Елена Ржевская - Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter - From the Battle for Moscow to Hitler's Bunker

Here is one of the last, dated 27 April: Goebbels’ Berliner Frontblatt (The Berlin Front Newssheet).

Bravo, Berliners!

Berlin will remain German! The Führer has announced this to the world, and you, the Berliners, will ensure that his word remains the truth. Bravo, Berliners! Your conduct is exemplary! Continue just as valorously, continue just as stubbornly, without mercy or leniency, and the waves of the Bolsheviks’ assault will crash in vain against you… You will prevail, Berliners. Help is on its way!

This little flysheet reached us on 29 April when we were already near Potsdamer Platz.

We were instructed to head for the area from which the troops of our 3rd Shock Army would attack in the direction of Potsdamer Platz. Early in the morning we proceeded in our adverse terrain vehicle over first one and then another barricade where they had been overturned and crushed by tanks, picking our way amidst mangled rails, timbers and guns. We passed over an anti-tank trench that had been filled in with shattered masonry and empty barrels. The buildings became more frequent, some docked by several storeys, others with only a charred wall remaining, as if it had forgotten to collapse. These were monuments to the fighting that had taken place two days earlier. In places, tanks had ploughed their way through the rubble, and vehicles, of which there were increasing numbers, were diverting on to the trails blazed by the tanks’ caterpillar tracks.

The traffic in the streets of Berlin was being directed by lasses from Smolensk, Kalinin and Ryazan in well-fitting tunics that must surely have been altered by Mrs Buzinska in Poznań. The car came to a stop when the road ahead was impassable. We saw advancing towards us small groups of Frenchmen with their luggage trolleys with the French flag on the side, picking their way through the accumulations of crushed brick, scrap metal and rubble. We waved to each other.

The closer we came to the centre, the more unbreathable the air became. Anyone who was in Berlin in those days will remember that air, acrid and opaque from the fumes and stone dust, and the grittiness of sand in their teeth.

We made our way behind the walls of the ruined buildings. No one was trying to put the fires out. The walls were still smoking, and decorative creepers continued to cling to them with burned paws.

‘Unsere Mauern brachen, unsere Herzen nicht !’ Our walls have broken, but not our hearts, declared a poster above a door that had survived but now led only to darkness and devastation.

Diving out of one basement into another, we encountered German families. They all asked us the same thing: ‘How soon will this nightmare end?’ Hitler declared, ‘If the war should be lost, the German nation must disappear.’ But people, in defiance of the Führer’s will, had no wish to disappear. White sheets and pillowcases were hung from windows.

‘In any house hanging out a white flag, all the men are to be shot.’ Such was Himmler’s order.

It was very difficult to find your way through the city by map reading. We had run out of Russian signs and the German ones had mostly disappeared along with the walls. We resorted to asking directions from people we met in the streets, who were hauling their possessions somewhere.

The signallers could be glimpsed, pulling their cables along behind them. Hay was being transported on a cart, and a moustachioed driver from a Guards regiment was chewing a dry straw. Other straw was being lightly sprinkled over the cratered Berlin roadway. A group of soldiers with submachine guns marched by, one with a bandaged head taking care not to fall behind or become detached from the column.

The coat of a bareheaded elderly woman crossing the road displayed a white armband prominently. She was leading two young children by the hand, a boy and a girl. Both of them, with their hair neatly brushed, had white armbands sewn to their sleeves above the elbow. As she passed us she said loudly, not bothered whether we understood or not, ‘These are orphans. Our house has been bombed. I am taking them to another place. These are orphans… Our house has been bombed…’

A man in a black hat came out of a gateway. He stopped when he saw us and held out a small package wrapped in greaseproof paper. He unwrapped it to reveal a yellowed box, which he opened. ‘L’Origan Coty, Fräulein Offizier. I swap for a packet of tobacco.’ He stood for a moment, then tucked his package away in the pocket of his long overcoat and wandered off.

After that the streets were completely deserted. I remember a pillar covered with posters, chiffon curtains reaching like outstretched white hands from a window, a bus with an advert on its roof, an enormous papier mâché shoe, which had crashed into a building. And Goebbels’ categorical assurances on the walls that the Russians would never enter Berlin.

Now, increasingly, it was dead districts containing nothing but ruins. It became even harder to breathe. Dust and smoke obscured the way forward. At every step we were risking a bullet. A fierce battle was by now raging in the government district. The latest order from the Nazi leadership demanded that the capital should be defended to the last man. ‘Men, women and boys stand side by side with the battle-tempered and stubbornly resisting Wehrmacht, which has been fighting the Bolshevik hordes for years and knows that this is a matter not of negotiations, but of life and death.’

Barricades, ditches, rubble, blocks and traps were to stop the advance of tanks. Concrete structures and major buildings had been turned into ramparts, their windows into gun embrasures. Damaged tanks that still had a functioning gun, and often undamaged tanks too, were dug into the ground, turning them into powerful firing points.

Goebbels’ Berliner Frontblatt listed the directions of the main attacks that had been mounted to repel ‘the Soviets’ in the preceding twenty-four hours: between Grunewald and Siemensstadt, in the Tempelhof–Neukölln district and streets to the south of the Wedding railway station.

‘Attack! On to complete and final victory, army comrades!’ exclaimed the appeal of our military soviet of the 1st Byelorussian Front.

A huge, unfamiliar city. The smoke from burning buildings shrouded its outlines, whole districts of ruins gave it the appearance of fantasy. Just under six years before, an invasion of Europe, criminal and unprecedented in its brutality, was launched from here, and now to here it had returned.

How many times, in the darkest days of the war, our soldiers had repeated, ‘We’ll reach Berlin yet, we’ll find out what that River Spree amounts to.’ And now they had. The meandering, high-banked River Spree, like Berlin’s other rivers, canals and lakes, complicated the advance of the attacking units. The haze from gunfire, smoke and dust hovered over the river like a dense pall, fancifully reflecting the light of burning buildings. Beyond the Spree was the government district, ‘the 9th Special Defence District’, where heavy fighting was in train.

On panels indicating the direction of traffic, on tanks, on shells being loaded into artillery, and on the barrels of rifles you saw the slogan, ‘To the Reichstag!’ It was on everyone’s mind in those days in Berlin. On 29 April troops of our army arrived at Königsplatz, on to which the six-pillared façade of the Reichstag’s grey hulk faced.

It was considered that once we took the Reichstag, once we raised the red flag above its cupola, the world would know that Hitler and fascism had been vanquished. The storming of the Reichstag riveted the attention of every journalist, whether newly arrived from Moscow or already with the front-line press. The honour of actually taking the building fell to our 3rd Shock Army under Colonel General Kuznetsov.