Armageddon - Max Hastings [351]
A Berlin housewife emerged from her shelter at midday on 2 May, for the first time since 25 April. Firing was still audible in the distance.
It was raining, and felt very cold. Our legs felt very queer, walking in the street. Berlin as far as the eye could see was a smoking, smouldering ruin. Dead men lay on the ground, and the living clambered over them carrying bedding and household articles. We went back to the shelter to fetch our things, and a mother and child from the Ukraine. Her house had gone, and I was going to nurse her at home. At the entrance was a Russian lieutenant. He said: “Now the war is over.” We said: “Thank God.”
The mother of Margrit and Karla Hug, both of whom had been repeatedly raped, took a different view. “Mutti decided she did not want any more humiliation and shame for Karla and me,” Margrit wrote in her diary for 1 May, and took us to the flat where we each drank four cups of Cinzano (after the chemist failed to persuade Mutti that it was not the time to end our lives). I said goodbye to friends and to Franzel, my brother . . . On the roof, we sat at the edge feet dangling down. Our house has six storeys. Mutti sat behind us, saying, “Jump, girls, jump.” I wondered why I did not fall. I wanted to, feeling very drowsy. I saw Vati [her father] standing down below, looking up, shouting: “Don’t do it!” The roof of the next house was burning. Bits of burning tar landed on Karla’s dress. She cried and moved on to a safer place. A neighbour appeared, and persuaded Mutti not to make us jump.
Yet many, many did kill themselves.
“Nothing is left of Berlin but memories,” Lieutenant Gennady Ivanov, one of the more reflective officers in the Red Army, wrote to his parents. “I would never have believed that a great city could be reduced to mere rubble. It seems so strange, after four years of gunfire, now to hear not a single shot around us.” It is impossible to dispute the truth of one of Goebbels’s last pronouncements before the murder of his children and his own suicide alongside his wife: “The earth will shake as we leave the scene.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The Bitter End
RETRIBUTION
“THE GERMANY IN which we found ourselves travelling at the end of April,” wrote the correspondent Alan Moorehead, “presented a scene that was almost beyond human comprehension. Around us fifty great cities lay in ruins . . . Many had no electric light or power or gas or running water, and no coherent system of government. Like ants in an ant-heap the people scurried over the ruins, diving furtively into cellars and doorways in search of loot . . . Everyone was on the move, and there was a frantic ant-like quality about their activities. Life was sordid, aimless, leading nowhere.”
Almost every factory chimney in the greatest industrial society in western Europe stood cold and still. Businesses lay empty, for what business could be done? No trains ran. Refugees huddled in overcrowded ruins, feeding on soup, potatoes and despair. No vessels save Allied warships moved in the ports. The roads were clogged with stony-faced people: soldiers in tattered uniforms or ill-fitting civilian clothes creeping home; families fleeing from the Russians; freed prisoners and slave labourers roaming the landscape in search of freedom, revenge or booty. Thick dust, generated by countless millions of explosive concussions from end to end of Germany, lay upon everything—windows, furniture, vehicles, houses, corpses, living people. The victors observed that a physical pallor of defeat possessed the faces of Germans, a compound of hunger, exhaustion and fear for the future. Among young and old alike, laughter had become a redundant sensation.
The orgy of looting, destruction and rape which followed the Red Army’s triumph in Berlin and across the rest of eastern Germany seemed to Stalin a just recompense to his soldiers for their labour, and a fitting chastisement for the German people.