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By Root 1216 0

the battlefield. So many men fell attempting to cross open ground that the Russians sometimes despaired of making the final breakthrough. More and more tanks and self-propelled guns were brought forward. Perhaps 10,000 German defenders remained within their perimeter. It seemed so hard to kill men dug into positions of masonry and rubble. Late that evening, at desperate risk two men of 756th Regiment, Mikhail Yegorov and Meliton Kantaria, climbed into the dome of the pitted and blasted Reichstag and hoisted the Red victory banner. In the early hours of 1 May, General Krebs, who had succeeded Guderian as Army Chief of Staff, went forward to the Russian lines and attempted to parley with the commander of Eighth Guards Army, the former defender of Stalingrad, about surrender terms. Absurdly, the German appeared to delude himself that, now Hitler was gone, the Allies would be willing to negotiate with a successor regime. After consultations with Stalin and Zhukov, Krebs was brutally informed that only total capitulation was acceptable. He returned to his headquarters. That evening the Russians launched a devastating new barrage against the remaining German perimeter. Next morning, the commander of LVI Pan-zer Corps requested a ceasefire. At 1500 on the afternoon of 2 May, the Rus-sian guns fell silent. Some 125,000 Berliners had died in the battle. Krebs killed himself.

“The Germans who fought to the last weren’t the old men—they were surrendering in their thousands, generals and soldiers together,” said Major Yury Ryakhovsky. “It was the young ones who went on and on.” In Berlin on 30 April, he was told of a twelve-year-old German boy who had destroyed twelve Soviet tanks with Panzerfausts. “We had never really understood just what the fausts could do. There were piles of them everywhere. Boys were firing at T-34s from a range of two or three metres. You could get nowhere in a straight line—you had to zig-zag everywhere, to and fro across the streets.”

“It seemed so strange, when the end was so close, that these young boys were resisting so fiercely,” said Lieutenant Vasily Filimonenko. When at last it was all over, he watched enemy soldiers advancing nervously from their positions to surrender, crying “Hitler kaputt! Hitler kaputt!”—the Wehrmacht’s mantra of renunciation. The Russian officer remembered earlier days, when even in captivity the arrogance of Hitler’s soldiers was undimmed. They would tell their captors sneeringly: “You’re all for it, you know.”

When Yury Ryakhovsky reached the ruins of the Reichstag, he could not bring himself to emulate thousands of Russian soldiers who had already scrawled their names on the walls. “I disliked the idea of behaving like a tourist. We were not there as tourists, I thought.” But when Captain Vasily Krylov saw his cousin Nikolai’s signature among the mass of graffiti, he wrote beneath it: “I was here, too.” Krylov said: “I felt great satisfaction, looking on Berlin. Our vengeance had come. Even when I saw Dresden, I thought: this, also, was right.” Filimonenko cherished the end in Hitler’s capital as the greatest moment of his life: “Ever since 1941, I had always dreamed of surviving to walk into Berlin.” Of a hundred men with whom he had completed his artillery training course in 1940, just three survived to celebrate victory.

Between 16 April and 8 May, the fronts of Zhukov, Konev and Rokossovsky lost 352,425 men, by far the heaviest casualty toll of the battle for Germany.* 9 More than 100,000 of these men were dead. The capture of Berlin displayed outstanding generalship by Konev, not by Zhukov. In his yearning for glory and in his desperation to satisfy Stalin, 1st Belorussian Front’s commander battered the enemy into submission through human sacrifice, not manoeuvre. Stalin and the Red Army gained their symbolic triumph, in a fashion and at a cost that no Western ally could envy. Hitler had desired that his own death should be wreathed in the sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of lesser mortals. Zhukov indulged him, making the battle for Berlin a clash of two prehistoric