Tony Le Tissier - With Our Backs to Berlin

As I was returning to my troops via Leipziger Strasse, a mortar bomb, whose approach I had not heard, exploded in front of me on the roadway. A fragment hit me in the throat, blocking my airpipe so that I could hardly breathe. I crawled, for I did not have enough air to walk, back to our field hospital in the Hotel Adlon. There everything was overcrowded with the wounded lying on top of instead of alongside each other. The splinter was removed, my throat bandaged up and luckily I was also given an anti-tetanus injection. I left quickly, depressed by so much misery.

When I returned to Potsdamer Platz, the work went on. The Potsdamer Strasse entrance had received a direct hit from a heavy shell, which had destroyed the concrete steps and exposed the earth below, making it ideal for setting up our mortars. We could now fire our high trajectory weapons safe from all but a direct hit.

The battalion commander came along and said that we should start using our rockets. that was why we had brought them. ‘But where?’ I asked him, for it was stupid demanding something like this. There was no concentration of enemy tanks to aim at such as we had had at the Schlesischer Station. There were only the weasly enemy scouts around that were becoming ever more cheeky as they wriggled their way through our thinly manned positions. Every runner emerging into the open was being shot at, as happened to me when I was returning from taking out stragglers to the forward positions. I was a dead shot and picked off a small group of scouts with my captured sub-machine gun. I asked a survivor: ‘What interests you here?’ and got a surprising reply. These Russians had the mad idea of capturing Hitler, whom in their innocence they believed was hidden somewhere around here. They had come to collect him and fly him back to Stalin, who would award them with a medal and send them home on leave. We could only laugh at this simplicity, as if the bodyguards would allow anyone to get near to Hitler. They would rather let themselves be hacked to pieces first.

But others too had silly ideas. Grand Admiral Dönitz, for instance, sent some specially selected sailors to Berlin to guard Hitler. When they landed at Gatow they were immediately brought to the Reichs Chancellery, but what could Mohnke do with them? There were enough guards there already, apart from the SD. So Mohnke sent them to the Reichstag to fill the gap that the Russians fortunately had not discovered. Unfortunately these sailors were not adequately equipped for combat, having come from an honour guard and a radar school, for it was thought that they would be only used as an honour guard at the Reichs Chancellery. However, despite the senior ranks of the naval officers accompanying them, they subordinated themselves to SS-Lieutenant Babick, who had had combat experience under Joachim Peiper, even though he had nothing higher than an Iron Cross First Class. [50]

I had now sent out two of my NCOs as forward observers, one covering the area Hallisches Tor-Möckern Bridge, the other the area Potsdamer Bridge-Lützowplatz. They both came back at night when there was nothing further to see. But they too could not offer any targets for the rockets, and we could not use these weapons for shooting at sparrows.

However, the pressure from the Reichs Chancellery continued to increase, and I had to do something to please my superiors, sitting in their bombproof cellars with no consideration for the civilian population. The rockets would only destroy their homes, burying them under the rubble. No, I would not do that. If I was not hitting the enemy, I had to find a target where I would not do any damage.

So I went into the Tiergarten where the tanks of the ‘Nordland’ under the command of the brave SS-Lieutenant Colonel Peter Kausch were located. When I explained my problem to him he clapped me on the shoulder and said: ‘You are quite right. Those gentlemen are shitting themselves.’ He pulled out his tanks and I fired two rockets into the vacated area. None of my superiors noticed, as they were not going to stick their heads outside. Following my report, all these gentlemen were content and left me in peace.

As I was curious how things were going, I used my wound as an excuse to visit the Reichs Chancellery almost every day, although I had our own nurses do the bandaging. There were about 1,500 wounded lying in the cellars almost on top of each other. The doctors bustled about tending to them with carbide lamps as only the Führerbunker had its own electricity supply. At least there was enough to eat, as well as sufficient supplies of other kinds. We could also get mortar bombs from there, but the shells for the artillery were almost finished, and once Gatow Airfield had fallen there were no more. Consequently the German artillery fire became ever weaker.

With regard to artillery, a one-armed army lieutenant approached me. He had two 105 mm guns but had lost contact with his unit, and was looking for another unit to attach himself to. With my battalion commander’s permission, we combined forces. He still had some ammunition for his guns, which he had brought with him. We put them under cover down below with us. If a super shell burst through the roof now, we would all be blown to smithereens. These Wehrmacht soldiers stuck with us to the end and we worked well together, including our forward observers.

The military police now wanted me to send my Volkssturm men forward into action. Despite my protests, they said: ‘No one can afford to sit around doing nothing any more. Send them into action somewhere.’

I suggested they comb out the Reichs Chancellery, where there were plenty of Party officials doing nothing, but they protested that that was not their job. These obnoxious types, whom every front line soldier hated, went off grumbling, but I realised that I would have to find something useful for my Volkssturm men to do.

I had asked the women that had established themselves on the station platforms with their children how we could help them. They said that they were hungry, for no one supplied them with anything, but that the worst thing was thirst. There was no water available down below as the system was out of order, and they were going crazy with thirst.

So we collected all the containers we could and set off to search for water. There were still some street water pumps in Berlin that had not been been used for years but were relatively intact. When we found one at last, the water carrying role began. Once I told my men that we would carry on doing this, there was no more wrangling about water. Of course, anyone attempting to use the water for washing would have been lynched, and men under 60 had to fend for themselves, but the Volkssturm men remained undisturbed in their task, for the women would have beaten up the military police mercilessly if they had intervened.

In the meantime the Russians had moved forward up to the Landwehr Canal on one side of the Tiergarten and up to the Spree on the other. Now we had targets enough, except in the Tiergarten where our own forces lay, and especially round the Zoo bunker, whose anti-aircraft guns were now engaged in the land battle.

On 27 April I took another group of stragglers up to Belle-Alliance-Platz (Mehringplatz), but found no one there to hand them over to, so I appointed the senior serving soldier in charge of the mob, which is all you could call them, set them on guard and went back. I could see that they would run when the first Russian appeared, but I hoped that there would still be some of our comrades around in the ruins that would take them on. The companies were now a complete mixture of different kinds of combatants. Often the stragglers made their way back, only to be rounded up and sent forward again like cattle to the slaughter. Among them I recognised some familiar faces, but I played dumb and pretended not to notice.