All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [387]
As the German food distribution system collapsed, from late March onwards civilians began to suffer severe hunger even in areas still held by the Wehrmacht. And they knew worse was to come. A Berlin teenager named Dieter Borkovsky was riding the city’s S-Bahn on 14 April, amid a throng of passengers loudly venting their anger and despair. Suddenly a soldier, adorned with medals which seemed absurdly incongruous on his small, dirty figure, shouted, ‘Silence! I’ve got something to tell you. Even if you don’t want to listen to me, stop whingeing. We have to win this war. We must not lose our courage. If others win the war, and they do to us only a fraction of what we have done in the occupied territories, there won’t be a single German left in a few weeks.’ Borkovsky wrote: ‘It became so quiet in that carriage one could have heard a pin drop.’
When the Russians reached Lübbenau, sixty miles south of Berlin, SS officer’s wife Hildegard Trutz hoped that clutching her two young children would spare her from rape. ‘My God! What a fuss I made with the first one! I can’t help laughing when I think of it now. I held Elke in my arms and pushed Norfried in front of me, hoping that would soften his heart. But he simply pushed Norfried aside and threw me on the ground. I cried and clung onto Elke, but the Russian just went ahead until I had to let go of her. He was quite quick about it, and the whole thing didn’t take more than five minutes … I soon found that it was much better not to resist at all, it was all over much quicker if you didn’t.’
Friedrike Grensemann came home from work to find her father preparing to obey a summons to the Volkssturm. He handed her his pistol, saying, ‘It’s all over, my child. Promise me that when the Russians come you will shoot yourself.’ Then he kissed her and went off to die. Few Germans were any more impressed than Herr Grensemann by the home guard’s mobilisation. They parodied the song ‘Die Wach am Rhein’: ‘Dear Fatherland, set your mind at rest/the Führer has called the Grandpas up.’ Berliners stripped shops of such food as they could buy, then retired to the cellars that became their refuges through the days that followed. Ruth-Andreas Friedrich risked a brief sortie to the street in darkness, during a pause in Russian air raids. She saw the eastern sky reddened ‘as if blood had been poured over it’, and listened to the now incessant gunfire, ‘a grumbling like distant thunder. That’s no bombing, that’s … artillery … Before us lies the endless city, black in the black of night, cowering as if to creep back into the earth. And we’re afraid.’
Danish correspondent Jacob Kronika wrote that many Berliners now fervently desired their leader’s end. ‘Years ago they shouted “Heil!” Now they hate the man who calls himself their Führer. They hate him, they fear him; because of him they are suffering hardship and death. But they have neither the strength nor the nerve to free themselves from his demonic power. They wait, in passive desperation, for the final act of the drama.’
Behind the front, the Nazis indulged a final orgy of killing: jails were emptied, their occupants shot; almost all surviving opponents of the regime held in concentration camps were executed, and lesser victims massacred with a dreadful carelessness. On 31 March at Kassel-Wilhelmshöhe station, seventy-eight Italian workers suspected of looting a Wehrmacht supply train were rounded up and shot by firing squads. West