A miner from Alsace who had surrendered asked darkly to be trusted with a rifle so he could fight against the Germans. ‘Even at this last minute,’ he said, ‘for everything!’ He turned up his sleeve to show the tattoo of a cross, which confirmed he came from Alsace.
Scant though the intelligence was that we obtained, putting everything together, getting an insight into the structure of the German defences around the Reich Chancellery, we felt able to conclude that, most likely, that is where Hitler was.
On the evening of 29 April a nurse was detained who had run through the line of fire to look for her mother. As she talked to us, she pulled a white headscarf from her coat pocket, either without thinking or seeking the protection of the red cross on its white background. Throughout the war that sign had afforded our wounded no protection. At first sight of it the Germans mercilessly targeted their bombing there.
The day before, the nurse had been accompanying the wounded from Vossstrasse to the only nearby place of safety, the bomb shelter of the Reich Chancellery. There she had heard from the soldiers and the staff of the building that Hitler was in the underground bunker.
Dawn. Streets after fighting. A dead German soldier. Shop windows ripped apart by shells, holes in walls leading deep into the interior of a deserted house. The wind sweeping rubbish and crushed stone over a cobbled street. By a building, on the pavement, are our soldiers. One is sleeping on his side, his knees drawn up, using a piece of a door as a headrest. Another is rewinding his foot wrappings. The last long minutes before another day of assault…
Everywhere there are barricades, anti-tank barriers, ditches and piles of rubble. Labyrinthine streets. Chaotic ruins. Burning, collapsing buildings, and buildings from whose windows the enemy is firing. Our soldiers rose to face death with unforgettable courage and selflessness in those testing years when death was not rewarded with victory; but there is a particular grief when a soldier dies with only a few hours left before victory. The Russian soldiers who entered Berlin had been through everything: pain and hatred, the bitterness of defeat and self-sacrifice, the hopelessness of encirclement, the despair of captivity, the rage of attacking, and the surge of enthusiasm in victorious battles from the Volga to the Spree – only for many of them to be cut down at the last minute in the streets of Berlin.
The battle raged day and night, ever fiercer. The Berlin garrison, the SS regiments, the troops retreating from the Oder and Küstrin or redeployed from the Elbe, all those troops that managed to get through to Berlin before the ring of encirclement closed around the city, were concentrated here in the government district.
On 30 April at 11.30 hrs the order was given to the attacking troops: fire with all weaponry! The bombardment began, from heavy artillery, the selfpropelled guns, tanks, fire from machine guns and submachine guns. Guns that had come all the way from the Volga fired for all the wrongs that had been done, for all the people who had been harmed. When the artillery fell silent, the soldiers attacked.
On the evening of that day, 30 April 1945, the red flag fluttered over the Reichstag. Fighting within the building itself continued throughout 1 May.
The Reichstag, a mighty building with a great dome visible from far and wide, was to go down in history as a symbol of victory. It was the heart of the 9th Special Defence District, and when it fell the Reich Chancellery could hold out no longer.
Berlin. The night before May Day 1945. A night of apocalypse. Blazing buildings grotesquely lighting up a crippled city sunk in darkness, the crash of collapsing masonry, the gunfire, the choking fumes of battle and conflagration. Searchlight beams probe the darkness of the night sky: not a single German aircraft is to cross the firmament over the ring encircling Berlin. No one and nothing can fly in, or escape from here by air.
In the centre of the German capital, in the government district, the German troops were trapped, surrounded. This was their hour of tragedy, of desperate persistence and self-immolation. Gunfire raked the dark street separating the enemies when suddenly (this came about in the sector of our neighbouring 8th Guards Army under General Chuikov) someone appeared from the enemy side. A flare picked him out from the chaos of war, waving a white flag. The first envoy in Berlin to parley about a truce, the first sign of recognition that the enemy’s situation was hopeless. The firing ceased immediately.
The envoy walked, clinging to masonry and shattered concrete, crushing glass and rubble underfoot. As the soldiers watched him approach step by step, behind him a historic epoch was receding, drawing to a close.
The episode is described in his memoirs by Lieutenant General Illarion Tolkonyuk, chief of the operational department of Chuikov’s headquarters. For the first time both sides stopped shooting at each other on a Berlin street. The envoy, Lieutenant Colonel Seifert, hastily reached the now silent Russian firing point in a grey corner building. Along the telephone wire the news of the envoy ran through the appropriate channels to Army Commander Chuikov. The envoy delivered a bilingual document in Russian and German, signed by Martin Bormann, to the effect that Lieutenant Colonel Seifert was authorized to negotiate with the Russian command. The purpose of the negotiation was to agree the matter of the crossing of the front line by the Chief of the General Staff of the German Army, General Hans Krebs, in view of the particular importance of the message he would bring.
Seifert returned across the street separating us from the enemy, and about an hour and a half later, as agreed, the Germans appeared in the same place, emerging from the fresh ruins. It was 3.00 a.m. Moscow time and, on the other side of the street, for the Germans, it was 1.00 a.m. Berlin time.
There was a fair amount of light, and the soldiers of the opposing sides watched tensely as General Krebs and his party, an orderly carrying his briefcase, an officer (Colonel Theodor von Dufving), and a soldier with a white flag, came forward in the early hours of a fateful new day.
Krebs was conveyed through the divisional headquarters to Chuikov’s command post. It was 3.30 a.m. Moscow time. At 3.30 p.m. the previous day Hitler had committed suicide. Krebs brought with him this news from Bormann and Goebbels and told General Chuikov, whom he mistook for Marshal Zhukov, that he was the first non-German to be notified of this fact.
He brought with him a letter from Goebbels to ‘the Leader of the Soviet people’. Marshal Zhukov gives the text of the letter in his book. The letter announced that, ‘The Führer has today voluntarily passed away. On the basis of his lawful right, the Führer has, in the will he has left, transferred all power to Dönitz, myself and Bormann. I have authorized Bormann to establish contact with the Leader of the Soviet people. This contact is essential for peace negotiations between the powers that have suffered the greatest losses. Goebbels.’
The letter had appended to it a list of the members of the new government in accordance with Hitler’s will. In this ephemeral government of the collapsed Third Reich, Goebbels was designated Reich Chancellor and Krebs Minister of War. A new post of Minister of the Party was invented for Bormann. Grand Admiral Dönitz was appointed Reich President and Commander of the Armed Forces.
Krebs was instructed to request a truce in Berlin so that the new government could reunite (Dönitz was at Flensburg) and, legally constituted, proceed to negotiations with the Soviet command. This was an obvious last effort to break out of encircled Berlin.