mortars. On the next day Konev was already closing in on Zossen, the new headquarters of the OKW, while Zhukov was held up by tough German resistance at the Seelow Heights on the west bank of the Oder. Frustrated, Zhukov threatened to dismiss any of his officers who did not push forward with total resolution. By April 19 he was able to smash through the German defenses and reach the eastern outskirts of Berlin. With additional backing from General Konstantin Rokossovsky’s Second White Russian Front, Zhukov was in a position to give Konev a good run for his money.
The Nazis, for their part, were determined to do their utmost to defend Berlin. On January 16, 1945, Hitler moved back to the city, having decided to direct from there the final phase of what he continued to insist would be a victorious war. However, because Berlin was under constant bombardment, he spent most of his time in an elaborate bunker complex that had recently been built under the Neue Reichskanzlei. Accessible via a spiral staircase leading down from an older and shallower bunker, the new Führerbunker contained eighteen rooms, including a conference room, offices for Goebbels and Martin Bormann (Hess’s replacement as Hitler’s deputy), valet quarters, a small surgery, a vegetarian kitchen, and the Führer’s private accommodations, which consisted of a bedroom, map room, living room, Eva Braun’s bedroom, and a bathroom. In Hitler’s domain the only decoration was Anton Graf’s portrait of Frederick the Great, the Prussian King who had snatched victory from the jaws of defeat in the Seven Years’ War. Hitler hoped to repeat this accomplishment.
If a German victory were somehow to be achieved, the national capital could not be allowed to fall. “I must force the decision here, or go down fighting,” Hitler told one of his secretaries. On March 9 his government issued a decree setting down the preparations for the defense of “Fortress Berlin.” Three rings of defenses were established around the city. The outer ring was some forty kilometers from the city center, the second encompassed the suburbs, and the last followed the S-Bahn line around the inner city. Major highways leading into the capital were blocked, and the principal bridges were mined to allow quick demolition if the need arose. A weak point in Berlin’s defense system was the manpower on hand within the capital. With most regular troops still on the fronts, the only unit of operational value was the Grossdeutschland Division, which had played a key role in the suppression of the Twentieth of July affair. Smaller flak and Pak (antitank) units were also available, as was the Volksturm, a motley collection of the very old and the very young, who had been mobilized at the last minute to sacrifice themselves for the Fatherland. The Volksturm units were untrained and poorly armed, though some of them carried the Panzerfaust, an antitank weapon that could do genuine damage. Hitler had no compunctions about throwing children and old men into battle. “The capital will be defended to the last man and the last bullet,” he said.
Members of the Volksturm in a maneuver near Potsdam, 1944
Perhaps the regime’s most potent weapon in the defense of Berlin was the Berliners’ fear of what would happen to them if the Russians overran their city. Goebbels’s propaganda machine harped on the horrors that would attend a Russian victory, and for once the little doctor was not exaggerating. Nonetheless, morale in Fortress Berlin was hardly of the highest as the Russians approached. Steady bombing had already induced an almost catatonic apathy in many quarters. Ursula von Kardorff likened the population to passengers on a sinking ship, resigned to “a fate that they could not escape.”
Some of the inhabitants, on the other hand, were not too apathetic to exploit the chaos around them for private gain. Packs of thieves roamed the ruins, stealing precious food, fuel, and material goods for sale in the thriving black market, which was the only viable market in town. Deserters from the collapsing eastern front filtered into the city and joined in the looting and thievery. Blessed with a bonanza business, funeral directors sold the same coffins over and over, then tossed the dead into mass graves. When one indignant widow complained about this swindle, another responded: “Since the living have no value, why should the dead?” The doorkeeper at the demolished Scherl Press House was heard to advise another widow: “Be happy that [your husband] is buried in a mass grave; at least he’ll have company.”
As the Russian vise closed on Berlin, Berliner vice resurfaced with a vengeance, but it had a desperate edge to it, as people tried to grab a last bit of pleasure before the anticipated surfeit of pain. There were reports of orgies in the basements and shelters, gluttonous feasts with stolen food, “cellar tribes” anaesthetizing themselves with pilfered medical alcohol and morphine. The physical scene with which the Berliners now had to contend encouraged an abandonment of restraints. With major buildings reduced to piles of rubble, points of orientation had disappeared. Prominent streets and avenues had been replaced by narrow paths winding through the ruins—perfect for muggings and anonymous trysts. As the Berliners said, it was easier to act as if one had just failed the Last Judgment when the world around so closely resembled Hell.
A hell, one should add, with a certain rusticity to it. Due to the loss of their agricultural hinterlands, Berliners had taken to planting vegetable gardens and even grain fields among the ruins. Corn and potatoes grew in the wreckage of the Gendarmenmarkt, between the blasted Schinkel masterpieces. Herds of goats were pastured where cars and busses once zoomed. With its yawning empty spaces, Berlin looked like a semicivilized outpost on the Prussian plain, which of course it once had been. And because transportation and communication between its various districts had broken down, the city also seemed once again to be more a collection of villages than an integrated metropolis. Obviously, this was not what the Nazis had had in mind when they promised to return Berlin to its “true self.”
On April 20, 1945, his fifty-sixth birthday, Hitler made a brief appearance above ground. Due to stress and the poisons prescribed by his quack physician, Theodor Morell, Hitler was a physical wreck. His skin was blotchy, his shoulders stooped, his left arm hung loose, and he listed to the right. Obviously uncomfortable outside his troglodyte world, he quickly pinned decorations on some Hitler Youth in the Chancellery garden and then disappeared back into the bunker, where he gave himself over to fantasies about a miraculous victory. He had been indulging in such fantasies for some time. On April 13, when news reached Berlin that President Roosevelt had died, Hitler and Goebbels thought they saw a reprise of Catherine the Great’s death during the Seven Years’ War, which had allowed Frederick the Great a last-minute victory. Now, they prophesied, Truman would pull the Western forces out of the war, leaving the Reich free to focus on Russia. Hitler also spoke rapturously of “wonder weapons” that would turn the tide: the V-1 and V-2 rockets, a new kind of U-boat, and remote-controlled airplanes. (Ironically—and thankfully—the Germans put little emphasis on developing the most important “wonder weapon” of the Second World War, the atomic bomb.) Down in his map room, Hitler shifted around armies that no longer existed. These forces would fall back on Berlin, he said, creating an impregnable barrier against which the Soviets would throw themselves in vain. Other Nazi forces would then hit the Reds from behind, saving Berlin and opening the way for German counteroffensives across the board. At other moments, however, Hitler could be surprisingly clear-eyed. At a staff conference on April 22 he suddenly announced that the war was lost and that he planned to kill himself.