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By Root 1458 0

was massed on the Reich’s borders from the Baltic to the Adriatic, with their city as the ultimate goal. This was significantly larger than the army with which Hitler had invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, an awesome achievement of the Stavka, albeit greatly aided by the United States’ Lend-Lease scheme, under which more than 5,000 aircraft, 7,000 tanks, many thousands of lorries, 15 million pairs of boots and prodigious quantities of food, supplies, arms and ammunition were shipped to the Soviet Union. Valued at $10 billion in total and representing 7 per cent of the USSR’s total output, this allowed the Russians to concentrate production on areas where they were most efficient. (The debt was finally repaid in 1990.) 77 So, when they wished one another Prosit Neujahr! (Happy New Year!) for 1945, few Berliners clinked glasses. The irony was not lost on them that, before the war, their liberal city had been the most anti-Nazi place in Germany, yet now it faced destruction because of its most prominent resident, who had returned from the Wolfschanze on 20 November 1944 and since 16 January had been living in the bunker beneath the Old Chancellery in the Wilhelmstrasse. (Although the bunkers under the New Chancellery were more spacious, the Old Chancellery ones 50 feet below street level were chosen as they were deemed safer.) Once there, Hitler indulged himself in fantasies about the Allies falling out with each other once their armies met.78 Although he has often been accused of moving phantom armies around on maps in the bunker, and making hollow declarations of coming victory, this was in part the fault of the sub-standard communications centre. Unlike the well-appointed Wolfschanze, his Berlin bunker had only a one-man switchboard, one radio transmitter and one radio telephone, and even that depended on a balloon suspended over the Old Chancellery.79 Officers were reduced to telephoning numbers taken at random from the Berlin telephone directory, the Soviet advance being plotted by how many times the calls were answered in Russian rather than German.

‘What troops and subordinate commanders appreciate is that a general should be constantly in personal contact with them,’ Wavell wrote in his book Generals and Generalship in 1941, ‘and should not see everything simply through the eyes of his staff. The less time a general spends in his office and the more with his troops the better.’ Although of course Hitler was a head of state rather than merely a general, for the last two and a half years of the war, ever since Stalingrad, the German people had seen almost nothing of him. He took most of his information from his Staff and from personal meetings with hard-pressed generals who almost all had to visit him rather than he them, in contrast to Churchill and Brooke who regularly flew out to talk with Allied commanders. In equally stark contrast to Churchill, Hitler never visited a bomb-site; instead the curtains in his Mercedes-Benz were closed as it sped past them. The last time Hitler appeared in semi-public was on his fifty-sixth and last birthday on 20 April 1945, when he congratulated a line-up of Hitler Youth fighters who had distinguished themselves in fighting. One of these children, Arnim Lehmann, recalls the Fuhrer’s weak voice and rheumy eyes as he squeezed their ears and told them how brave they were being. Analysis of the film footage with modern, computer-assisted lip-reading techniques for speech recognition confirms that he went down the line with an exhortation such as ‘Well done’, ‘Good’ and ‘Brave boy’ for most of the fighters, who look as if they were barely in their teens.

‘I have the impression that a very heavy battle lies ahead of us,’ said Stalin as he opened the last planning session for the capture of Berlin, and he was right. Yet he had 2.5 million troops, 6,250 tanks and 7,500 aircraft to throw into this enormous final assault, and on Monday, 16 April 1945 around 22,000 guns and mortars rained 2,450 freight-car loads of shells at the German lines, which were also blinded by a mass of searchlights