We left the house. Our hostess’s husband was planting flowers in the ground he had dug, as he did every year, to sell. Armoured personnel carriers trundled by, their caterpillar tracks clanking.
In the sky a German spy plane hovered above us, a Focke-Wulf ‘frame’, and where the road forked, the Military Roads Commission had an information kiosk for anyone driving in Germany, severely warning that ‘Driving on the left will result in confiscation of the driver’s licence.’ The warning looked comically out of place, but also rather touching in the way that it hinted at a different way of life with sensible regulations, a different world without war.
People of many nationalities, newly liberated, streamed along the roads towards us: French, Russian, British, Polish, Italians, Belgians, Yugoslavs… Prisoners of war, captives from concentration camps and torture chambers, slaves dragged here from the USSR, from all over Europe, to forced labour, starvation and death.
A few were riding in German vans or on purloined bicycles. More commonly, they were on foot, in groups, under a homemade flag of their own country. Some were in military uniform, some in civilian clothing, some in the striped jacket of a prisoner. Their exclamations of greeting, radiant with warmth, lit by a smile, the frank, open expression of emotion were heart-warming, profoundly touching encounters I will never forget.
Past a cavalry regiment stationed in a village adjacent to the highway, past a tank brigade of the commander of the front’s reserve, past a roadside poster urging ‘Forward, Victory is Near!’, overtaking trucks heavy-laden with ammunition, we drove into Küstrin, a town on the Oder, deserted, ruined. ‘The key to the gates of Berlin’, the Germans called it.
The main square was now a graveyard of the buildings that had once looked on to it. They seemed to be advancing on it from all directions, reduced now to grim piles of rubble. Beams left suspended in mid-air groaned; stone dust poured down from the gaps in walls. In the middle of the square a monument with a bronze bird on top of it had miraculously survived. My God, how lonely this place felt, with that idiotic, vainglorious bird all on its own in a dreadful wasteland of stone.
Back on the highway. Again, fields and woodland, windmills looming on the horizon. Pigs, unfed, crazed, rushing around the fields.
The retreating enemy had blown up the bridges, the main roads had been wrecked and were littered with broken vehicles, but the trucks with their cargoes were getting through somehow, clocking up hundreds of kilometres on the difficult route into the heart of Germany. What hardships did these front-line drivers not endure, what trackless wastes did they not traverse with their loads, sinking down in river crossings, bogged down in swamps, dodging bombs and shells and mines in order to get here, in a truck riddled by bullets and shrapnel, to participate in the final battle!
Dusk fell, protecting us from attack by enemy aircraft, and the amount of traffic on the highway increased markedly. Tanks, trucks, self-propelled guns, armoured personnel carriers, amphibious tanks, horse carts. Infantry in Studebaker trucks and marching on foot. On rifle barrels, on tank turrets, on carts, everywhere you saw the slogan, ‘Berlin, here we come!’
When it was completely dark the traffic only grew heavier. The night was short and you had to get into position while you could. People drove slowly, not turning on their headlights, getting snarled up in traffic jams. Anti-aircraft guns were firing. From village byroads artillery, tanks, and infantry were all drawn to the highway. Vehicles drove several abreast, peeled off and drove through land to the sides of the road. Everywhere there was rasping and clanking, furious honking, horses being whipped, everybody trying to overtake those ahead of them.
The centre of Berlin was ablaze, and huge tongues of fire leapt skywards. The multistorey buildings they lit up seemed very close, but were in reality kilometres away. Great beams of light from searchlights swept the sky. The dull rumble of never-ending artillery fire reached our ears. Here the suburbs were still bristling with enemy anti-tank traps, but our tanks were already thundering towards the centre.
And this very night, in the catacombs beneath the Reich Chancellery, Adolf Hitler married Eva Braun. When later I learned this, I recalled the collapsing walls of burnt-out buildings, the acrid smell of charred ruins, the grim tank traps no longer capable of protecting anyone from anything, and in the darkness the inexorable thunder of tanks rushing towards the centre of Berlin, to the Reichstag and the Reich Chancellery.
I sat on an abandoned empty oil drum in a suburban street outside a boarded-up shop window, under a signboard whose gold letters proclaimed it to be a patisserie, Franz Schulz Feinbäckerei, waiting to hear from headquarters where we were to go. That night the front line ran through the centre of Berlin. From time to time there were flashes of artillery fire.
I remembered our river crossings at Smolensk in 1943, when starved horses refused to pull the artillery pieces and exhausted people had finally to push the guns themselves, under a squall of shelling by the enemy. I recalled cameraman Ivan Sokolnikov, who risked his life to film there for the newsreels. In addition to providing footage for the next edition of the newsreel, Sokolnikov was charged with using a proportion of the film allocated to record for the so-called ‘historical film library’, which was to preserve for posterity the tragic face of war. And film he did: the crossing, the soldiers straining under the intolerable weight of the guns, dying in the bombing and under fire.
One sequence that lodged in my memory did not make it into the newsreel or the official historical record: that same spring, although somewhat earlier, when it was difficult but still possible to use sledges over the thawing snow, by the side of one such trail a transport soldier was sitting in his sledge. His horse had collapsed. The driver unharnessed her and, without looking at the horse, pushed the shaft to one side and hung a cooking pot on it filled with snow. He lit a small fire. There were strict orders to look after and protect the horses for as long as was conceivably possible. In this case, however, there seemed no likelihood the poor animal could be got back on its feet. The yellow water in the cooking pot came to the boil, but the doomed horse was still sorrowfully blinking. The driver waited grimly…
Did that soldier make it to Berlin? If only we could have brought to the place where we were all those who had endured the harshness of army life, who had suffered unbearably from hunger, from the bitter cold, from wounds and fear; if only we could have brought back to life those who had perished so that they could at least see what a formidable force their army was as it entered the lair of the beast.
For three days Berlin had been completely surrounded. In heavy fighting, breaking through the defence of one district of the city after another, the troops of the 3rd Shock Army of Colonel General Kuznetsov, the 5th Assault Army of Colonel General Berzarin, and the 8th Guards Army of Colonel General Chuikov advanced towards the city centre, towards the Tiergarten, towards Unter den Linden, towards the government district. The newly appointed Soviet commandant of Berlin, Colonel General Berzarin, had already issued an order dissolving the National Socialist Party and banning its activities.
The residents of Berlin cowered in basements beneath burning, collapsing buildings. The water situation was dire, and their meagre supplies of food were running low. On the surface there was non-stop gunfire, shells exploding, chunks of masonry flying through the air, the fumes and smoke from burning buildings, the air suffocating. The situation of the population was desperate.