Armageddon_ A Novel of Berlin - Leon Uris [105]
Chapter Three
THE STAGE WAS SET for the grizzly playing out of the German death wish. From the chancellory bunker, Adolf Hitler brought on ultimate self-destruction by a deliberate decision to fight to the last. Indeed, it was all in the tradition of the fiery deaths of the idols of Teutonic legends; this was, however, no myth.
Like Berwin of Rombaden, he exhorted his warriors to perform superhuman feats. However, unlike the Aryans of the legend, Hitler’s “Aryans” existed in name only, and they could not respond. He commanded nonexistent paper armies to come to the rescue and counterattack. He went through an odious ritual of a marriage ceremony with Eva Braun, a woman as stupid and dull as Emma Stoll. And, in the last moments, he ranted that all of Germany had betrayed him and was unworthy of his genius.
The Russians, whom he had declared subhumans, followed their monstrous barrages by frontal assaults into the bowels of his kingdom. As the tortured city gurgled in its death throes, he waited until the enemy was within touching distance, and then he ordered the torch set to his body.
Children and old men of the People’s Army, disorganized military units, and frantic Nazis bloodied the Russian intruder mightily. The final bath of blood was a fitting sacrifice to the end of the pagan gods. The German fought from the bunkers and the rooftops and the street corners and the windows. Berlin was a city of mighty stone and steel, as was Leningrad, but unlike the Germans, the Red Army did not shy away from a street fight.
In the last days of April Russian victories were counted in inches, casualties in tens of thousands. No siege, this; batter it out foot by foot, room by room; isolate it house by house, street by street, section by section; reduce it to shambles. Artillery and tanks fired down great streets at point-blank and walls grotesquely buckled and crashed. Human fodder, bearing bayonets and flamethrowers, gutted and gored its way forward. Rivers of blood spilled into the gutters. The back of the Nazi was being broken by unstoppable sledge-hammer blows. The German committed suicide, fought, bled, escaped, surrendered. The civilians cowered and starved and became dehydrated from anguished thirst.
The magnificent Unter Den Linden and Siegesalee with their immense boulevards and great massive structures were reduced to hideous shells. Sizzling bridges collapsed into the Spree and the Brandenburger Gate was riddled to a sieve; the castles and Reichstag smoldered and the factories that somehow lived through the months of bombing crumpled under short flat hits of cannon and the incessant tattoo of machine guns, grenades, and mortars. This violent racket went on without respite until exhaustion beyond exhaustion overcame the defenders. And then they were systematically cut off and their ammunition fell to the zero point.
By the first day of May white flags sprouted by the tens of thousands and the upraised hands of surrender followed. The sound and the fury diminished as lone fanatical suicide units made the final futile gesture.
On the second of May Red Army vehicles rolled freely through those places not blocked by wreckage. They controlled a city that had undergone more damage at the hands of man than any single place on earth. Berlin was obliterated from one end to the other and a hundred thousand dead civilians lay beneath the mountains of brick.
Months before, as the Red Army began the final offensive, Russian journalists, with official blessings, promised the soldiers that Berlin and all in it would be spoils of the victors.
As the combat troops gained complete control they were suddenly and strangely withdrawn from Berlin, battalion by battalion, and replaced by garrison forces of inferior quality. The replacement troops contained a great number of Asians from distant Soviet Republics. They began the final