INSIDE HITLER’S BUNKER: The Last Days of the Third Reich by Joachim Fest   He walked with a peculiar gait, lurching from side to side in the narrow corridors as though looking for support from the walls of the bunker. His face was pasty and bloated, his eyes bloodshot. He could scarcely read, even though all papers were typed out for him in letters three times the normal size on special “Führer typewriters”. There was a bad tremor in his left hand. His clothes, which had always been so spick and span, were now spattered with food stains. He would lie on the sofa for hours munching slice after slice of cake, talking of nothing but dogs and dog training, the dangers of eating meat and, of course, how everyone had betrayed him — Göring, Himmler, Speer, the German people — everyone except Eva Braun (shortly and so briefly to become Frau Hitler) and Blondi his Alsatian.   The Bunker was a horrible place. Although it had 20 rooms, nearer 50 if you include the outer bunker above, they were all small and sparsely furnished, with naked light bulbs casting a cold light from the ceiling. Oily puddles collected in the corridors. In the final days, there was a terrible stench of diesel fumes, sweat and urine — although, as ever, Hitler insisted on a strict no-smoking policy. Even Göbbels tried to avoid the Führerbunker because of the desolate mood that infected its inhabitants. In the streets outside, dozens of corpses swung from trees and lampposts, left over from the wave of executions in March. Ever since February, thousands of Berliners had been killing themselves each month, driven to suicide by the approaching end of the Reich that was to last 1,000 years.   There was one exception to this unmitigated despair. Adolf Hitler himself was, no, not happy (of true happiness he was incapable), but he was at ease with himself. This was where he belonged and, when urged to fly south to make his final stand, he had little difficulty in deciding to stay put. “The Führer must not die in a summerhouse,” as Göbbels put it, on message to the last.   Hitler was, after all, a creature of the underground. After seeing him at work in one of his concrete burrows, Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, the nearly assassin of July 20, 1944, exclaimed, “Hitler in the bunker — that’s the real Hitler.” Albert Speer recorded that as early as 1933, when they were discussing their grandiose architectural plans for the new Reich, “Hitler kept drawing bunkers, again and again bunkers”.   Joachim Fest, in his unputdownable account of those last worst days, points out how little pleasure Hitler had taken in his Blitzkrieg victories. Even in February 1941 he was worried about the prospects of a peace with Russia and was already planning to attack Afghanistan and India. His initial programme was, in German terms, quite orthodox. As far back as 1926 the German army had plans to liberate the Rhineland, eliminate the Polish Corridor and annex Austria. What was, as Fest puts it, “a break with everything the world had ever stood for” was the limitless nihilism, the unquenchable thirst for destruction that was to include the German people as well as their enemies. The Nero Command of March 1945 had ordered the territory of the Reich to be turned into a desert void of civilisation. The war was to be fought without thought of the civilian population.   Hitler wanted to be celebrated not as another Alexander or Napoleon but as an Alaric, Attila or Genghis Khan, the last and greatest of barbarian destroyers. Looking back, his only regret was that he had been too indecisive, too half-hearted, too benign, except, he was proud to record, he had cleansed “the German lebensraum of the Jewish poison” — so much for those who have tried to invent a “moderate” Hitler egged on by extremists.   Fest’s account nearly 60 years on brings back the full horror as though it were yesterday, though it lacks the majestic sweep and caustic wit of Hugh Trevor-Roper’s The Last Days of Hitler, which was written in the months immediately after on the basis of interviews with survivors and remains an imperishable masterpiece to be compared with Gibbon or Macaulay. Inside Hitler’s Bunker also necessarily repeats a good deal of the material in the last two chapters of Fest’s memorable life of Hitler, the first great German biography of their evil genius.   For all their ingenious efforts, neither Fest nor Trevor-Roper can explain how this passion for destruction took hold of the nation of Göthe and Schubert, but then nor can anyone else. To locate the poison somewhere deep in the German soul, as both writers do, is surely a dangerous business, for Pol Pot and others have shown us that this terrible intoxication is not unique to Germans. And as we now know, Hitler is not the only person to have been thrilled by “the thought of the devastating effects a bomb or rocket attack would have on the canyons of Manhattan”. On January 16, 1945, Adolf Hitler descended a stairway into a tunnel that led to his bunker. Few, if any, Berliners would have noticed their Führer slipping under the surface. The citizens of Berlin had too much else to worry about, such as finding shelter (85 percent of Berlin's housing had been reduced to rubble), catching a few moments of sleep between American and British round-the-clock bombings, and eking out a living in a city where the infrastructure and any sense of the mundane had been destroyed. For the next three months, as Berlin crumbled, Hitler and a few of his closest confidants would rarely see the light of day; a few would not leave the bunker alive. The War Comes To Berlin The Final Days  Berliners, gaunt from short rations and stress, had little to celebrate at Christmas in 1944. Much of the capital of the Reich had been reduced to rubble by bombing raids. The Berlin talent for black jokes had turned to gallows humour. The quip of that unfestive season was: 'Be practical: give a coffin.'   The mood in Germany had changed exactly two years before. Rumours had begun to circulate just before Christmas 1942 that General Paulus' Sixth Army had been encircled on the Volga by the Red Army. The Nazi regime found it hard to admit that the largest formation in the whole of the Wehrmacht was doomed to annihilation in the ruins of Stalingrad and in the frozen steppe outside. To prepare the country for bad news, Josef Göbbels, the Reichsminister for Propaganda, had announced a 'German Christmas', which in National Socialist terms meant austerity and ideological determination, not candles and pine wreaths and singing Heilige Nacht. By 1944, the traditional roast goose had become a distant memory.   In streets where the façade of a house had collapsed, pictures could still be seen hanging on the walls of what had been a sitting room or bedroom. The actress Hildegard Knef gazed at a piano left exposed on the remnants of a floor. Nobody could get to it, and she wondered how long it would be before it tumbled down to join the rubble below. Messages from families were scrawled on gutted buildings to tell a son returning from the front that they were all right and staying elsewhere. Nazi Party notices warned: 'Looters will be punished with death!'   Air raids were so frequent, with the British by night and the Americans by day, that Berliners felt that they spent more time in cellars and air raid shelters than in their own beds. The lack of sleep contributed to the strange mixture of suppressed hysteria and fatalism. Far fewer people seemed to worry about being denounced to the Gestapo for defeatism, as the rash of jokes indicated. The ubiquitous initials LSR for Luftschutzraum, or air raid shelter, were said to stand for 'Lernt schnell Russisch': 'Learn Russian quickly'. Most Berliners had entirely dropped the 'Heil Hitler!' greeting. When Lothar Loewe, a Hitler Youth who had been away from the city, used it on entering a shop, everyone turned and stared at him. It was the last time he uttered the words when not on duty. Loewe found that the most common greeting had become 'Bleib übrig!' - 'Survive!'.   The humour also reflected the grotesque, sometimes surreal, images of the time. The largest air raid construction in Berlin was the Zoo bunker, a vast ferro-concrete fortress of the totalitarian age, with flak batteries on the roof and huge shelters below, into which crowds of Berliners packed when the sirens sounded. The diarist Ursula von Kardorff described it as 'like a stage-set for the prison scene in Fidelio'. Meanwhile, loving couples embraced on concrete spiral staircases as if taking part in a 'travesty of a fancy-dress ball'.   There was a pervasive atmosphere of impending downfall in personal lives as much as in the nation's existence. People spent their money recklessly, half-assuming that it would soon be worthless. And there were stories, although hard to confirm, of girls and young women coupling with strangers in dark corners around the Zoo station and in the Tiergarten. The desire to dispense with innocence is said to have become even more desperate later as the Red Army approached Berlin.   The air raid shelters themselves, lit with blue lights, could indeed provide a foretaste of claustrophobic hell, as people pushed in, bundled in their warmest clothes and carrying small cardboard suitcases containing sandwiches and thermos. In theory, all basic needs were catered for in the shelters. There was a Sanitätsraum with a nurse, where women could go into labour. Childbirth seemed to be accelerated by the vibrations from bomb explosions, which felt as if they came as much from the centre of the earth as from ground level. The ceilings were painted with luminous paint for the frequent occasions during the air raids when the lights failed, first dimming then flickering off. Water supplies ceased when mains were hit, and the Aborts, or lavatories, soon became disgusting, a real distress for a nation preoccupied with hygiene. Often the lavatories were sealed off by the authorities because there were so many cases of depressed people who, having locked the door, committed suicide.   For a population of around three million, Berlin did not have enough shelters, so they were usually overcrowded. In the main corridors, seating halls and bunk rooms, the air was foul from overuse and condensation dripped from the ceilings. The complex of shelters under the Gesundbrunner U-Bahn station had been designed to take 1,500 people, yet often more than three times that number packed in. Candles were used to measure the diminishing levels of oxygen. When a candle placed on the floor went out, children were picked up and held at shoulder height. When a candle on a chair went out, then the evacuation of the level began. And if a third candle, positioned at about chin level began to sputter, then the whole bunker was evacuated, however heavy the attack above.   The foreign workers in Berlin, three hundred thousand strong and identifiable by a letter painted on their clothes to denote their country of origin, were simply forbidden entry to underground bunkers and cellars. This was partly an extension of the Nazi policy to stop them mingling intimately with the German race, but the overriding concern of the authorities was to save the lives of Germans. A forced labourer, particularly an 'Ostarbeiter', or eastern worker, most of whom had been rounded up in the Ukraine and Byelorussia, was regarded as expendable. Yet many foreign workers, conscripted as well as volunteers, enjoyed a far greater degree of freedom than the unfortunates consigned to camps. Those who worked in armaments factories around the capital, for example, had created their own refuge and Bohemian sub-culture with newssheets and plays in the depths of the Friedrichstrasse station. Their spirits were rising visibly as the Red Army advanced, while those of their exploiters fell. Most Germans looked on foreign workers with trepidation. They saw them as a Trojan Horse garrison ready to attack and revenge themselves as soon as the enemy armies approached the city.   Berliners suffered from an atavistic and visceral fear of the Slav invader from the east, worked up after a dozen years of ideological indoctrination. Fear was easily turned to hate. As the Red Army approached, Göbbels's propaganda harked on again and again about the atrocities at Nemmersdorf, when Red Army troops invaded the south-eastern corner of East Prussia the previous autumn and raped and murdered the inhabitants of this village.   General Günther Blumentritt, like most of those in authority, was convinced that the bombing raids on Germany produced a real 'Volksgenossenschaft', or 'patriotic comradeship'. This may well have been true in 1942 and 1943, but by late 1944 the effect tended to polarise opinion between the hard-liners and the war-weary. Berlin had been the city with the highest proportion of opponents to the Nazi regime, as its voting records before 1933 indicate. But with the exception of a very small and courageous minority, opposition to the Nazis had generally been limited to jibes and grumbles. The majority had been genuinely horrified by the assassination attempt against Hitler on 20 July 1944. And as the Reich's frontiers became threatened both in the east and in the west, they drank in Göbbels's stream of lies that the ührer would unleash new 'wonder weapons' against their enemies, as if he were about to assume the role of a wrathful Jupiter flinging thunderbolts at the ungodly.   A letter written by a wife to her husband in a French prison camp reveals the embattled mentality and the readiness to believe the regime's propaganda. 'I have such faith in our destiny,' she wrote, 'that nothing can shake a confidence which is born from our long history, from our glorious past, as Dr Göbbels says. It's impossible that things turn out differently. We may have reached a very low point at this moment, but we have men who are decisive. The whole country is ready to march, weapons in hand. We have secret weapons which will be used at the chosen moment, and we have above all a Führer whom we can follow with our eyes closed. Don't allow yourself to be beaten down, you must not at any price.'   The Ardennes offensive, launched on 16 December 1944, intoxicated Hitler loyalists with revived morale. The tables had at last turned. Belief in the Führer and in the Wunderwaffen, the miracle weapons such as the V-2, blinded them to reality. Rumours spread that the US First Army had been completely surrounded and taken prisoner due to an anaesthetic gas. They thought that they could hold the world to ransom and take revenge for all that Germany had suffered. Veteran NCOs appear to have been among the most embittered. Paris was about to be recaptured, they told each other with fierce glee. Many regretted that Paris should have been spared from destruction the year before while Berlin was bombed to ruins. They exulted at the idea that history might now be corrected.   The German Army's high command did not share this enthusiasm for the offensive in the west. General staff officers feared that Hitler's strategic coup against the Americans in the Ardennes would weaken the eastern front at a decisive moment. The plan was in any case vastly over-ambitious. The operation was spearheaded by the Sixth SS Panzer Army of Oberstgruppenführer Sepp Dietrich and the Fifth Panzer Army of General Hasso von Manteuffel. Yet the lack of fuel made it extremely unlikely that they would ever reach their objective of Antwerp, the western allies' main supply base.   Hitler was fixated by dreams of dramatically reversing the fortunes of war and forcing Roosevelt and Churchill to come to terms. He had decisively rejected any suggestion of overtures to the Soviet Union, partly for the sound reason that Stalin was interested only in the destruction of Nazi Germany, but there was also a fundamental impediment. Hitler suffered from an atrocious personal vanity. He could not be seen to sue for peace when Germany was losing. A victory in the Ardennes was therefore vital for every reason. But American doggedness in defence, especially at Bastogne, and the massive deployment of allied air power once the weather cleared, broke the momentum of attack within a week.   On Christmas Eve, General Heinz Guderian, the chief of the Army supreme command, OKH, drove west in his large Mercedes staff-car to Führer headquarters in the west. After abandoning the Wolfsschanze, or 'Wolf's Lair', in East Prussia on 20 November 1944, Hitler had moved to Berlin for a minor operation to his throat. He had then left the capital on the evening of 10 December in his personal armoured train. His destination was another secret and camouflaged complex in woods near Ziegenberg, less than forty kilometres from Frankfurt-am-Main. Designated the Adlerhorst, or 'Eagle's Eyrie', it was the last of his field headquarters designated by codenames which reeked of puerile fantasy.   Guderian, the great theorist of tank warfare, had known the dangers of such an operation from the start, but he had little say in the matter. Guderian's OKH was responsible for the Eastern Front, even though it was never allowed a free hand. The OKW, the high command of the Wehrmacht (all the armed forces), was responsible for operations outside the Eastern Front. Both organizations were based just south of Berlin in neighbouring underground complexes at Zossen.   Guderian, despite having as quick a temper as Hitler, was very different in outlook. He had little time for an entirely speculative international strategy when the country was under attack from both sides. Instead, he relied on a soldier's instinct for the point of maximum danger. There was no doubt where that lay. His briefcase contained the intelligence analysis of General Reinhard Gehlen, the head of Fremde Heere Ost, the military intelligence department for the Eastern Front. Gehlen calculated that around 12 January the Red Army would launch a massive attack from the line of the river Vistula. His department estimated that the enemy had a superiority of eleven to one in infantry, seven to one in tanks and twenty to one in artillery and also in aviation. Guderian entered the conference room at the Adlerhorst to find himself facing Hitler and his military staff, and also Heinrich Himmler, the Reichsführer SS who, after the July plot, had also been made commander of the Replacement Army. Every member of Hitler's military staff had been selected for his unquestioning loyalty. Field Marshal Keitel, the chief of staff of the OKW, was famous for his pompous servility to Hitler. Exasperated army officers referred to him either as the 'Reich's garage attendant' or the 'nodding donkey'. Colonel General Jodl, who had a cold, hard face, was far more competent than Keitel, yet he hardly ever opposed the Führer's disastrous attempts to control every battalion. He had very nearly been dismissed in the autumn of 1942 for having dared to contradict his master. General Burgdorf, Hitler's chief military adjutant and chief of the Army personnel department controlling all appointments, had replaced the devoted General Schmundt, mortally wounded by Stauffenberg's bomb at the Wolfsschanze. Burgdorf was the man who had delivered the poison to Field Marshal Rommel, with the ultimatum to commit suicide.   Guderian, using the findings of Gehlen's intelligence department, outlined the Red Army's build-up for a huge offensive in the east. He warned that the attack would take place within three weeks and requested that, since the Ardennes offensive had now ground to a halt, as many divisions as possible should be withdrawn for redeployment on the Vistula front. Hitler stopped him. He declared that such estimates of enemy strength were preposterous. Soviet rifle divisions never had more than 7,000 men each. Their tank corps had hardly any tanks. 'It's the greatest imposture since Ghengis Khan,' he shouted, working himself up. 'Who is responsible for producing all this rubbish?'   Guderian resisted the temptation to reply that it was Hitler himself who talked of German 'armies' when they were the size of a single corps, and of 'infantry divisions' reduced to battalion strength. Instead, he defended Gehlen's figures. To his horror, General Jodl argued that the offensive in the west should continue with further attacks. Since this was exactly what Hitler wanted, Guderian was thwarted. It was even more provoking for him to have to listen at dinner to the verdict of Himmler, who revelled in his new role of military leader. He had recently been made Army Group commander on the upper Rhine in addition to his other appointments. 'You know, my dear Colonel General,' he said to Guderian, 'I don't really believe that the Russians will attack at all. It's all an enormous bluff.’   Guderian had no alternative but to return to OKH headquarters at Zossen. In the meantime, the losses in the west mounted. The Ardennes offensive and its ancillary operations cost 80,000 German casualties. In addition, it had used up a large proportion of Germany's rapidly dwindling fuel reserves. Hitler refused to accept that the Ardennes battle was his equivalent of the Kaiserschlacht, the last great German attack of World War I. He obsessively rejected any parallels with 1918. For him, 1918 symbolised only the revolutionary 'stab-in-the back' which brought down the Kaiser and reduced Germany to a humiliating defeat. Yet Hitler had moments of clarity during those days. 'I know the war is lost,' he said late one evening to Colonel Nicolaus von Below, his Luftwaffe aide. 'The enemy's superiority is too great.' But he continued to lay all the blame on others for the sequence of disasters. They were all 'traitors', especially army officers. He suspected that many more had sympathised with the failed assassins, yet they had been pleased enough to accept medals and decorations from him. 'We will never surrender,' he said. 'We may go down, but we will take a world with us.'   General Guderian, horrified by the new disaster looming on the Vistula, returned to the Adlerhorst at Ziegenberg twice more in rapid succession. To make matters worse, he heard that Hitler, without warning him, was transferring SS panzer troops from the Vistula front to Hungary. Hitler, convinced as usual that only he could see the strategic issues, had suddenly decided to launch a counter-attack there on the grounds that the oilfields must be retaken. In fact he wanted to break through to Budapest, which had been surrounded by the Red Army on Christmas Eve. From his field headquarters on New Year's Day, 1945, a subdued Hitler spoke to the German people. Albert Speer described the scene: Hitler’s western headquarters [code named Adlerhorst, "Eagle's Nest"], from which he had directed the Ardennes offensive, was at one end of a solitary grassy valley near Bad Nauheim, a mile northwest of Ziegenberg. Hidden in woods, camouflaged as blockhouses, the bunkers had the same massive ceilings and walls as all the other places at which Hitler stayed. Two hours of this year of 1945 had passed when I at last, after passing through many barriers, arrived in Hitler's private bunker. I had not come too late: adjutants, doctors, secretaries, Bormann--the whole circle except for the generals attached to the Führer's headquarters, were gathered around Hitler drinking champagne. The alcohol had relaxed everyone, but the atmosphere was still subdued. Hitler seemed to be the only one in the company who was drunk without having taken any stimulating beverage. He was in the grip of a permanent euphoria. Although the beginning of a new year in no way dispelled the desperate situation of the year past, there seemed to be a general feeling of thankfulness that we could begin anew at least on the calendar. Hitler made optimistic forecasts for 1945. The present low point would soon be overcome, he said; in the end we would be victorious. The circle took these prophecies in silence. Only Bormann enthusiastically seconded Hitler. After more than two hours, during which Hitler spread around his credulous optimism, his followers, including myself, were transported in spite of all their skepticism into a more sanguine state. His magnetic gifts were still operative. For it was no longer possible to produce conviction by rational arguments. We ought to have come to our senses when Hitler drew the parallel between our situation and that of Frederick the Great at the end of the Seven Years' War, for the implication was that we faced utter military defeat. But none of us drew this conclusion. Announcer: At New Year, the Führer speaks to the German Volk from his headquarters: German Volk! National Socialists! My comrades! Only the arrival of the New Year has prompted me to speak to you. The times have demanded more from me than speeches. The events of the past twelve months, especially those of July 20h [the assassination attempt], have forced me to dedicate all my attention and strength to that for which I have lived many years: the destiny-struggle of my Volk. At year’s end I am spokesman for the nation and at this moment also the agent of its destiny. With overflowing heart I thank the countless millions of my comrades for everything that they have done, suffered, put up with, and accomplished. I include people in the cities, market towns, and little towns and our children. I would like to ask you not to lose heart but to trust in the leadership of the movement. With extreme fanaticism you must fight this ponderous war for our people’s future to the end. Overall, comrades, I want to assure you again that, just as during our struggle for power, my belief in the future of our Volk is unshaken. One has received the highest calling when providence lays before one such difficult trials. Therefore, I alone must make every effort to lead the German Volk through these hard times and open the door to the future, for which we all work and fight. I cannot close this appeal without thanking almighty God for the help he has given to Volk and leadership, as well as for the power he has given us to be stronger than the troubles and danger we confront. I thank God for my own salvation only because I am happy that I am able to offer my life to the service of my Volk. In this hour, as spokesman for Great Germany, I vow to the Almighty that we will be faithful and unshaken in our duty. In the New Year we will fulfill our rock-solid belief that the hour will come when victory will come to those who are most worthy, the Great German Reich. Guderian's visit on New Year's Day coincided with the annual procession of the regime's grandees and the chiefs of staff, to transmit in person to the Führer their 'wishes for a successful New Year'. That same morning Operation North Wind, the main subsidiary action to prolong the Ardennes offensive, was launched in Alsace. The day turned out to be a catastrophe for the Luftwaffe. Göring, in a grand gesture of characteristic irresponsibility, committed almost a thousand planes to attack ground targets on the western front. This attempt to impress Hitler led to the final destruction of the Luftwaffe as an effective force. It ensured the allies' total air supremacy.   The Grossdeutsche Rundfunk broadcast Hitler's New Year speech that day. No mention was made of the fighting in the west, which suggested failure there, and surprisingly little was said of the Wunderwaffen. A number of people believed that the speech had been pre-recorded or even faked. Hitler had not been seen in public for so long that wild rumours were circulating. Some asserted that he had gone completely mad and that Göring was in a secret prison because he had tried to escape to Sweden.   Some Berliners, fearful of what the year would bring, had not quite dared to clink glasses when it came to the toast 'prosit Neujahr!' The Göbbels family entertained Colonel Hans-Ulrich Rudel, the Stuka ace and the most decorated officer in the Luftwaffe. They sat down to a dinner of potato soup as a symbol of austerity.   The New Year holiday ended on the morning of 3 January. The German devotion to work and duty remained unquestioned, however improbable the circumstances. Many had little to do in their offices and factories, owing to shortages of raw materials and parts, but they still set out on foot through the rubble or on public transport. Once again, miracles had been achieved repairing the U-Bahn and the S-Bahn tracks, even though few of the carriages had unbroken windows. Factories and offices were also freezing due to smashed windows and so little fuel for heating. Those with colds or flu had to struggle on. There was no point attempting to see a doctor unless you were seriously ill. Almost all the German doctors had been sent to the army. Local surgeries and hospitals depended almost entirely on foreigners. Even Berlin's main teaching hospital, the Charité, included doctors from over half a dozen countries on its staff, including Dutch, Peruvians, Romanians, Ukrainians and Hungarians.   The only industry which appeared to be flourishing was armaments production, directed by Hitler's personal architect and Wunderkind, Albert Speer. On 13 January, Speer gave a presentation to army corps commanders in the camp at Krampnitz just outside Berlin. He emphasised the importance of contact between front commanders and the war industries. Speer, unlike other Nazi ministers, did not insult his audience's intelligence. He disdained euphemisms about the situation and did not shrink from mentioning the 'catastrophic losses' sustained by the Wehrmacht over the last eight months.   The Allied bombing campaign was not the problem, he argued. German industry had produced 218,000 rifles in December alone. This was nearly double the average monthly output achieved in 1941, the year the Wehrmacht had invaded the Soviet Union. The manufacture of automatic weapons had risen by nearly four times and tank production nearly fivefold. In December 1944, they had produced 1,840 armoured vehicles in a single month, over half what they had made in the whole of 1941. This also included far heavier tanks. 'The trickiest problem', he warned them, was the shortage of fuel. Surprisingly, he said little of ammunition reserves. There was little point producing all these weapons if munitions production failed to keep pace.   Speer spoke for over forty minutes, reeling off his statistics with quiet professionalism. He did not rub in the fact that it was the massive defeats on the eastern and western fronts over the last eight months which had reduced the Wehrmacht to such shortages in all types of weapons. He voiced the hope that German factories might reach a production level of 100,000 machine pistols a month by the spring of 1946. The fact that these enterprises relied largely on slave labourers dragooned by the SS was not, of course, mentioned. Speer also failed to remark upon their wastage - thousands of deaths a day. And the territories from which they came were about to diminish further. At that very moment, Soviet armies numbering over four million men were massed in Poland along the river Vistula and just south of the East Prussian border. They were starting the offensive which Hitler had dismissed as an imposture.

Götterdämmerung

By the beginning of 1945 the personnel, technical equipment and weapons of the Soviet army reached the highest level in all the war years. On the Soviet-German front the Soviet Army had 6.7 million people, 107.3 thousand guns and mortars, 12.1 thousand tanks and self-propelled artillery installations and 14.7 thousand war aircraft.

In mid January the Soviet troops launched a large-scale offensive on the front from the Baltic Sea to the Vistula

By the beginning of 1945 a powerful defense system had been set up between the Vistula and the Oder by the Hitler Command, consisting of seven borderlines and a great number of fortified lines and positions. On the front from Warsaw to Jaslo defense was maintained by the main forces of the "A" army group numbering up to 560,000 soldiers and officers, some 5,000 guns and mortars, 1,220 tanks and storm guns. The army group was backed by 630 war aircraft. It was decided to use strong frontal blows, above all, to be delivered by the tank troops to split the enemy's grouping into two parts, crush the main forces of the "A" army group and complete the liberation of . The troops had to advance at high speed and arrive before the enemy could capture the defence lines. These actions are known as the Vistula-Oder operation.

The operation started on the morning of January 12. Initially the offensive was planned to begin on January 20 or later. But the date was changed because on December 16 the German command struck a blow at the American-British units in the Ardennes. The Soviet allies found themselves in a critical situation. The British Prime Minister Winston Churchill turned to the head of the Soviet government Josef Stalin for help. Soviet troops opened fierce fire on the enemy, causing heavy losses. To avoid being surrounded, the Germans began to retreat. On January 16, the Soviet troops began to press the enemy along the entire 250-km front line. It took them six days to force their way farther to the West, covering 150 km and crossing the on the move.

On January 17, the Soviet troops liberated the cities of Radomsko and Czestochowa. The first to break into Czestochowa was a tank battalion under the command of Major Khokhryakov, who received his second Gold Star of the Hero of the for his resolute actions and personal courage.

On January 17, , the Soviet troops liberated the capital  Warsaw though Hitler's orders were that the city should not be surrendered whatever the cost. To mark the liberation of the Polish capital the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet established the medal "For the Liberation of Warsaw", which was conferred on more than 682 thousand Soviet and Polish soldiers and officers.

On January 18, the troops of the 1st Ukrainian and the 1st Belorussian Fronts met in the area of Szydlowiec. This allowed the Soviet troops to launch an assault along the frontline of over 500 km and break through the German defense lines on theVistula. The enemy's "A" army group sustained a heavy defeat. The Soviet Army was moving rapidly toward German borders.

On January 19 the advance units entered .

By the end of January the Soviet troops reached the Oder, forced it and captured a position to the north and the south of Kustrin. The tankers of the 44th guard brigade became famous for their heroic performance as they moved forward in the advance unit of the 11th guard tank corps. The brigade left behind the retreating German units, reached the stronghold of the Mezeritz reinforced region and, without waiting for the corps' main forces, broke through the enemy defenses in an audacious attack, got into the enemy's rear and captured a position on the Oder. For their heroism and quick action the brigade's entire personnel received government decorations, eleven soldiers and officers were given the title of the Hero of the , and the Brigade's Commander Colonel I. Gusakovsky received his second "Gold Star" medal.

Within the 23 days of the offensive the 500-km-deep defenses between the Vistula and the were crushed. The Vistula-Oder operation was of paramount military and political importance. The Soviet troops with the participation of the 1st Polish Army and guerillas liberated a considerable part of Polish territory. War moved on to German territory and was waged now 60 km from its capital . The enemy sustained heavy losses: 35 divisions were destroyed, and 25 lost from 50 to 70 percent of their personnel. To oppose the advancing Soviet troops the Hitler Command had to transfer 29 divisions and 4 brigades from other directions of the Soviet-German Front, from inside of Germany and from the Western Front and to stop its offensive in the west. In this way the Soviet Army helped its allies.

THE EASTERN-PRUSSIAN OPERATION

Eastern Prussia had a most powerful defense system, including concrete fortifications. The Heilsberg reinforced area alone had over 900 long-term defense structures, covered with anti-tank trenches. The enemy grouping numbered up to 45 divisions with 580 thousand soldiers and officers, 8,200 guns and mortars, some 700 tanks and assault guns. The defense of East Prussia involved 200 thousand Volkssturm members. Ground troops were supported by 775 war aircraft. By the beginning of the offensive the Soviet troops had 1,669 thousand men, 25,426 guns and mortars, 3,859 tanks and self-propelled artillery installations, and 3,097 war aircraft.

On January 13, the Soviet troops launched an offensive. A thick and dense fog hung over the battlefield. Using the fog as a cover, the enemy let the infantry and tanks come close, then opened fire and started a counterstroke. This hampered the advance, but the Soviet offensive grew increasingly stronger.

On January 21, the Soviet troops liberated Gumbinnen, and on the following day Insterburg. The enemy put up stubborn resistance and it took many hours of fierce fighting to seize Gumbinnen. The defeat of the enemy near Insterburg opened the road to Königsberg and forced the Germans to retreat from the area of the Masurian Lakes. The Soviet Army began to pursue the enemy.

On February 10, Soviet troops began to liquidate the enemy grouping, pressed against the gulf to the southwest of Königsberg. During these days extraordinary energy and courage were displayed by the 38-year-old Commander of the Front General I. Chernyakhovsky.

On February 18, General Chernyakhovsky received a fatal wound on the battlefield near Malsak. The General was buried in Vilnius.

On March 29, the enemy grouping located southwest of Königsberg ceased to exist. It took 48 days to crush the grouping. Only a small part of the enemy units managed to cross the gulf and reach the bay bar, Frische-Nherung.

On April 6, , the Soviet troops began the storming of Königsberg.

On April 9, the Germans defending Königsberg surrendered.

On April 13-25 the remainder of the Eastern-Prussian German grouping concentrated on the Zemland peninsula was crushed by Soviet troops. The ground troops were backed by Baltic Fleet aircraft, war ships and submarines. During the East-Prussian operation more than 25 enemy divisions were destroyed, 12 divisions lost from 50 to 75 percent of their personnel. The Soviet Army took over the whole of East Prussia and liberated a large part of Poland's northern regions. 

THE CARPATHIAN-PRAGUE DIRECTION

In the first half of January the Soviet troops launched an offensive on the frontline of the Vistula and Ondava rivers. Military operations were resumed in the southern regions of Slovakia. The troops had to advance in the severe winter conditions through mountains and forests.

In January-February the Soviet Army liberated Poland's southern regions and a large part of Slovakia. 

By the end of February the Soviet troops got to the upper reaches of the Vistula and became engaged in the fighting at the approaches to the Moravska-Ostrava industrial area and on the western slopes of the Slovakian mining area on the River Gron.

On March 25 the Soviet troops delivered the first strikes against the enemy to the north of the Danube. After the surprise forced crossing of the River Gron, they rushed to the West, liberating one region of after another.

On April 4 the Soviet troops liberated the Slovakian capital and then developing the offensive the city of Brno.

FROM TO

From December 26, 1944, Soviet troops were engaged in the fighting aimed at liquidating the enemy grouping surrounded near Budapest. The main units fought on the outer front of the encirclement, and part of the Soviet troops turned the front to the east against the enemy units defending the western part of the city, Buda. The German Command ordered the garrison to defend the city to the last soldier, hoping to use the blows from the outside to break through the encirclement and restore the defense on the . To reach this goal, the enemy struck three counterblows. The bloody fighting persisted to the west of for more than a month.

On February 13 the Hungarian capital was liberated. The enemy's massive forces, which had tried to break through the encirclement, were destroyed on the following day near the city. More than 350 thousand soldiers and officers were decorated with the medal "For the Seizure of Budapest" established to mark the victory. Many units were named after the city. Along with Soviet troops, units of the Rumanian corps as well as over 2,500 Hungarian soldiers and officers of the Budaisk voluntary regiment were engaged in the fighting for Budapest.

On March 6 the German troops launched a counteroffensive. The Nazi leaders sought at any cost to throw the Soviet troops behind the Danube and retain the oil-rich areas south of Vienna and west of Lake Balaton. They concentrated massive forces southwest of Budapes and transferred several tank and infantry divisions from the western part of Germany and from Italy. The 6th SS tank army arrived from the Western Front.

On March 15 the enemy advance was stopped. The German tanks did not manage to break through to the Danube.

On March 16 the Soviet Army began the Viennese operation, which resulted in a German retreat.

On March 25 Soviet troops sent the enemy flying.

On April 4 the Soviet Army completed the liberation of Hungarian territory. Later the Presidium of the Hungarian People's Republic declared this day (April 4) a national holiday. More than 140,000 Soviet soldiers and officers lost their lives for the liberation of Hungary.

On April 13 the Soviet troops fully cleared Vienna from the Nazis. This was the sixth European capital liberated by the Soviet Army. The units that displayed courage in the fighting for were named after the city. The Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet established the medal "For the Seizure of Vienna" and decorated with it more than 270,000 soldiers and officers. More than 26,000 were killed in action, liberating Austria from Nazism.

THE STORMING OF BERLIN

On the morning of April 16 the Soviet troops launched an offensive. The operation involved 2.5 million personnel, 41,600 guns and mortars, 6,250 tanks and self-propelled artillery guns, 7,500 war aircraft, including 800 long-range aircraft. A great number of artillery guns and tanks were concentrated on the directions of the main strikes. A key role was played by the famed Russian "Katyusha" rockets.

On April 25, the Soviet and American troops met in the area of Torgau.

By April 29, the Soviet troops took over a large part of the city and reached its center. On the day before the Division of General V.Shatilov took by storm the Moabit prison, where the Nazis had murdered the prominent Tatar poet Musa Dzhalil. The surviving prisoners were set free by the Soviet Army.

On April 30 Soviet troops began storming the Reichstag. Clashes took place in the building's halls, rooms and on the staircases. The enemy put up fierce resistance, but the Soviet soldiers pressed forward.

On the early morning of May 1 a red banner was flying on the Reichstag near the sculpture groups. The banner was erected by M. Yegorov and M. Kantaria. Thousands of soldiers and officers, who had stormed the Reichstag, were decorated with orders and medals. Officers A. Davydov, S. Neustroev, K. Samsonov, sergeants M. Yegorov, M. Kantaria and many others received the title of the Hero of the .

On May 8, in Karlshorst in a Berlin suburb, at 22 hours 43 minutes Central European time the Act for unconditional capitulation of the German Armed Forces was signed by the former Chief of Staff of the Wehrmacht Supreme Command Field Marshal Keitel, Commander-in-Chief of the Navy Admiral Friedeburg and Colonel General of the Air Forces Stumpf, who had been authorized by Dönitz (appointed by Hitler as Reich Chancellor and Commander-in-Chief). The signing ceremony was attended by Marshal of the Soviet Union G. Zhukov, Chief Marshal of the British Royal Air Force Tedder, and also, as witnesses, by American General Spaatz and French General Lattre de Tassigny.

On May 8 the operation was over. The Soviet people rejoiced at the news of the seizure of. By 25 salvoes from 324 guns hailed the courageous Soviet soldiers who had seized Berlin.

Germany's Final Measures in World War Two By Louise Wilmot   We in the Western world equate the end of World War II with the Ardennes offensive—the Battle of the Bulge. Just before Christmas, 1944, in a thick fog that protected his tanks from Allied aircraft, Hitler gambled by launching a sudden counterattack in eastern Belgium, in difficult country, and brought off a tactical coup. His troops overwhelmed the surprised defenders, and it looked as if he would cut them off and reach the Allies' big supply port at Antwerp. But an American general famously said "Nuts" when called upon to surrender, and the fog lifted. The last German offensive in the West speedily crumbled, and from then on, though there was tough fighting in some places, the British and the Americans were able in many others just to walk forward, accepting the surrender of hundreds of thousands of Germans who were grateful to be giving up to the Western powers and not to the Soviets. Anglo-American captivity was not comfortable, particularly in the first few weeks, but at least the prisoners (in the main) could survive. Soviet captivity was a different matter. Of the 90,000 men who surrendered at Stalingrad in January of 1943, only 6,000 made it back to Germany, more than ten years later. The Soviets were not in a forgiving mood.   The final Western land campaign against Nazi Germany may have been something of an anticlimax. But on the Eastern Front the war came to an end apocalyptically. To Central Europeans with a historical sense, it must have seemed as cataclysmic as the Mongol invasions, seven centuries before. Millions of Red Army soldiers, thousands of tanks and aircraft, had lined up on the River Vistula, which bisects Poland from north to south. On January 12, 1945, they struck, with great howls of artillery and multiple-rocket launchers—"Stalin Organs," the Germans called them. Already, the preceding summer, a whole German army group had been ground down by this massive weight, and the local commanders were desperate to be allowed to retreat, to show some flexibility in defense. Hitler, by now madly obstinate, told them that they must hold on; he even had generals shot for treachery and defeatism if they disobeyed. The outcome was foreseeable: the German defense disintegrated. One after another, supposed strong points became engulfed in the Soviet flood, and one after another, Polish cities were liberated—Warsaw, a heap of ruins because the Germans had burned it in revenge for the Polish uprising of August 1944; Kraków, a Renaissance jewel of a town, which survived intact because the Soviets were too quick for any defense to operate. On January 27 came a melancholy capture: Auschwitz. Most of its surviving prisoners had been evacuated by the Nazis in a death march a week or two before, and were now moving, a column of pajama-clad scarecrows, toward concentration camps in Germany. By the time the Red Army had outrun its supply lines and needed to refit its tanks, it stood at the River Oder, at most fifty miles from Berlin. Defeat looms In June 1944 Germany's military position in World War Two appeared hopeless. The situation on the eastern front was catastrophic, with the Red Army poised to drive the Nazis back through Poland. In the west, Allied forces had fought their way through southern Italy as far as Rome. In Britain, the task of amassing the men and materials for the liberation of northern Europe had been completed, and Operation Overlord had begun with the D-Day landings on 6 June. Hitler, however, refused to accept the inevitability of defeat. Surrounded by acolytes, he blamed Germany's setbacks on incompetence on the part of his generals, and was convinced that the tide of war could still be turned. Above all, the German people must show the necessary faith and will. 'Providence', he believed, 'will bestow victory on the people that has done most to earn it!'   Hitler placed his hopes on two factors. Offensively, on the introduction of new 'miracle weapons' that would inflict massive damage on the Allied war effort. Defensively, on a tenacious rearguard struggle, bolstered by propaganda and mounted if necessary by boy soldiers.   Miracle weapons Research into the military uses of rocket technology and jet propulsion had been concentrated at the Peenemünde research station since the 1930s, under the supervision of Wernher von Braun. In 1942 its scientists had successfully tested two new weapons, later known as the V-weapons ('V' stood for Vergeltung, or retaliation). These were the flying bomb, or V-1, and the long-range rocket, the V-2.   Technical problems delayed the deployment of these weapons until the summer of 1944. By then, Hitler had persuaded himself that they would cause such devastation in London that Britain and the United States would be forced to reassess their strategy. The Western Allies might even abandon their 'unnatural' alliance with Stalin and accept a separate peace, allowing Nazi Germany to concentrate its resources on defeating the Red Army in the east.   The first weapon to go into operation was the V-1, a jet-propelled pilot-less aircraft with a one-ton warhead and a maximum range of approximately 200 miles. It could be launched from ramps on the ground or, less reliably, from the air via Heinkel-111 aircraft. After the V-1 reached its target on automatic pilot, its engine cut out and it fell from the sky, giving those on the ground below only a few precious seconds to take cover.   Doodlebugs The first ten V-1s were launched on London on 12 June 1944, and six days later 121 people were killed by a direct hit on the Guard's Chapel at Wellington Barracks. At the end of the month some 100 'doodlebugs' - as Londoners called them - were being directed at the capital every day. According to the writer Evelyn Waugh, they were 'as impersonal as a plague, as though the city were infested with enormous, venomous insects'. On the basis of secret intelligence reports, the British government anticipated a prolonged onslaught that might cause 100,000 casualties each month, and even require the evacuation of the city. Yet as things turned out, their impact was far less powerful than the Germans had hoped, with some 6,000 Londoners killed by the end of the war, and another 17,000 injured. How did this happen?   One key factor was the Nazis' inability to manufacture enough V-bombs. Only 3,000 were produced each month, instead of the 45,000 the Allies had feared. And their deployment was hampered by RAF raids on launch-sites in northern France, ordered after information was smuggled to British diplomats in Switzerland by the French resistance fighter Michel Hollard.   Of the 10,000 V-1s fired at England, moreover, around a quarter crashed before reaching land, and over half the remainder were shot down by a combination of fighters, anti-aircraft batteries massed on the south coast, and the effective use of radar and proximity fuses.   V-2 rockets   In September the Germans switched the focus of their V-1 attacks to Antwerp, the chief supply port for Allied forces in Europe. The area sustained similar casualties, but was never put out of action. That same month, however, London came under attack from von Braun's much-delayed V-2.   This 14-metre-long rocket with a one-ton warhead marked the first use of ballistic missile technology in warfare. It was fired 60 miles into the stratosphere before its fuel supply was cut, and the rocket coasted along its preset ballistic trajectory to the target. The first V-2s, fired from launch-sites in the Netherlands, struck London on 8 September.   Hitler now hoped that the V-2s would be 'the decisive weapon of the war'. The chief grounds for such optimism lay in the fact that the Allies could not defend themselves against the V-2, because the rockets travelled faster than the speed of sound, so the first sign of an attack was a massive explosion when they hit the ground. Yet, although the V-2s had killed more than 2,000 Londoners and damaged thousands of homes by March 1945, they proved no more able than the V-1 to change the course of the war.   The impact of the V-2 was limited by persistent production problems, with delays further increased by an RAF raid on Peenemünde in August 1943. And although thousands of concentration camp inmates were forced to work on the production lines at the Nordhausen underground rocket factory in the Harz mountains, no more than 700 rockets a month were ever produced.   With the rockets at such a rudimentary stage, moreover, they inevitably proved unreliable. Many of them exploded before they reached their target, and a significant proportion went astray because their guidance systems failed. A third 'miracle weapon', a massive long-range gun sited on the French coast, was never fired before the site was overrun by Allied troops.   Later development Looking back, it is easy to conclude that the resources and manpower devoted to the V-weapons programme - 200,000 workers on the V-2 alone - were wasted. But if they hadn't had so many production problems, they could certainly have caused considerable damage to British cities. And V-weapons were the forerunners of many later developments in weapons and space technology.   The rocket research of von Braun, in particular, was so ground-breaking that he and his team were taken to the United States at the end of the war to become an essential part of the American space programme. Their work for the Nazis, including their responsibility for the fate of the forced labourers, was conveniently forgotten. Von Braun became an American citizen in 1955 and director of the Marshall Space Flight Centre in 1970.   The most fearsome new weapon of all - the atom bomb - was fortunately never available to Hitler. Although its scientists continued to investigate the military potential of applied nuclear fission, Germany's uranium research programme did not progress beyond laboratory level in wartime. Hitler was thus denied a lethal weapon that he would most certainly not have hesitated to use.   Defensive expedients   Once the search for 'miracle weapons' had failed, the only expedient left to the Nazis was fanatical defence against Allied invaders. Every city, every village, every street was to be defended to the last. Superior will, Hitler believed, could still compensate for an overwhelming inferiority in manpower and resources.   But how could Germany be defended when its reserves of fighting men were almost exhausted? It was unable to replace its losses on the eastern front, while the home front was dependent on seven million foreign workers. In the absence of men of military age, the regime was forced to turn new reserves of older men and, especially, boys.   The main source of potential fighters was the Hitler Youth, the compulsory organisation for young Germans. In 1943, it provided basic infantry training to boys over the age of 14, while 15-year-olds were set to work in anti-aircraft batteries (where they were joined in the last months of war by some 35,000 members of the women's Labour Service).   In Spring 1943 the Waffen-SS, the armed wing of the SS/Police organisation, requested permission to recruit a special Hitler Youth formation for boys under military age. The 12th Panzer (Armoured) Division Hitlerjugend began training later that year. Most of its 10,000 volunteers were 17-year-olds, and although the division was led by officers who had risen through Hitler Youth ranks, some of its NCOs were boys who had no combat experience at all.   Boy soldiers   The division first went into action in Normandy in June 1944, shortly after the D-Day landings. Allied officers attested to the reckless courage of its soldiers, but within a month 20 per cent of them had been killed, with another 40 per cent missing or wounded. The combination of fanaticism and recklessness in the unit was responsible for several war crimes in Normandy, including the murder of Canadian prisoners of war.   Later conscripts were not even given full military training before they went into battle. In October 1944 the Nazis established the Volkssturm for all available men between the ages of 16 and 60. Badly equipped, and consisting mostly of men who were not suitable for normal military service, the Volkssturm was to lose some 175,000 men in its hopeless efforts to repel the Allies.   Boys as young as 10 and 11 were also pressed into service in the chaotic final weeks of the war. In April 1945 some 5,000 of them were sent into action against the Red Army in defence of the bridges in Berlin. Many did not survive. Hitler Youth members as young as 12 were among those awarded the Iron Cross by Hitler during his last public appearance in the Reich Chancellery, on his 56th birthday on 20 April.   Elsewhere, too, boys fought against battle-hardened soldiers. In Munich, for example, American tanks were confronted by 10- and 11-year-olds, dressed in uniforms too big for them, carrying weapons they were afraid to fire. These boys were taken prisoner and survived the war, but thousands more were less fortunate.   There was to be no 'miracle' for Hitler's Germany. At the end, still unable to accept responsibility for the disaster, the Führer found others to blame. As always, he accused a mythical 'international Jewry' of conspiring against him, but now he turned also turned against his own people. The Germans themselves had been too lacking in will to deserve victory, he said in his final days - and they deserved the wasteland they were about to inherit.   The Franconia region of Germany, the towns and villages that line the way from Würzburg to Nuremberg was the cradle of Nazi ideology, and the shattered remains of the once mighty Wehrmacht, supported by militias and Nazi fanatics, defended every centimeter of it against the inexorable advance of U.S. forces -- even when all hope for Wunderwaffen (miracle weapons) that would bring about the Endsieg (final victory) was gone. Involved were principally the 22d Infantry of the 4th Division and the 17th Armored Infantry Battalion of the 12th Armored Division as they battled against elements of Panzer Kampfgruppe XIII and the 17. SS Panzer-Grenadier-Division "Götz von Berlichingen". It took place over hills and through valleys, across rivers and in the forests. -  village-by-village, street-by-street bitter fighting that pitched American GIs against regular German Landser (front soldiers), fanatical members of the Hitler Youth, and the bewildered boys and old men of the Volkssturm (militia). German civilians suffered agonies in the days, and in some cases hours, before the American attackers reached their town. He describes, in vivid detail, the desperate attempts of average citizens to convince local mayors, Ortsgruppenleiter (local Nazi Party officials), or Wehrmacht commandants to allow them to hang white flags from their houses and to surrender their towns. The terrible organism the Nazis had created continued to function--even took on a life of its own--after its head was severed. Local party functionaries, town officials, and German soldiers perpetuated the reign of terror out of a sense of duty that bordered on a moral imperative and that rendered them blind to reality. When mostly women and older men began to oppose the senseless adherence to the dying regime, they did so not for ideological reasons but to save what little they had left. They knew that the National Socialist regime had ended and just wanted to survive. In the aftermath of the war there was a failure to build up an effective insurgent movement against foreign occupation, the so called Werwolf, but there was  resentment in local populations against fraternization between German women and American GIs, and marauding bands of displaced persons (DPs) that caused headaches for the occupiers. Crimes were committed by the inmates of DP camps. In camps for Jewish Displaced Persons, there was  the frustrations of many Jews forced to live in these camps and they gave rise to groups seeking vengeance against their former oppressors. One such group, Nakam, led by Abba Kovner, tried to kill hundreds of imprisoned SS officers held at Langasser camp by surreptitiously poisoning their food, but only succeeded in sickening several dozen. The outcome of this Jewish vengeance group was hardly a singular case, but instead one of many with the same goal.