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

The Reichstag, a mighty building with a great dome visible from far and wide, was to go down in history as a symbol of victory. It was the heart of the 9th Special Defence District, and when it fell the Reich Chancellery could hold out no longer.

Berlin. The night before May Day 1945. A night of apocalypse. Blazing buildings grotesquely lighting up a crippled city sunk in darkness, the crash of collapsing masonry, the gunfire, the choking fumes of battle and conflagration. Searchlight beams probe the darkness of the night sky: not a single German aircraft is to cross the firmament over the ring encircling Berlin. No one and nothing can fly in, or escape from here by air.

In the centre of the German capital, in the government district, the German troops were trapped, surrounded. This was their hour of tragedy, of desperate persistence and self-immolation. Gunfire raked the dark street separating the enemies when suddenly (this came about in the sector of our neighbouring 8th Guards Army under General Chuikov) someone appeared from the enemy side. A flare picked him out from the chaos of war, waving a white flag. The first envoy in Berlin to parley about a truce, the first sign of recognition that the enemy’s situation was hopeless. The firing ceased immediately.

The envoy walked, clinging to masonry and shattered concrete, crushing glass and rubble underfoot. As the soldiers watched him approach step by step, behind him a historic epoch was receding, drawing to a close.

The episode is described in his memoirs by Lieutenant General Illarion Tolkonyuk, chief of the operational department of Chuikov’s headquarters. For the first time both sides stopped shooting at each other on a Berlin street. The envoy, Lieutenant Colonel Seifert, hastily reached the now silent Russian firing point in a grey corner building. Along the telephone wire the news of the envoy ran through the appropriate channels to Army Commander Chuikov. The envoy delivered a bilingual document in Russian and German, signed by Martin Bormann, to the effect that Lieutenant Colonel Seifert was authorized to negotiate with the Russian command. The purpose of the negotiation was to agree the matter of the crossing of the front line by the Chief of the General Staff of the German Army, General Hans Krebs, in view of the particular importance of the message he would bring.

Seifert returned across the street separating us from the enemy, and about an hour and a half later, as agreed, the Germans appeared in the same place, emerging from the fresh ruins. It was 3.00 a.m. Moscow time and, on the other side of the street, for the Germans, it was 1.00 a.m. Berlin time.

There was a fair amount of light, and the soldiers of the opposing sides watched tensely as General Krebs and his party, an orderly carrying his briefcase, an officer (Colonel Theodor von Dufving), and a soldier with a white flag, came forward in the early hours of a fateful new day.

Krebs was conveyed through the divisional headquarters to Chuikov’s command post. It was 3.30 a.m. Moscow time. At 3.30 p.m. the previous day Hitler had committed suicide. Krebs brought with him this news from Bormann and Goebbels and told General Chuikov, whom he mistook for Marshal Zhukov, that he was the first non-German to be notified of this fact.

He brought with him a letter from Goebbels to ‘the Leader of the Soviet people’. Marshal Zhukov gives the text of the letter in his book. The letter announced that, ‘The Führer has today voluntarily passed away. On the basis of his lawful right, the Führer has, in the will he has left, transferred all power to Dönitz, myself and Bormann. I have authorized Bormann to establish contact with the Leader of the Soviet people. This contact is essential for peace negotiations between the powers that have suffered the greatest losses. Goebbels.’

The letter had appended to it a list of the members of the new government in accordance with Hitler’s will. In this ephemeral government of the collapsed Third Reich, Goebbels was designated Reich Chancellor and Krebs Minister of War. A new post of Minister of the Party was invented for Bormann. Grand Admiral Dönitz was appointed Reich President and Commander of the Armed Forces.

Krebs was instructed to request a truce in Berlin so that the new government could reunite (Dönitz was at Flensburg) and, legally constituted, proceed to negotiations with the Soviet command. This was an obvious last effort to break out of encircled Berlin.

The substance of the discussions between Generals Chuikov and Sokolovsky and General Krebs is now public knowledge. At the time we heard only rumours about the arrival of Krebs, and the discussions immediately became secret.

Krebs was one of the victims of the last appointments and meteoric career promotions in the doomed Third Reich. He was elevated to the post of Chief of the General Staff of the Army only in late March or even in April 1945, to replace Guderian, whom Hitler had dismissed. Very upright, cleanshaven, with a pistol on his greatcoat belt, he maintained a military bearing. That is how he looks in a photograph taken at the conclusion of the failed negotiations. Krebs had served for a long time in Moscow as the military attaché of the German embassy. He spoke Russian, and understood the hard-line remarks Chuikov and his officers were exchanging: ‘We’ll have to finish them off!’ and, into the telephone when talking to Marshal Zhukov: ‘I wouldn’t ponce around. Unconditional surrender and basta! ’

The toughest, most implacable character present at the talks was, however, Vsevolod Vishnevsky, a former officer in the tsarist Life Guards, now wearing the epaulettes of a colonel, a famous Soviet writer who appeared in Berlin right at the end of the war.

Vishnevsky shrieked in fear and indignation, ‘Take the pistol off that bandit!’ They had some difficulty calming him down, owing to his inability to differentiate between an envoy and a prisoner. Another outburst came when he saw that, when Krebs handed the documents over to Chuikov, he kept some pages himself, and demanded that they be taken off him by force. This writer and socialist humanitarian was restrained with difficulty by soldiers who had been fighting throughout the war years and become toughened and embittered towards the enemy, but who nevertheless retained respect for military ethics and a sense of personal dignity.

For the German side, the negotiations were doomed to fail. Marshal Zhukov, to whom Chuikov was reporting by phone, emphasized that negotiations could be conducted only with the agreement of all the allies, who expected scrupulous observance of mutual obligations.

The documents presented by Krebs were delivered to Zhukov at the command point of front headquarters. It was obvious that the reply could only be a demand for unconditional surrender to all the Allies. Ultimately, however, it was for Stalin to decide, and he was asleep at his dacha, as Zhukov was informed over the telephone by the general on duty. This would delay the negotiations, and Zhukov was concerned that this might give the Allies grounds to blame the Soviet command for engaging in separate negotiations. He decided. ‘I must ask you to wake him. The matter is urgent and cannot be left until morning.’

In a conversation I had with him years later, Georgiy Zhukov praised his memory as ‘remarkable’, but even people who did not have that distinction had no difficulty in retaining firmly in their minds the words they heard Stalin utter. We can rest assured that Zhukov’s recollection of Stalin’s reply was accurate. I quoted them when I wrote about my meeting with Zhukov, and I will repeat them here, with some additional comments.

Awakened by Zhukov’s call, Stalin, perhaps still half asleep, reacted to the news of Hitler’s suicide in less than his usual phlegmatic manner, and even with a degree of spontaneity: