Doom & Triumph

As every Berliner must have known in his heart, the mammoth march of Red Army power could not be stopped. The Russians might be delayed, but their day of victory could not long be denied.

But thousands of Berliners, men and boys, ill-clothed, ill-weaponed, inept Volkssturmer, old & tired onetime soldiers, the fanatic Hitlerjugend, even hundreds of women, went to the fields and forests at the edges of the city. There they found trenches, pillboxes, antitank ditches. They also found begrimed, bone-tired soldiers and Luftwaffe officers scrambled in irregular detachments. And they found enormous numbers of antiaircraft guns with their wicked snouts now leveled, dug-in tanks with their deadly 88s, machine guns aligned, almost tripod to tripod, to sweep the highways. Perhaps--?

Then, from the wall of smoke and swirling dust on the close horizon, broke the first bolts of doom. Russian shells and rockets showered, then rained, then poured. There had never been such a mass of Russian guns. Through the storm came dazed, staggering, wildly running German soldiers. After them came the Red Army tanks.

Arc of Flame. Then there was the hellish vortex of battle--the high-pitched screeches and sharp bursts of shells, the awful concussions, the crunching torture of the earth itself. The Russian tanks passed on and over.

Thus, in a 70-mile arc of flame and steel, had the soldiers of Red Marshal Georgi K. Zhukov, Stalin's designated conqueror of Berlin, come up to the outskirts of the Nazi capital. They had left behind, on the roads and fields back to Kuestrin and Schwedt, thousands of dead German soldiers, more thousands of prisoners, hills of wreckage. In five days they had fought through five defense belts, smashing down a great concentration of enemy tanks in what may have been the war's biggest battle of armor. Now they could pierce the heart of the Hitlerites' realm--the scarred, sprawling fourth city of the world, the Nazis' holy ground. Russian shells screamed over and around Hitler's Kanzlei on Wilhelmstrasse and exploded close to Hermann Goeringstrasse and into Potsdamer Platz. There, in the Kriegsministerium, the conquest of Russia had once been mapped by confident Wehrmacht commanders.

The Clamp. The millions of Berliners who could not fight, those who did not want to fight now that doom was on the doorstep, milled in panic. They surged to the Ringbahn, fought each other to get on the last trains to anywhere. They massed in the air-raid shelters, choked the Unter-grundbahn platforms and tracks. Stunned, they huddled wherever they could find shelter and waited for the end.

Zhukov's men did not wait. Like a multi-toothed clamp, the Red Army sent piercing thrusts into the outer districts, tightening the pressure all around. Suddenly the Russians were everywhere in the ring of industrial districts and workers' suburbs to the north and east. The first deep piercings were among the wreckage of the rows of dark, ugly brick and stone houses of Wreissensee and Pankow. Here had lived the hundreds of thousands of Berliners who had known the kicks and cuffs of the little Nazi bosses. These were Berlin's onetime centers of Socialism and Communism. Now there were SS troopers and Nazi youth fighting from flaming block to block, from the warehouses and factories turned into fortresses.

The clamp closed on a dozen districts. Then suddenly the Russians seemed to be everywhere at once on the south. Cavalrymen from Siberia, Cossacks from the Don raced west behind the armored thrusts, galloped into woods to slash out German gunners--and the Germans touched off fuel to set the woods ablaze. Soon shells fell on Tempelhof airdrome. Berlin was three-quarters encircled.

Dusty History. By this week it appeared that Berlin's envelopment and destruction would have to be total. Fear-crazed men fought beside the fanatics as the teeth of the clamp bit deeper by the hour. Now the Russians were on the main spokes of the wheel of Chaussees and wide Strassen that led to the hub at Alexander Platz. From Weissensee and Pankow they bit in toward the big Sportspalast, where Adolf Hitler had recited much of the history that now had turned to bitter dust.

The dazed Volksstuermer, the battle-shocked Wehrmacht regulars surrendered now in larger numbers. But the fanatics fought on. Perhaps they meant to fight from the deep basement of Hitler's chancellery, from behind the heroic statues of Prussians in the Tiergarten's Victory Avenue, from all around the 150-year-old Brandenburger Tor and its surmounting green-grey copper Quadriga of Victory. Defense Commissioner Joseph Goebbels screamed his final exhortations to stand and die, then, reportedly, fled. The Hamburg radio shrilled that Adolf Hitler himself had chosen to stay in his capital at the head of its defense rather than retreat to a place of safety in the south. Berliners probably believed it.

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