The diary, although recording events at quite a different level, is absurdly similar to the diaries of the very stupidest German front-line soldiers, which in turn are closely similar to each other. The similarity is no sign of democratic ways but of the monstrous uniformity of thinking that Hitler counted on and Nazism cultivated.
Although the Reich Chancellery was only 550 metres or so from the Reichstag, it was in the zone allocated to our neighbouring 5th Assault Army, which captured it. We were not allowed to cross that dividing line, but the fighting was over and everything was a muddle. Absolutely anybody who got the chance came rushing into our army’s zone, which contained the Reichstag, in order to record, ‘I was here,’ to sightsee, to write their name on the Reichstag, to go inside. That was true, first and foremost, of our neighbours in the 5th Army.
Certain officers in our army proved shrewder and decided to trespass on our neighbour’s territory, the Reich Chancellery. I was one of them. I left my name on the Reichstag only three days later.
I actually did manage to tear myself away from the documents for a short while, and walk round the city in the company of our driver, Sergey, and several officers. We stood at the Brandenburg Gate through which German troops had triumphantly marched when they returned from Warsaw, Brussels and Paris. Nearby, on a square piled with broken bricks, burnt metal and charred, overturned trees, the grey building of the Reichstag, not yet cool after the fire, was still smoking. Above it, above the skeleton of its dome, a red banner fluttered high in the overcast sky.
Skirting shell craters and piles of rubble, we reached the Reichstag. We climbed the pitted steps, inspected the soot-blackened pillars, stood for a while by the walls and looked at each other. A soldier was sitting asleep on the steps, leaning his bandaged head against a pillar and with a forage cap pulled over his face. A moustachioed guardsman with a bedroll over his shoulder was pensively rolling a cigarette. The large windows of the lower floor of the Reichstag were firmly boarded up with wooden panels, which were covered from top to bottom with graffiti. Sergey took out a pencil stub and, under someone’s sweeping inscription of ‘Where are you, dearest friend? We are in Berlin, visiting Hitler,’ scrawled in a shaky hand, ‘Hello to all Siberians!’ After him, too emotional to speak, I added my greetings to all Muscovites.
We went inside. Our soldiers were wandering around, battered folders of documents were strewn about and there was a smell of burning. The Reichstag’s documents were being used as cigarette paper.
Then we walked on through the city. The pavements were almost deserted. On pillars we saw the proclamation of the commander of the 1st Byelorussian Front to the civilian population of Berlin and the province of Brandenburg: ‘At the present time no government exists in Germany…’ In places, groups of residents were clearing the rubble, passing each other a brick at a time. Soldiers with red armbands on their sleeves were pasting up the order of the Soviet commandant of the city. A wooden arch was erected in honour of Victory in Berlin. It had a large red star set in the middle of it, and the flags of the Allies flanking it.
Vehicles were making their way through gaps where collapsed masonry had been cleared. The girls directing traffic, wearing white gloves specially issued to mark our arrival in the German capital, were energetically, tirelessly spinning round on their traffic police pedestals and enlivening Berlin’s crossroads.
Looking at them brought a lump to my throat. I remembered how very recently they had been standing in foot wrappings with rifles over their shoulders, carrying out their duties on roads at the front, chilled to the marrow, hoarse, insistent. (Just try ignoring the orders of such a girclass="underline" before you knew it she would be firing that rifle at your axles.)
The infantry marched by, holding up the traffic, the metal heel plates of their heavy boots clattering on the roadway. Their banner was being carried in its cover behind the unit’s commander.
Berliners stopped to read the commandant’s orders and note down the food ration.
We crossed a bridge over the Spree, skirting an upside-down German truck that had inscribed on its side, ‘All our wheels are turning for the war.’ A woman was sitting on the bridge, her head thrown back, her legs stretched out straight in front of her, laughing her head off. I greeted her. She looked at me with unfocused, transparent eyes, nodded back in greeting, as though recognizing me, and shouted out in a guttural, crazy, voice, ‘Alles kaput!’
On 3 May 1945, a highly detailed report was compiled titled Certificate of identification of the German Reich Minister Dr Josef Goebbels, the wife of Goebbels, and of six children. More than ten people were involved in drawing up this document and signing it. These were people involved in the discovery, from the army’s reconnaissance section, from Smersh, the political section of the corps, the medical service, and the Germans who identified the bodies. The discovery of the bodies of Goebbels and his family was made very public, which seemed only natural. On that day nobody in charge thought differently. Journalists, photographers and newsreel reporters were allowed to record everything.
In the first days of victory, people experienced what they believed was a dawning of freedom. They acted rationally and normally, but found they had been deluding themselves. They were immediately pulled up. Stalin was outraged that people had taken the initiative to make this event so public and somebody evidently got a flea in his ear. From the following day a screen of strict secrecy went up round the search for Hitler. There was to be no contact with the press or photographers, and all reports were to go directly to Stalin, bypassing the Army command.
In the first edition of my book Berlin, May 1945, my conscience prompted me to warn the reader that when it was described in writing, the search for Hitler would inevitably be presented as going more smoothly than it did in reality. The purposeful development of my narrative, moving from fact to fact, was bound to give the impression of a more rational, orderly and down-to-earth process than was warranted.
At that time I titled one chapter ‘Without Mystification’, but in fact there was no shortage of mystification, and it was very much of our own, Soviet, making. The German part of the plot was the situation surrounding the death of Hitler, while the Soviet part of the plot was woven from the customary insistence on keeping everyone and everything completely in the dark.
It was an exaggeration I was obliged to make to suggest that we were carrying out a mission we had been set. The reader would, however, have found the reality just too implausible, because in fact no mission was ever formulated. Although, actually, I was not deviating too far from the truth, because there was a mission, the final mission of the war, and it was there to be felt in the very air of Berlin. Those who were conscious of it, the ‘grassroots’, took the initiative themselves.
Then and there, in the first days of May 1945, in difficult conditions and with no halfway trustworthy information to go by, the mission of leading the search for Hitler was assumed in our 3rd Shock Army by Colonel Vasiliy Gorbushin. There was a need to unify the efforts of the intelligence personnel, quickly get to the bottom of everything, cut through all the nonsensical rumours and complete the task.