Inferno - Max Hastings [390]
Friedrike Grensemann came home from work to find her father preparing to obey a summons to join the Volkssturm. He handed her his pistol, saying, “It’s all over, my child. Promise me that when the Russians come you will shoot yourself.” Then he kissed her and went off to die. Few Germans were any more impressed than Herr Grensemann by the home guard’s mobilisation. They parodied the song “Die Wach am Rhein”: “Dear Fatherland, set your mind at rest / The Führer has called the Grandpas up.” Berliners stripped shops of such food as they could buy, then retired to the cellars that became their refuges through the days that followed. Ruth-Andreas Friedrich risked a brief sortie to the street in darkness, during a pause in Russian air raids. She saw the eastern sky reddened “as if blood had been poured over it,” and listened to the now incessant gunfire, “a grumbling like distant thunder. That’s no bombing, that’s … artillery … Before us lies the endless city, black in the black of night, cowering as if to creep back into the earth. And we’re afraid.”
The Danish correspondent Jacob Kronika wrote that many Berliners now fervently desired their leader’s end. “Years ago they shouted ‘Heil!’ Now they hate the man who calls himself their Führer. They hate him, they fear him; because of him they are suffering hardship and death. But they have neither the strength nor the nerve to free themselves from his demonic power. They wait, in passive desperation, for the final act of the drama.”
Behind the front, the Nazis indulged a final orgy of killing: jails were emptied, their occupants shot; almost all surviving opponents of the regime held in concentration camps were executed, and lesser victims massacred with a dreadful carelessness. On 31 March at Kassel-Wilhelmshöhe station, 78 Italian workers suspected of looting a Wehrmacht supply train were rounded up and shot by firing squads. West of Hanover, the Gestapo murdered 82 imprisoned slave labourers and POWs. On 6 April, 154 Soviet prisoners were killed in a prison at Lahde, and a further 200 at Kiel. In the Nazis’ last days of power over life and death, Hitler’s doomed creatures sought to ensure that the joy of liberation was denied to all those within their reach.
Hundreds of thousands of prisoners were herded westwards, away from the Russians, and many were literally marched to death. Hugo Gryn, a Jew, described his experiences among a column of starving slaves on the road to Sachsenhausen: “When we left Lieberose, we were marched some distance away, stopped, and then heard lots of firing and then [there was] smoke. They killed and set on fire everybody who could not move out. This march was dreadful. Snow, mud. And when dusk came, turn left or turn right, walk into the nearest field, get down. In the morning, get up, except for those who could not get up, then we would move forward, wait a while, hear the shots and move on.” Almost half of the 714,211 concentration-camp prisoners held in the Reich in January 1945 were dead by May, along with many more POWs. On 12 April, the German Philharmonic Orchestra gave its last performance, organised by Albert Speer. Beethoven’s Violin Concerto was performed with Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony. So too was the finale of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung.
A LAST climactic battle remained. Since 1939, the spotlight of world attention had shifted again and again between place-names great and obscure: from Warsaw to Dunkirk and Paris; London and Tobruk; Smolensk, Moscow and Stalingrad; El Alamein and Kursk; Salerno and Anzio; Normandy, Bastogne and Warsaw again. Now, Hitler’s capital became the focus not only of many hopes and fears, but also of a vast concentration of military power: the three Soviet fronts that massed before Berlin comprised 2.5 million men and 6,250 armoured