A man in a black hat came out of a gateway. He stopped when he saw us and held out a small package wrapped in greaseproof paper. He unwrapped it to reveal a yellowed box, which he opened. ‘L’Origan Coty, Fräulein Offizier. I swap for a packet of tobacco.’ He stood for a moment, then tucked his package away in the pocket of his long overcoat and wandered off.
After that the streets were completely deserted. I remember a pillar covered with posters, chiffon curtains reaching like outstretched white hands from a window, a bus with an advert on its roof, an enormous papier mâché shoe, which had crashed into a building. And Goebbels’ categorical assurances on the walls that the Russians would never enter Berlin.
Now, increasingly, it was dead districts containing nothing but ruins. It became even harder to breathe. Dust and smoke obscured the way forward. At every step we were risking a bullet. A fierce battle was by now raging in the government district. The latest order from the Nazi leadership demanded that the capital should be defended to the last man. ‘Men, women and boys stand side by side with the battle-tempered and stubbornly resisting Wehrmacht, which has been fighting the Bolshevik hordes for years and knows that this is a matter not of negotiations, but of life and death.’
Barricades, ditches, rubble, blocks and traps were to stop the advance of tanks. Concrete structures and major buildings had been turned into ramparts, their windows into gun embrasures. Damaged tanks that still had a functioning gun, and often undamaged tanks too, were dug into the ground, turning them into powerful firing points.
Goebbels’ Berliner Frontblatt listed the directions of the main attacks that had been mounted to repel ‘the Soviets’ in the preceding twenty-four hours: between Grunewald and Siemensstadt, in the Tempelhof–Neukölln district and streets to the south of the Wedding railway station.
‘Attack! On to complete and final victory, army comrades!’ exclaimed the appeal of our military soviet of the 1st Byelorussian Front.
A huge, unfamiliar city. The smoke from burning buildings shrouded its outlines, whole districts of ruins gave it the appearance of fantasy. Just under six years before, an invasion of Europe, criminal and unprecedented in its brutality, was launched from here, and now to here it had returned.
How many times, in the darkest days of the war, our soldiers had repeated, ‘We’ll reach Berlin yet, we’ll find out what that River Spree amounts to.’ And now they had. The meandering, high-banked River Spree, like Berlin’s other rivers, canals and lakes, complicated the advance of the attacking units. The haze from gunfire, smoke and dust hovered over the river like a dense pall, fancifully reflecting the light of burning buildings. Beyond the Spree was the government district, ‘the 9th Special Defence District’, where heavy fighting was in train.
On panels indicating the direction of traffic, on tanks, on shells being loaded into artillery, and on the barrels of rifles you saw the slogan, ‘To the Reichstag!’ It was on everyone’s mind in those days in Berlin. On 29 April troops of our army arrived at Königsplatz, on to which the six-pillared façade of the Reichstag’s grey hulk faced.
It was considered that once we took the Reichstag, once we raised the red flag above its cupola, the world would know that Hitler and fascism had been vanquished. The storming of the Reichstag riveted the attention of every journalist, whether newly arrived from Moscow or already with the front-line press. The honour of actually taking the building fell to our 3rd Shock Army under Colonel General Kuznetsov.
In 1933, after the ominous ‘false flag’ arson attack on the Reichstag, Hitler was able to force the aged President Hindenburg ‘temporarily’ to suspend civil liberties. They were never restored. This allowed Hitler to carry out a clampdown, with mass arrests of Communists and Social Democrats, giving the Nazis an absolute majority in the Reichstag. The burned-out building was not repaired and, under the Nazi regime, parliament ceased to be important. Its subsequent infrequent sessions were held elsewhere.
The principal building under the new regime was a new Reich Chancellery, built specially for Reich Chancellor Hitler by his favourite architect, Albert Speer (later Minister of Armaments and War Production). It was 500 metres from the Reichstag.
At that time we still had no firm intelligence to confirm that Hitler and his staff headquarters were in the shelter beneath the Reich Chancellery. Such information as the intelligence services had was scanty, inconsistent, unreliable and contradictory. Captured German soldiers had little to tell us. Some believed Hitler had flown to Bavaria or elsewhere, others were totally indifferent to everything, including the matter of where he might be. They were overwhelmed and burned out by what they had been through.
A squealer was captured, a boy of fifteen or so in the uniform of the Hitler Youth, his eyes reddened, his lips cracked. He had been shooting furiously but now just sat there, looking around puzzled but with evident curiosity, like any other young kid. These instant transformations in the war always amazed me. He told us that their division, commanded by Reichsjugendführer Artur Axmann, the national leader of the Hitler Youth, was protecting Hitler. He had heard that from their commanders. They had kept repeating it, and saying it was essential to hold out until General Wenck’s army came to the rescue.
All day I had to interpret at the interrogation of prisoners in the basement of a house not far from Potsdamer Platz. It was occupied by a tailor’s family, also by a woman and her son, and a girl in a ski outfit. The ceaseless thunder of battle was muffled in the basement. Sometimes we experienced what felt like earthquake tremors.
The tailor, an elderly man, hardly ever got up from his chair. He often took out his pocket watch and inspected it at length. Everyone involuntarily watched him doing so. His grown-up son was a cripple who had contracted polio as a child; he sat at the tailor’s feet with his head on his father’s lap. The elder daughter was either asleep or rushed round looking anxious. Her husband was in the Volkssturm and was outside somewhere in the streets of Berlin. Of all these bewildered, worn-out people, only the tailor’s wife was busy with something all the time; her duties as a mother took priority over war or her fear of death. At the appropriate time, she would spread a napkin on her knees and lay out tiny pieces of bread and jam.
The young woman with the thin, serious boy and the girl in the ski suit, were ‘refugees’ from another basement. They tried to take up as little space as possible. The woman periodically talked loudly about herself: she was married to a firefighter who had been mobilized and sent to the front. She had been waiting two years for her husband to come home on leave, and had made a list of things he needed to do in the apartment: change a door handle, fix the window fastenings, etc., but now their house had burned down. The boy scowled, evidently tired of listening yet again to his mother’s stories. The girl was wearing rough boots and had a pack on her back that she could not bring herself to take off. She was ugly and gawky and nobody asked her who she was or where she came from.
Prisoners waiting to be called for interrogation sat in there also. A not particularly young German lieutenant told me quietly, ‘I’ve spent half the day sitting among civilians,’ by which he meant the occupants of the basement. ‘I’m not sure if you’re aware of that.’ ‘What can we do?’ ‘No, by all means, if they are decent people I don’t mind.’
We were interested in just one thing: where was Hitler? He did not have the answer to that, but wanted to speak his mind, and started in a roundabout way. He stood up and straightened himself before beginning. ‘Our enemy No. 1 was England. Enemy No. 2 was Russia. In order to defeat England, we had first to finish off Russia… Oh God!’ he said and covered his face with his hands.