v1.0.1 / chapter 14 of 15 / 01 mar 08 / greg goebel / public domain
* On 30 April 1945, Adolf Hitler decided he'd had enough and committed suicide. That did not completely stop the fighting in Europe, but over the next week the shooting gradually faded out, effectively ending with a formal surrender on 8 May. The Allies now restored order and put the surviving leaders of the Nazi regime on trial.
* As the Red Army converged on the center of Berlin, the struggle for the city entered its final phase. Stalin wanted the battle completed by May Day, the traditional Communist holiday, regardless of the cost. As the Red Army squeezed the defenders into the Tiergarten area, life turned into a hell of explosions, destruction, and lunacy.
By that time, Hitler was close to the end of his rope. He was infuriated that day when a report came in over BBC radio that Heinrich Himmler had offered to surrender Germany to the Western Allies. Himmler was beyond the Fuehrer's reach, but he was able to capture Major General Hermann Fegelein, the SS liaison to headquarters, trying to get away in civilian clothes with his pregnant mistress. He seemed drunk and was loaded down with loot.
Fegelein was worked over by the Gestapo, revealed that he knew of Himmler's schemes, and was promptly executed. If Hitler wasn't long for this world, he could at least cram in a bit more vindictiveness in the time he had left. He felt all the more vindictive because he realized that now even the SS was deserting him. He ordered Hanna Reitsch to fly out of Berlin with General Greim, who was to arrange for the arrest of Himmler and deal with him as well.
That done, Hitler turned his attention to more pleasant matters. His mistress, Eva Braun, had always wanted to marry him, but though he had little interest in other women he had refused to do so, feeling it would have diminished his stature as a self-made Teutonic demigod. Her relationship with him was so discreet that few outside the Fuehrer's immediate circle knew she existed. She was, however, totally devoted to him. When her sister Ilse, who had fled west in front of the advancing Soviets, suggested that the Fuehrer was leading the country into an abyss, Eva angrily told Ilse that she ought to be stood up against a wall and be shot. Hitler knew that Eva wanted legitimacy badly, and as she was clearly willing to die with him even he could not deny her that when the world was falling down around him. They married that evening.
He then dictated his political testament, passing the Reich presidency and formal leadership to Doenitz, though the other prime contender for the position, Martin Bormann, was named Party Chancellor and executor of Hitler's will. This arrangement would almost certainly put Doenitz and Bormann at odds; even in his last hours, Hitler could not give up his instinct to play people off against each other. Those who had failed him, Goering and Himmler, were to be expelled from the Nazi Party.
Even Hitler acknowledged in the document that these instructions would likely be irrelevant in the order that followed him, though tiresomely true to form he ended with a blast against "international Jewry". The testament declared that Goebbels would be Reich Chancellor in the new order, but Goebbels, possibly recognizing the futility of the honor, for the first time refused to obey his Fuehrer and insisted that he would remain to the end.
* Hitler woke up on the morning of 29 April to be greeted with news of the death of Benito Mussolini and his mistress, who had been captured and shot by Italian partisans. That set the atmosphere for the rest of the day, which was characterized by the rumble of explosions above the bunker as the Soviets closed in. All the military news was bad, and there was little doubt that the Red Army would capture the bunker in two or three days. Once again Hitler was encouraged to flee Berlin; once again he refused.
The next morning, 30 April 1945, the Red Army began a final push to capture the Reichstag, which was defended by roughly 6,000 Germans, mostly fanatical SS troops. After a thorough bombardment, the 150th Division of the Third Shock Army went in.
While the drama above ground continued, events in the Fuehrer's bunker moved on to their final conclusion. Hitler ate lunch with his two secretaries at midday while Eva Hitler gave away her belongings. In mid-afternoon, the Fuehrer and his bride committed suicide in his private quarters; he swallowed a cyanide pill and shot himself, while she relied on the cyanide pill. Witnesses were impressed by the way that she had displayed no fear to the very end, exhibiting a sort of dignity and serenity beyond the reach of her husband.
Hitler, revolted by the way the corpses of Mussolini and his mistress had been strung up in public to be abused, had given orders that he and his wife's bodies be cremated. SS officers took the corpses to the surface and tried to burn them, though they couldn't build a proper pyre to make sure the bodies were reduced to ash. One of the SS guards ran downstairs to tell a colleague: "The chief's on fire. Do you want to come and have a look?"
With Hitler dead, the occupants of the bunker began to disperse. Martin Bormann tried to flee through the battleground in the city. He was reported killed but his body was not found, and rumors would linger for decades that he had escaped and was at large. A skeleton was found in Berlin in 1972 that was identified as his, and he was declared dead by a German court in 1973.
Both the defenders and the attackers in the fight for the Reichstag had other things on their mind than the fate of Hitler and Eva Braun. It was a nasty close-quarters struggle, with German and Soviet troops fighting it out for individual rooms with submachine guns and grenades. That evening, two Soviet soldiers, Mikhail Yegorov and Meliton Kantaria, experienced fighters who had fought in partisan ranks, managed to get to the roof of the building to plant a flag at 10:50 PM, symbolically proclaiming Soviet victory in the struggle. It was as powerful a symbol of victory to the Russians as the raising of the US flag on Iwo Jima by the Marines was to the Americans.
* The shooting wasn't actually over at the time. The vicious fight for the Reichstag went on until sunrise the next morning, 1 May, when the surviving defenders finally gave up. In the meantime, SS troopers had blasted a hole in the wall between a subway tunnel and a neighboring canal to flood it and prevent the Soviets from using it to infiltrate German positions. The water flooded through 25 kilometers (15.5 miles) of tunnels that were full of civilians trying to hide out from the fighting.
The story has persisted that large numbers were drowned, but more detailed examinations suggest that the tunnels flooded slowly and not more than generally to waist height. Some wounded who were in the underground may have drowned, but the numbers of bodies seen floating in the water were probably casualties from other actions whose corpses just happened to be in the tunnel. There was no shortage of corpses in Berlin at the moment. The Soviets were worried that some of the Nazi brass were trying to escape at that time and Red Army forces were fighting furiously to make sure no Germans got out of the encirclement of the city.
A few hours earlier, in the small hours of the morning, German General Krebs had come across the lines under a white flag and spoken with Chuikov. Krebs tried to brass it out with Chuikov at first, saying: "Today is the first of May, a great holiday for our two nations -- "
Chuikov dryly put Krebs in his place: "We have a great holiday today. How things are with you over there it is less easy to say."
Krebs, brought down a notch, informed Chuikov that Hitler had committed suicide. Chuikov replied, lying through his teeth: "We know." That took Krebs back again, but he went on to ask for a cease-fire until the new Doenitz government could organize itself for a formal capitulation. Krebs was assuming that Chuikov had a level of authority that was well beyond what he actually had, and Krebs seemed to probing for a conditional capitulation when the Allies had agreed to settle for nothing less than unconditional surrender. Chuikov stalled Krebs and then phoned Zhukov to pass on the news. Zhukov then phoned Koba in turn. On hearing the news, Stalin replied: "So that's the end of the bastard. Too bad it was impossible to take him alive." Stalin, never very trusting, sent Beria to provide confirmation.
Krebs finally tired of being strung along by the impassive Chuikov and went back to the bunker that afternoon. Have reached the end of his tether, Krebs committed suicide, as did Goebbels and his entire family, with his wife Magda Goebbels feeding their six children cyanide. An ineffectual attempt was made to burn the bodies.
The following morning, 2 May, Lieutenant General Helmuth Weidling, who had been appointed commandant of Berlin a week earlier, went to Chuikov's headquarters and surrendered the city. He wrote an order to be distributed to the troops:
BEGIN QUOTE:
On 30 April, the Fuehrer to whom we all swore allegiance left us in the lurch. On command of the Fuehrer, you still believe that you must fight for Berlin, even though the lack of heavy weapons and ammunition, and the situation in general, make this battle appear senseless!
Every hour longer that you go on fighting prolongs the terrible suffering of the Berlin population and of our wounded. In agreement with the high command of the Soviet forces, I demand that you stop the battle immediately.
END QUOTE
Weidling even recorded a message for Red Army sound trucks to shout at German units that continued to fight. Many surrendered, but some others kept right on shooting. It took the Soviets two more days to completely stamp out the resistance.
* The fall of Berlin was a great triumph of the Soviet people. They had paid bitterly for it, taking 300,000 casualties. However, the survivors had reason to celebrate and time to relax for once.
For the Berliners who had survived the battle, there was no reason to celebrate. Survival was a difficult prospect, and the future beyond mere survival was grim. The Soviet troops who had been fighting on the front lines proved surprisingly kindly. One German woman who watched the "Ivans" trying to learn how to ride captured bicycles found they reassuringly reminded her of overgrown kids -- not all that bad a way to describe a conscript private. However, kids tend to have weak concepts of ethics, and one Soviet officer warned a German that those who would come later were simply "pigs". He was perfectly correct. Everything that wasn't nailed down was looted, much of what was nailed down was trashed, the women were casually raped, and Soviet officers took no great care to stop the abuses when they did not participate themselves.
There was, astonishingly for law-abiding Germans, even looting and fighting by the citizens. Some Berliners drank themselves into temporary oblivion, others huddled up and wept, or simply sank into dull passivity.
Soviet soldiers had found the corpses of Nazi Propaganda Minister Goebbels, his wife, and their six children. The Red Army had also recovered Hitler's remains, after a false alarm from a corpse found at the Reichs Chancellry, which turned out to be one of Hitler's manservants who looked a great deal like the Fuehrer. A SMERSH team was put in charge of the matter, sending a team of sappers into the Reichs Chancellery to check for booby-traps before entering themselves. The sappers, who were more afraid of the SMERSH team than booby traps, found that the Germans hadn't left any unpleasant surprises behind.
The Soviets kept quiet about these discoveries, telling the Western Allies they had found nothing. Even Zhukov was given the cover story, and Koba, playing his nasty games, repeatedly called him up, asked if he had found Hitler's body, and then demanded action when Zhukov said no. Zhukov didn't find out about the lie for twenty years, and the story didn't get out to the West for much longer. Hitler's and Eva Braun's remains were placed in a tomb at Magdeburg in East Germany until 1970, when the KGB, under orders by Brezhnev and Andropov, crushed up the bones and scattered them over a marsh. The only relics left of Hitler are his teeth and a portion of his skull, showing the hole of the bullet that killed him.
Hitler might have cheated Stalin's wrath, but there were other things Koba wanted in Berlin. The NKVD managed to seize over two tonnes of gold from the Reischbank, along with larger amounts of silver and piles of various currency notes, but the take there was disappointing. Most of the gold had been moved West to fall into the hands of the Western Allies.
* The end of fighting in Berlin didn't quite end the war. The new Doenitz government sent emissaries to the British and Americans, with Doenitz clinging to the absurd hope that the Western Allies would betray the Soviets and make a deal with the Germans to present a common front against Bolshevism. He received in reply a brief, concise document that spelled out precisely what the Allies meant by "unconditional surrender", along with a demand that it be signed immediately. Doenitz thought it over and resentfully caved in. The articles of surrender were signed in France by General Alfred Jodl on 7 May and went into effect on the evening of 8 May.
This was actually a preliminary document, with the Germans to sign a more formal document later. It led to a round of tedious bickerings over protocol and precedence between the British and Americans, the Soviets, and the French, but in the end everyone wanted the Germans to surrender, and the suspicions and irritations over touchy pride were set aside. The Germans formally surrendered just after midnight on 9 May 1945. Zhukov led the Allied team at the surrender ceremony. Zhukov danced at the celebration afterward, though not before the cameramen had been prudently asked to leave.
A formal surrender was a fine thing, since there was a German army of 100,000 men in Norway that had been ready and able to carry on the battle, but even that wasn't quite the last word. Germans units in the East continued to go on fighting in desperate attempts to stay out of Soviet hands. There was a short-lived squabble over the Danish island of Bornholm in the Baltic, where the German commander considered himself still at war with the USSR and fired on Soviet aircraft. After two days of air attacks, the Red Army landed a contingent of shock troops on the island and forced the Germans to surrender. It was the final real battle of the European war.
There had been nasty fighting in Prague as local partisans, assisted by elements of General Andrei Vlasov's ROA force, rose up against the Germans. The troops of the ROA faced a dim future and they turned against their masters in hope of improving their standing. They soon were informed by Communist Czech partisan leaders that the ROA was still regarded as the enemy, and so on 9 May the ROA troops fled west along with German troops in hopes of finding sanctuary with the Americans. Left in control of Prague, the Czechs engaged in brutal reprisals against German civilians left among them. German women had their heads shaved and were gang-raped in public. German mothers were bound to their children with barbed wire and thrown in the Vltava (Moldau) River to drown; tens of thousands of corpses were pulled out of the water downstream.
As for the ROA, the Americans were not quite sure what to do with them. Some American officers suggested that the troops disperse and make their own way west, and many did. Vlasov, however, was arrested by the Americans and then grabbed by the Soviets. He and 11 other ROA officers were hanged in 1946.
About 175,000 Germans surrendered in Yugoslavia, with about half of them to die of ill-treatment in captivity. Elsewhere, in French coastal towns still under German control, in Norway, in Denmark, the surrenders went more peacefully. A picture taken on 17 May in Denmark shows German troops tossing their weapons onto the back of the flatbed truck and appearing perfectly cheerful over the whole thing.
* With the shooting finally over, it was time to get Germany in order again. There were certain issues to deal with. Generals such as Kesselring and Keitel who were suspected of war crimes were arrested. Himmler was captured by the British but, having a good idea of his chances if he went on trial, committed suicide by taking cyanide.
The Doenitz government, holed up in Flensburg on the coast, was allowed to operate for the moment until the Allies figured out what to do next. Stalin suspected that even this limited acceptance of the Doenitz government hinted that the Western Allies were trying to strike a deal with the Nazis to sell out the USSR, and the Soviet government protested loudly.
The Soviets were in a particularly foul mood. Not long before his death, Roosevelt had decided that Stalin was completely untrustworthy, and the new US president, Harry Truman, took a very hard line with the Soviets. On 8 May Truman cancelled Lend-Lease aid to the USSR. Technically he had every right to do so, since the terms of Lend-Lease specified that it would be terminated at the end of the war in Europe, but Truman did absolutely nothing to soften the blow.
However, even newspapers in the US were indignant over the existence of the rump Nazi regime, asking why all senior German officials hadn't been rounded up. On 23 May, British troops swept in and arrested the Doenitz government, subjecting them to humiliatingly thorough searches to make sure they weren't concealing weapons or cyanide capsules. The Third Reich was history.
* With the fighting fading out, the Red Army did try to impose order on Berlin. The troops were told in indoctrination sessions to improve their behavior and the rapes and looting began to die down, if slowly. Soviet troops would still try to order Germans to hand over their watches at gunpoint, only to be told: "Watch already surrender!" Rape became much less necessary when German women, faced not only with their own starvation but that of their children, could be bought simply with a promise of some food. Soviet troops found that stable sexual relationships had homely charms of their own and acquired "occupation wives", a practice that enraged their real wives back in the USSR when the news got back.
The Soviets had half expected the Germans would mount a partisan campaign against the Red Army, much like the savage guerrilla war that Soviet partisans had conducted against the Germans. In October 1944, the Nazis had in fact created an underground resistance movement, the "Werewolves", to carry on the struggle. After the surrender, the Werewolves performed a few acts of terror, but there had never been much enthusiasm for the exercise and the Werewolves were quickly suppressed. Former SS officers did, however, form a shadowy organization known as "Odessa" that would linger on for decades and be suspected of various acts of terror around the world.
However, once things settled down, the Germans proved to be model subjects, one Soviet marveling at their "docility and discipline". The Germans were sick of war; Naziism had been proven a bust; and traditional German respect for law, authority, and order worked against the spirit of terrorism. In fact, Berliners even converted old Nazi flags into Communist banners, a transformation of attitude that some jokers among them characterized as "Heil Stalin!"
Colonel General Nikolai Berzarin was now the formal commandant of Berlin. He was a very conscientious man, trying to keep Berliners fed and restore the city to working order, and even dropping into messhalls to casually chat with the citizenry. He would be later killed in a completely idiotic traffic accident and Berliners would mourn him, with rumors floating around that Berzarin had actually been murdered by the NKVD.
Worse would follow Berzarin. A German Communist named Walter Ulbricht, who had spent much of the war in the Soviet Union, was already on the scene, acting as Stalin's unquestioning servant. Eventually Ulbricht would rise to the head of the Red East German regime established by the Soviets. Ulbricht was a master denouncer, and appallingly even Beria, a backstabber on a grand scale, called him a "scoundrel capable of killing his father and mother." The East Germans would build up a formidable internal security apparatus, the Stasi, acquiring much of its unpleasant capability from ex-Gestapo men, working under new management.
* As the new order emerged in a divided Germany, there remained the question of what to do with the leadership of the old order, now behind bars. British and American interrogators found that senior Wermacht officers tried to place all the blame for the crimes of the Reich on the Nazis and the SS. The officers tried to present themselves as simply misunderstood -- victims of bad decisions and unfortunate circumstances.
The record clearly showed that German generals had been happy enough to go along with Hitler's agenda when he was winning, ignoring the crimes of the regimes at best and aiding in them at worst, and had only turned against him when he started to lose. The interrogators, assembling the big picture from various remarks and readings between the lines, were appalled to find that the generals unconsciously but clearly said as much. It was a performance along the lines of that of a gang of bank robbers in jail going on about the stupid things they had done that got them caught, and never giving a moment's thought that maybe they shouldn't have been robbing banks in the first place.
Of the innermost Nazi circle, only Goering had been captured alive at the end of the war, Hitler, Goebbels, and Himmler all having committed suicide. Rudolf Hess was already in captivity, due to his mad attempt to negotiate with the British in 1940. On 18 October 1945, a formal indictment was brought against 24 leaders of the old regime, including Goering and Hess, not to mention Ribbentrop, Rosenberg, and Keitel. The trial began in Nuremberg on 20 November.
The Nuremberg trials were unarguably one of greatest legal shows in history. They were an opportunity not only to try the Nazi leadership, but also the regime itself and make its crimes apparent. The sentences were passed down on 30 September and 1 October 1946. Twelve of the defendants were sentenced to hang, while seven more were given prison terms, and three were acquitted. The condemned were executed on 16 October. Of course Goering had been sentenced to die, but he committed suicide by drinking poison just a few hours before he was to go to the gallows. Keitel was hanged, probably to the satisfaction of veterans who regarded him as the "gravedigger" of the German Army.
Somewhat oddly, Ribbentrop and Rosenberg were executed as well, despite the fact that Ribbentrop had been regarded by most as an incompetent and Rosenberg was clearly ineffectual. There would be further trials of Nazi officials and officers, some as late as the 1990s. Erich Koch was handed over to the Poles, but for whatever reason they decided not to execute him despite his enthusiasm for brutalities.