Armageddon - Max Hastings [324]
There was a Cuban dance band, which had appeared from no one knew where, performing nightly in the basement of a ruin in the Tiergarten. The Cubans became fashionable. Money seemed suddenly irrelevant, supplanted by barter. Unexpected stocks of coffee, cigarettes and cognac were unearthed. Half a kilo of coffee could be exchanged for twenty litres of petrol. There was heavy traffic in false identity papers and car number plates. Fatalism, lassitude gained sway everywhere outside the ranks of those soldiers preparing to fight their last battle. Prisoners of war alleged to be clearing city bomb rubble sat idle by fires lit in the debris, apparently unsupervised. Unarmed soldiers and deserters wandered the streets, with little effective interference from the military police. The Third Reich’s deadly grip was loosening, its lifeblood seeping away into the horror-soaked soil of Germany. Labour gangs began to build defensive barricades in the suburbs. Berliners observed that they would hold up the Russians for exactly sixty-five minutes: an hour laughing, followed by five minutes sweeping the pathetic obstacles aside.
“The Berliners carried on forced by fear,” wrote von Stemann. “They were frightened all the time: of their own secret police; of the bombers; of the Russians; and of the revenge of millions of forced labourers. They were frightened of their own past, and knew it would catch up with them.” Yet despite all the preparations, there were welcome rumours among the inhabitants that the capital would not be defended at all. For a few brief weeks, Berliners thought themselves fortunate people, as elsewhere across Germany people fled for their lives in their millions.
Ilse Bayer, twenty-five-year-old daughter of a Berlin haulage contractor, was the wife of a naval petty officer based at Swinemünde on the Baltic. Through January and February, she had found refugees from East Prussia knocking on the door of her billet. Now, it was her own turn to become a fugitive. On the afternoon of 12 March, a secretary from naval headquarters ran down their street, warning families of an impending air attack. Frau Bayer scooped up her two younger children in her arms, while the eldest ran in front of her to a shelter. The bombing seemed to last an eternity. At one point, an admiral appeared and wanted to evict all the civilians from the shelter, since it stood on Kriegsmarine property. No one heeded him.
The Bayers emerged at last to find flames everywhere, their own home in ruins, the ships alongside the quays burning fiercely. Ilse believed that her husband Walter was at sea, but suddenly she saw him standing there in front of her. “I almost clawed him to see if he was real.” The commanding officer of his destroyer, an uncommonly humane man, had sent Bayer ashore in a launch to retrieve his family. His wife found herself struggling desperately to get her small children, utterly distraught, up the side of the destroyer from the pitching boat. Next afternoon, the navy landed the refugees amid the ruins of Kiel. The Bayers were fortunate to find a lodging with an elderly couple in a village a few miles outside the city, where the children cried themselves to sleep. In the days that followed, there were renewed flashes of terror, when the roads were strafed by passing fighter-bombers, “which killed a lot of people at that time.” But the Bayer family rejoiced in their unexpected good fortune. They lived.
Eleonore von Joest, who had trekked from East Prussia to Berlin in January, found herself once more on the road in April with her mother, seven children, a housemaid and a Polish farmworker called Miron. They could