Inferno - Max Hastings [393]
With so many Germans running away or surrendering at any opportunity, it is extraordinary that resistance persisted for so long. Some 45,000 SS and Wehrmacht troops, together with 40,000 Volkssturm and a mere 60 tanks, held out for a week against the might of Zhukov’s and Konev’s armies. Street fighting is never easy, because it is hard to control and manoeuvre small groups of men clinging to precarious lodgements among buildings, and the struggle in that last week of April showed the power of despair. In Hitler’s capital, the Red Army paid the price for its policy of unrestrained savagery towards German soldiers and civilians: whatever the views of Hitler and the SS, it is hard to suppose that Berlin’s defenders would have fought so stubbornly had they entertained hopes of mercy for themselves or the population. As it was, the Soviet commitment to murder, rape and pillage was known to every German. Most of those manning the perimeter saw no prospect save that of death. Among the last-ditch defenders was a unit of the French Waffen SS Charlemagne Division. The commander of these doomed men, twenty-five-year-old Henri Fenet, was presented with the Knight’s Cross at a ceremony held in a wrecked tram, by candlelight. Fenet already had another medal: the Croix de Guerre, earned fighting for France in 1940.
Amazingly, soldiers of the Charlemagne and some other Waffen SS units mustered sufficient determination to mount local counterattacks, one of which retook from the Russians the Gestapo headquarters building on Prinz Albrechtstrasse. Some men and boys who sought salvation in flight were summarily hanged in the streets by the SS men ranging the city. Russians and Germans alike were mocked by the contrast between the mountains of wreckage and the heaped and broken bodies littering the landscape and signs of spring breaking through. When gunfire paused even briefly, birds could be heard singing; trees blossomed until blast reduced them to blackened skeletons; tulips flowered in some places, and in the parks there was an overpowering scent of lilac. But mostly there were corpses. Germany’s leaders had conducted a long love affair with death: in Berlin in April 1945, this achieved a final consummation.
On 28 April Benito Mussolini was captured and shot by partisans while attempting to escape from northern Italy. On the afternoon of the thirtieth, as Russian troops stormed the Reichstag building 400 yards from Hitler’s bunker, the leader of the Third Reich killed himself and his wife. The banality of evil has seldom been more vividly displayed than by the couple’s conduct in their last days. Eva Braun was much preoccupied with the disposal of her jewellery—“my diamond watch is unfortunately being repaired”—and by concealing her dressmakers’ accounts from posterity—“On no account must Heise’s bills be found.” She wrote in a last letter to her friend Herta Ostermayr, “What should I say to you? I cannot understand how it should have all come to this, but it is impossible to believe any more in a God.”
Most Germans received the news of Hitler’s death with numbed indifference. The soldier Gerd Schmuckle was at a crowded inn far from Berlin when the radio bulletin was broadcast. “If—instead of this announcement—the innkeeper had come to the door and said that an animal of his had died in the stable, the sympathy could not have been less. Only one young soldier leapt up, extended his right arm and cried out ‘Hail to the Führer!’ All the others continued to eat their soup as though