All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [391]
On 28 April Benito Mussolini was captured and shot by partisans while attempting to escape from northern Italy. On the afternoon of the 30th, as Russian troops stormed the Reichstag building four hundred yards from Hitler’s bunker, the leader of the Third Reich killed himself and his wife. The banality of evil has seldom been more vividly displayed than by the couple’s conduct in their last days. Eva Braun was much preoccupied with the disposal of her jewellery – ‘my diamond watch is unfortunately being repaired’ – and by concealing her dressmakers’ accounts from posterity: ‘On no account must Heise’s bills be found.’ She wrote in a last letter to her friend Herta Ostermayr, ‘What should I say to you? I cannot understand how it should have all come to this, but it is impossible to believe any more in a God.’
Most Germans received the news of Hitler’s death with numbed indifference. Soldier Gerd Schmuckle was at a crowded inn far from Berlin when the radio bulletin was broadcast. ‘If – instead of this announcement – the innkeeper had come to the door and said that an animal of his had died in the stable, the sympathy could not have been less. Only one young soldier leapt up, extended his right arm and cried out “Hail to the Führer!” All the others continued to eat their soup as though nothing of importance had occurred.’ In the capital sporadic fighting persisted for two more days, until Berlin’s commandant Lt. Gen. Karl Wiedling surrendered on 2 May.
A terrible quiet, the quiet of the dead and damned, fell upon the city. ‘No sound of man or beast, no car, radio or tram …’ wrote a Berlin woman. ‘Nothing but an oppressive silence broken only by our footsteps. If there are people inside the buildings watching us, they are doing so in secret.’ She added a week later: ‘Everywhere there’s filth and horse manure and children playing – if that’s what it can be called. They loiter about, stare at us, whisper to one another. The only loud voices you hear belong to Russians … Their songs strike our ears as raw, defiant.’
Everywhere the Soviet victors held sway, they embarked upon an orgy of celebration, rape and destruction on a scale such as Europe had not witnessed since the seventeenth century. ‘The baker comes stumbling towards me down the hall,’ wrote a Berlin woman about one of her neighbours, ‘white as his flour, holding out his hands: “They have my wife …” His voice breaks. For a second I feel I’m acting in a play. A middle-class baker can’t possibly move like that, can’t speak with such emotion, put so much feeling into his voice, bare his soul that way, his heart so torn. I’ve never seen anyone but great actors do that.’
A German lawyer, who had miraculously preserved his Jewish wife through the Nazi years, now sought to protect her from Russian soldiers. One shot him in the hip. As he lay dying, he saw three men rape her as she screamed out her Jewish identity. The anonymous Berlin woman diarist who recorded the episode wrote: ‘No one could invent a story like this: it’s life at its most cruel – mad blind circumstance.’ An elderly Berliner moaned, ‘If only it were over, this poor bit of life.’ The diarist, who was herself repeatedly raped, wrote of experiencing a sense of detachment from her own physical being, ‘a means of escape – my true self simply leaving my body behind, my poor, besmirched, abused body. Breaking away and floating off, unblemished, into a white beyond. It can’t be me that this is happening