All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [388]
Hundreds of thousands of prisoners were herded westwards, away from the Russians, and many were literally marched to death. Hugo Gryn, a Jew, described his experiences among a column of starving slaves on the road to Sachsenhausen: ‘When we left Lieberose, we were marched some distance away, stopped, and then heard lots of firing and then [there was] smoke. They killed and set on fire everybody who could not move out. This march was dreadful. Snow, mud. And when dusk came, turn left or turn right, walk into the nearest field, get down. In the morning, get up, except for those who could not get up, then we would move forward, wait a while, hear the shots and move on.’ Almost half of the 714,211 concentration camp prisoners held in the Reich in January 1945 were dead by May, along with many more PoWs. On 12 April, the German Philharmonic Orchestra gave its last performance, organised by Albert Speer. Beethoven’s Violin Concerto was performed with Bruckner’s 8th Symphony. So too was the finale of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung.
A last climactic battle remained. Since 1939, the spotlight of world attention had shifted again and again between place names great and obscure: from Warsaw to Dunkirk and Paris; London and Tobruk; Smolensk, Moscow and Stalingrad; El Alamein and Kursk; Salerno and Anzio; Normandy, Bastogne and Warsaw again. Now, Hitler’s capital became the focus not only of many hopes and fears, but also of a vast concentration of military power: the three Soviet fronts that massed before Berlin comprised 2.5 million men and 6,250 armoured vehicles, supported by 7,500 aircraft. In darkness in the early hours of 16 April, Zhukov launched a frontal assault against the Seelow Heights east of the city. The operation was among the most brutish and unimaginative of Russia’s war. Its commander was so impressed by watching his bombardment devastating the defences that after thirty minutes he gave the order to start the attack. A Russian engineer wrote home that night: ‘Along the whole length of the horizon it was bright as daylight. On the German side, everything was covered with smoke and thick fountains of earth in clumps flying up. There were huge flocks of scared birds flying around in the sky, a constant humming, thunder, explosions. We had to cover our ears to prevent our eardrums breaking. Then tanks began roaring, searchlights were lit along all of the front line in order to blind the Germans. Then people started shouting everywhere, “Na Berlin!”’
Russian infantry ran forward into the German minefields, while the first tanks clattered towards the Heights. Briefly, it seemed that the artillery had silenced the defences. But then the Germans opened fire. They had pulled back from forward positions, so that Zhukov’s bombardment fell on empty trenches. As Soviet tanks thrashed in deep mud on the slopes in their path, the attackers began to suffer terrible casualties. ‘We moved across terrain cratered from shellfire,’ wrote Soviet sapper Pyotr Sebelev. ‘Everywhere lay smashed German guns, vehicles, burning tanks and many corpses … Many of the Germans surrender. They don’t want to fight and give their life for Hitler.’ But many more continued to shoot. ‘Why drag out the misery?’ mused one despairing member of the Wehrmacht, whose wife and three children had drowned when the Wilhelm Gustloff refugee ship was torpedoed in the Baltic on 15 April. ‘But then, there’s still the other blokes. Many of them I’ve known for years. Am I going to leave them in the lurch?’
The Final Russian Assaults
Gen. Gotthard Heinrici’s defenders inflicted three Russian casualties for each of their own. There was no display of inspired Soviet generalship: Zhukov’s hordes merely threw themselves