Inferno - Max Hastings [392]
By 25 April, Zhukov and Konev had encircled the German capital—an attempt by Gen. Walther Wenck’s Twelfth Army to break the ring and bring relief was easily frustrated. The Russians began a weeklong struggle to batter a path through the city street by street, block by block. The antitank ditches dug with such labour by tens of thousands of Berliners proved as futile as all such obstacles, but barricades of rubble heaped on old trams and rail trucks were more effective. Regular troops supported by old men and teenagers of the Hitler Youth fought the Russians with small arms, grenades and panzerfausts. The boy soldiers who died fighting for Berlin would have seemed especially tragic victims, had there not been so many others. Dorothea von Schwanenflugel described an encounter with one unhappy little figure, “a mere child in a uniform many sizes too large for him, with an anti-tank grenade lying beside him. Tears were running down his face, and he was obviously very frightened of everyone. I very softly asked him what he was doing there. He lost his distrust and told me that he had been ordered to lie in wait here, and when a Soviet tank approached he was to run under it and explode the grenade. I asked how that would work, but he didn’t know. In fact this frail child didn’t even look capable of carrying such a grenade.” Another Berlin woman wrote likewise:
You see very young boys, baby faces peeping out beneath oversized steel helmets. It’s frightening to hear their high-pitched voices. They’re fifteen years old at the most, standing there looking so skinny and small in their billowing uniform tunics. Why are we so appalled at the thought of children being murdered? In three or four years the same children strike us as perfectly fit for shooting and maiming … Up to now being a soldier meant being a man … Wasting these boys before they reach maturity obviously runs against some fundamental law of nature, against our instinct, against every drive to preserve the species. Like certain fish or insects that eat their own offspring. People aren’t supposed to do that. The fact that this is exactly what we are doing is a sure sign of madness.
Neither side enjoyed scope for tactical subtlety in the battle for Berlin, there were merely a thousand savage local encounters in which the attackers measured each advance in yards. Again and again the first men to push forward were killed, the lead tanks destroyed; Soviet artillery and bombers pounded the defenders; whole streets were reduced to rubble. Siege artillery, 203mm howitzers, was brought forward to blast buildings whose occupants fired back over open sights while dust and smoke clogged the air. Stalin goaded his marshals by telephone from Moscow: tens of thousands of men paid with their lives as Zhukov and Konev conducted not a coordinated assault but a race to fulfil their rival ambitions.
“Berlin … presented a dreadful scene,” wrote a Swedish Red Cross representative, Sven Frykman, surveying the beleaguered city by night. “A full moon shone from a cloudless sky so you could see the awful extent of the damage. A ghost town of cave dwellers was all that was left of this world metropolis … The imperial palace, all the splendid castles, the prince’s palace, the Royal Library, Tempelhof, the buildings along the Unter den Linden—hardly anything was left. Because of the moonlight which shone through all these empty windows and doorways, the city gave an even more grotesque impression than by daylight. Here and there a flame was still burning after the most recent bombing raids, and the fire brigades were at work. Burst pipes on some of the streets made you think of Venice and its canals.”
Helga Schneider wrote: “We are vegetating in a ghost town, without electric light or gas, without water, we are forced to think