Few Berliners could get in to see anything. There were small groups of officers and soldiers. There was filming for the newsreels, and Goebbels was surrounded by a few commanders keen to be in the picture.
I was standing to one side, and from a distance suddenly saw Major Bystrov, standing stock-still, his dark, haggard face almost unrecognizable. Leaning forward, he was staring, transfixed, at the body of Goebbels.
The whole scene, with the blackened body on its platform, in the ragged remnants of its Nazi uniform, with the yellow, noose-like tie which had somehow survived round the bare, black neck, its ends gnawed by fire and now stirring in the wind, seemed like an exhibit from history’s chamber of horrors. When I later read that passage in Goebbels’ diary where he gleefully records the Führer’s approval of his notion of introducing a yellow star to identify Jews, I wondered if there had not been something symbolic about that yellow noose round the neck of its inventor.
Before killing himself, Goebbels slaughtered his own children, closing the circle of murder with poison and fire, the means put to so much use in the concentration camps.
The bulletin read:
On 2 May 1945 at 17.00 hours in the centre of Berlin, a few metres from the entrance to the bomb shelter of the German Reich Chancellery, Lieutenant Colonel Klimenko, Majors Bystrov and Khazin, in the presence of German Berlin residents Wilhelm Lange, chef of the Reich Chancellery, and Karl Schneider, mechanic of the Reich Chancellery garage, discovered the charred bodies of a man and a woman, the body of the man being of low stature, his right foot half bent and shorter than his left, with a charred metal prosthesis, the remnants of a uniform of the Nationalist Socialist Party, a Gold Party Badge, charred…
The Walther pistol found beside them had not been fired.
During the long years of the war we had passed through the ruined, burned lands of the Kalinin and Smolensk regions, of Byelorussia and Poland. We had seen Goebbels’ propaganda in action: the savage devastation of the land, the death camps, the trenches full of murdered people, the ‘new civilization’ in which a man was his brother’s executioner. The path of the war had brought us to the Reich Chancellery.
Now, many years later, I am sometimes asked, ‘Wasn’t it frightening to look at those dead bodies?’ But that was not what I felt. I shuddered, but I was not frightened, and not only because we had seen so many terrible things in four years of war, but rather because those charred remains did not seem human: they seemed satanic.
But the dead children: that was frightening. Six children: five girls and one boy, exterminated by their parents.
‘Whose children are these?’ Major Bystrov asked Vice Admiral Voss. Bystrov had just brought Voss here, to the underground complex. Voss had been entrusted with the mission of reaching Grand Admiral Dönitz in order to hand him the supreme authority Hitler had bequeathed him, and the order to continue the war at all costs. There was to be no question of capitulation!
Together with the remnants of General Mohnke’s group, which had been defending the Reich Chancellery, Voss tried to break through the encirclement in the region of Friedrichstrasse, but was captured. Bystrov drove Vice Admiral Voss through the streets of defeated Berlin. Voss represented the Navy at Hitler’s headquarters. Towards them as they drove wandered dejected columns of prisoners.
Voss stared stonily through the car window the whole time. Terrible, smoking ruins. A crowd of Berliners at a camp kitchen where a Russian cook was ladling out hot soup… Overturned barricades, over which the car drove before crawling on through narrow alleys carved through streets blocked by fallen masonry, rubble and rubbish.
‘Did you know these children?’ Major Bystrov asked. Voss nodded in the affirmative and, asking permission, sank wearily into a chair. ‘I saw them only yesterday. This one is Heidi,’ he said, pointing to the youngest girl. Before coming here he had identified Goebbels and his wife.
Goebbels, with his retinue of journalists, had come on board the cruiser Prinz Eugen, commanded by Voss, in the summer of 1942. Voss owed his advancement to Goebbels. Not so long ago, only back in February when the headquarters moved to Berlin, Goebbels, his wife and Voss were invited to a family dinner party by Grand Admiral Dönitz. The conversation was diverse, and concerned the organization of the defence of Berlin. ‘We talked about the need to build stronger street fortifications and to draw more young people from the Volkssturm group into defence duties. All these issues were touched on, however, only superficially; in passing, as it were.’ They did not allow the intrusion of alarming thoughts to spoil their pleasant evening.
Forced by events down into the underground complex together, they met as old friends, and yesterday, before Voss left with Mohnke’s group, Goebbels had said to him in parting, ’Everything is lost for us now.’ Magda Goebbels added, ‘We are tied here by the children. There is nowhere we can go with them now.’
Major Bystrov and Voss stood together in this dank, dreadful underground room in which the children were lying under their blankets. Voss was shocked, devastated, and sat there hunched. They were silent, each with his own thoughts. That same day Major Bystrov told me about what happened next. Voss, this seemingly completely broken man, suddenly leapt up and started running. Bystrov went after him along the corridor of the dark cellar, fearing he might disappear up a sidestreet and dive into some unknown hiding place. Bystrov caught him, however, and could see this had been an act of complete despair, pointless. Voss had never imagined he could get away.
The children were found in one of the underground rooms by Senior Lieutenant Leonid Ilyin on 3 May. They were lying in bunk beds, the girls in long nightgowns, the boy in pyjamas of light material, just as they had climbed into bed for the last time. Their faces were pink from the action of potassium cyanide. The children seemed alive and only sleeping.
Later, when Leonid Ilyin read these lines, he wrote to me,
I am that same Senior Lieutenant Ilyin. Thank you very much for remembering me… There was me, my soldier Sharaburov, Palkin and another soldier whose name I do not know, a Jew by nationality, who we had been given in case we needed an interpreter. At that time we were shooting, being shot at, but fortunately we were all alive. I took a loaded Walther 6.35 mm with a spare clip from a desk drawer in Goebbels’ study. There were also two suitcases with documents, two suits and a watch. I have Goebbels’ watch to this day. It was given to me as being of no value and I have kept it as a souvenir.
On 3 May, when I had a moment to spare, I wandered round the Reich Chancellery and food stores. Well, now that’s all forgotten history… Well, that’s everything I wanted to write….
But in the room where the poisoned children lay, there was absolutely nothing apart from bedding. I asked through my interpreter why they had poisoned the children. They were not guilty of anything.
In the hospital of the Reich Chancellery there was a doctor among the medical staff, Helmut Kunz, who had been involved in killing the children. He worked in the medical department of the SS in Berlin and on 23 April, when the medical unit was dissolved, was sent to the Reich Chancellery.
He was unshaven and had sunken eyes. He was in SS uniform and spoke jerkily, sighing a lot, clasping and unclasping his hands. He was, perhaps, the only person down there in the complex who had not lost his sensitivity, his jitteriness about everything he had witnessed. He said,