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By Root 1365 0

forward again and again. The Germans poured fire into the attackers, destroying tanks in hundreds and killing men in thousands. For two days, six Soviet armies battered at the Seelow line without achieving a breakthrough. Konev, in the south, was ordered to push forward two tank armies, while Rokossovsky in the north diverted forces to support Zhukov. On 18 April, Wehrmacht Corporal Helmut Fromm wrote from Konev’s sector: ‘Now we’re in front of Forst. The Russians have got a bridgehead across the Neisse, and attacked this morning at eleven. We had to pull back. I was left with a machine-gun and two men. I’m the only one who knows how to use a Faust – most of the others have only done office work. Then we rode very fast on bicycles up the Breslau–Berlin autobahn … Ivan’s guns are firing. Ten minutes ago Bohmer and Bucksbraun were wounded – Bohmer’s very badly cut up. We carried him back on a plank, screaming. Whose turn is it next? Gunfire from the road. To our left a flak 88 is under fire. I’m trying to dig as deep as I can. In the sky above us a Russian tank-buster is circling … If I survive, I shall give thanks to God.’

Hitler declined to send reinforcements to Heinrici, leaving Ninth Army to hold the Oder positions as best it could. Mass, not manoeuvre, at last enabled Zhukov to swamp the defences and push forward to reach Hitler’s outer Berlin line on 21 April; the capture of the Seelow Heights had cost the Russians 30,000 dead, the Germans 12,000. The attackers hastened on towards the city along the main road, Reichstrasse 1, as fugitives and deserters scurried and stumbled to stay ahead of them. ‘They all seem so miserable, so little like men any more,’ wrote a Berlin woman watching German soldiers shuffle past her apartment building on 22 April. ‘The only thing they inspire is pity, no hope or expectations. They already look defeated, captured. They stare past us blindly, impassively … They’re obviously not too concerned about us, Volk or civilians or Berliners or whatever we are. Now we’re nothing but a burden. And I don’t sense they’re the least ashamed of how bedraggled they look, how ragged. They’re too tired to care, too apathetic. They’re all fought out.’

By the 25th, Zhukov and Konev had encircled the German capital – an attempt by Wenck’s Twelfth Army to break the ring and bring relief was easily frustrated. The Russians began a week-long struggle to batter a path through the city street by street, block by block. The anti-tank ditches dug with such labour by tens of thousands of Berliners proved as futile as all such obstacles, but barricades of rubble heaped on old trams and rail trucks were more effective. Regular troops supported by old men and teenagers of the Hitler Youth fought the Russians with small arms, grenades, panzerfausts. The boy soldiers who died fighting for Berlin would have seemed especially tragic victims, had there not been so many others. Dorothea von Schwanenflügel described an encounter with one unhappy little figure, ‘a mere child in a uniform many sizes too large for him, with an anti-tank grenade lying beside him. Tears were running down his face, and he was obviously very frightened of everyone. I very softly asked him what he was doing there. He lost his distrust and told me that he had been ordered to lie in wait here, and when a Soviet tank approached he was to run under it and explode the grenade. I asked how that would work, but he didn’t know. In fact this frail child didn’t even look capable of carrying such a grenade.’ Another Berlin woman wrote likewise:

You see very young boys, baby faces peeping out beneath oversized steel helmets. It’s frightening to hear their high-pitched voices. They’re fifteen years old at the most, standing there looking so skinny and small in their billowing uniform tunics. Why are we so appalled at the thought of children being murdered? In three or four years the same children strike us as perfectly fit for shooting and maiming … Up to now being a soldier meant being a man … Wasting these boys before they reach maturity obviously runs against