All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [390]
Neither side enjoyed scope for tactical subtlety in the battle for Berlin, there were merely a thousand savage local encounters in which the attackers measured each advance in yards. Again and again the first men to push forward were killed, the lead tanks destroyed; Soviet artillery and bombers pounded the defenders; whole streets were reduced to rubble. Siege artillery, 203mm howitzers, was brought forward to blast buildings whose occupants fired back over open sights while dust and smoke clogged the air. Stalin goaded his marshals by telephone from Moscow: tens of thousands of men paid with their lives as Zhukov and Konev conducted not a coordinated assault, but a race to fulfil their rival ambitions.
‘Berlin … presented a dreadful scene,’ wrote Swedish Red Cross representative Sven Frykman, surveying the beleaguered city by night. ‘A full moon shone from a cloudless sky so you could see the awful extent of the damage. A ghost town of cave dwellers was all that was left of this world metropolis … The imperial palace, all the splendid castles, the prince’s palace, the Royal Library, Tempelhof, the buildings along the Unter den Linden – hardly anything was left. Because of the moonlight which shone through all these empty windows and doorways, the city gave an even more grotesque impression than by daylight. Here and there a flame was still burning after the most recent bombing raids, and the fire brigades were at work. Burst pipes on some of the streets made you think of Venice and its canals.’
Helga Schneider wrote: ‘We are vegetating in a ghost town, without electric light or gas, without water, we are forced to think of personal hygiene as a luxury and hot meals as abstract concepts. We are living like ghosts in a vast field of ruins … a city where nothing works apart from the telephones that sometimes ring, glumly and pointlessly, beneath piles of fallen masonry.’ Not all calls were futile: the staff in Hitler’s bunker were reduced to seeking information by calling numbers in chosen areas to discover where the enemy had reached. As one quarter after another was overrun and Russian voices were heard, in cellars terrified civilians muttered to each other: ‘Der Iwan kommt!’
With so many Germans running away or surrendering at opportunity, it is extraordinary that resistance persisted for so long. Some 45,000 SS and Wehrmacht troops, together with 40,000 Volkssturm and a mere sixty tanks, held out for a week against the might of Zhukov’s and Konev’s armies. Street fighting is never easy, because it is hard to control and manoeuvre small groups of men clinging to precarious lodgements among buildings, and the struggle in that last week of April showed the power of despair. In Hitler’s capital, the Red Army paid the price for its policy of unrestrained savagery towards German soldiers and civilians: whatever the views of Hitler and the SS, it is hard to suppose that Berlin’s defenders would have fought so stubbornly had they entertained hopes of mercy for themselves or the population. As it was, the Soviet commitment to murder, rape and pillage was known to every German. Most of those manning the perimeter saw no prospect save that of death. Among the last-ditch defenders was a unit of the French Waffen SS Charlemagne Division. The commander of these doomed men, twenty-five-year-old Henri Fenet, was presented with the Knight’s Cross at a ceremony held in a wrecked tram, by candlelight. Fenet already had another medal: the Croix de Guerre, earned fighting for France in 1940.
Amazingly, soldiers of the Charlemagne and some other Waffen SS units mustered sufficient determination to mount local counter-attacks, one of which retook from the Russians the Gestapo headquarters building on Prinz Albrechtstrasse. Some men and boys who sought salvation in flight