Cornelius Ryan - The Last Battle

In Heinrici’s war diary, in which all telephone conversations were taken down verbatim in shorthand, an astonishing entry appears: “12:30 April 21: Busse to Heinrici: ‘Just got word that 56th Corps last night moved into Olympic Village from Hoppegarten without specific orders. Request arrest…’” No one knows where Busse got his information, but it was wrong: the Olympic Village was at Döberitz on the western side of Berlin. Weidling was fighting on the eastern out-skirts of the city.

The Eclipse documents he had studied so thoroughly had convinced Jodl that Wenck’s drive east would not be hindered by the Americans who, he was sure, were permanently halted on the Elbe.

The other fifteen bodies were found three weeks later. Still clutched in the hand of Albrecht Haushofer were some of the sonnets he had written in jail. One line read: “There are times which are guided by madness; And then they are the best heads that one hangs.”

Apparently there had not been time to circulate Wiberg’s report after its receipt in London.

Two operations continued without a break: the meteorological records, kept at the station in Potsdam, did not miss a day throughout 1945, and eleven of the city’s seventeen breweries—engaged, by government decree, in “essential” production—continued making beer.

In Normandy, in 1944, the author remembers being present when two captured soldiers in German uniform posed a strange problem to intelligence interrogaters of the U.S. First Army: nobody could understand their language. Both men were sent to England where it was discovered they were Tibetan shepherds, press-ganged into the Red Army, captured on the eastern front and press-ganged once again into the German Army.

Joachim Lipschitz was eventually to become one of West Berlin’s most famous officials. As Senator of Internal Affairs in 1955, he was in charge of the city’s police force. He remained an unrelenting foe of the East German Communist regime until his death in 1961.

Some of the fire engines that had left on the twenty-second returned to the city on the order of Major General Walter Golbach, head of the Fire Department. According to post-war reports, the fire engines were ordered out of Berlin by Goebbels to keep them from falling into Russian hands. Golbach, on hearing that he was to be arrested for rescinding Goebbels’ order, tried to commit suicide and failed. Bleeding from a face wound, he was taken out by SS men and executed.

They both lived. Prompt action by a doctor saved their lives.

The Russians do not deny the rapes that occurred during the fall of Berlin, although they tend to be very defensive about them. Soviet historians admit that the troops got out of control, but many of them attribute the worst of the atrocities to vengeance-minded ex-prisoners of war who were released during the Soviet advance to the Oder. In regard to the rapes, the author was told by editor Pavel Troyanoskii of the army newspaper Red Star: “We were naturally not one hundred per cent gentlemen; we had seen too much.” Another Red Star editor said: “War is war, and what we did was nothing in comparison with what the Germans did in Russia.” Milovan Djilas, who was head of the Yugoslav Military Mission to Moscow during the war, says in his book Conversations with Stalin that he complained to the Soviet dictator about atrocities committed by Red Army troops in Yugoslavia. Stalin replied: “Can’t you understand it if a soldier who has crossed thousands of kilometers through blood and fire has fun with a woman or takes a trifle?”

With the two correspondents when Chuikov summoned them to the meeting was a visiting Soviet composer, Matvei Isaakovich Blanter, sent by Stalin to write a symphony commemorating the Berlin victory. The correspondents asked the General what to do with the composer, and Chuikov said, “Bring him along.” But when Blanter arrived he was wearing civilian clothes, and it was clear that he could not be passed off as a Red Army officer. He was hastily shoved into a clothes closet adjoining the meeting room. He stayed there for most of the ensuing conference. Just before the visitors left he fainted from lack of air and fell into the room, to the utter astonishment of the Germans.

It is the author’s belief that the Russians were not interested in Eva Braun and made no real effort to identify her body. The first confirmation by the Soviets that Hitler was dead was made to the author and to Professor John Erickson by Marshal Vasili Sokolovskii on April 17, 1963, almost eighteen years after the event.