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Hello and welcome to Battleground 45 with me, Saul David, and Roger Morehouse. Well, we're getting close to the end of the war in Europe at least.
And therefore, it seems a pretty sensible time to talk about the Battle of Berlin. This long delayed battle for Berlin, Roger, because, of course, the Russians had got all the way to the Erda River in early February, and yet they didn't launch their final attack until the 16th of April. We briefly discussed this when we were talking about the East Prussia campaign, but remind listeners why there was that interim before they launched the final attack.
Yeah, the German forces are fighting very hard all the way back through that period. And the Red Army is helped initially by the weather. You've got a very hard winter that sort of January, February. So the ground is dry.
very frozen solid very much across what is then occupied Poland and into the Eastern German provinces, you know, Pomerania, Silesia and so on. So they actually reach, for example, we talked a couple of weeks ago about the siege for Breslau. So they actually reached Breslau on the 13th of February, for example, and,
And, you know, the tactic for the Germans at the time is, as I explained before, is to try and reinforce these sort of nodal points, what they called festungen or fortresses, like Breslau, like Poznań now in Western Poland, to try and hold up the Soviet advance as best as possible.
with the idea that, you know, at worst, you hold it up and you buy some time for geostrategic stuff to happen. I mean, they're not entirely clear what's going to happen. They're always hoping, the Germans, that it's going to be this sort of what they saw, the sort of natural incongruence, the natural incoherence of that alliance.
alliance between, you know, the capitalist imperialist West, as it were, and the communist East, they were hoping that the inherent contradictions of that alliance would sort of, you
and the alliance itself would collapse. In the end, there was a sort of brief glimmer in early April with the death of Roosevelt. There was a brief glimmer of sort of some sort of, you know, grand strategic possibility for change for the Germans. But then, of course, you know, Truman succeeds and that glimmer itself is sort of taken away. So it's a long slog
for both of the Soviets and for the Germans towards Berlin. You've got the battle for Zehlo Heights, which is out to the east of Berlin, just on the Berlin side of the River Oder, which is also a brutal battle. And with the German defeat at the Zehlo Heights, then essentially the road to Berlin is open. And by that stage, of course, it's mid-April. So it does take a couple of months for the front to actually reach the German capital.
It's worth talking a bit, isn't it, about the sheer scale of this attack. I mean, I mentioned in our last episode with Patrick, the discussion of the meeting on the Elbe and the possibility the Americans could have launched an attack on Berlin. They could have launched it around about the
13th, 14th of April. They chose not to for reasons we explained, really a fear of casualties, but also a kind of preoccupation with the so-called Southern Redoubt, which turned into a bit of a figment, as we know after the event. So the Russians themselves attack, and it's a huge attack, isn't it? Because the assault is put in by two fronts. That's two army groups, in effect, Zhukovs in the north,
and Konevs, a little bit further south. A total of 16 armies. They didn't all attack at once, supported by tens of thousands of guns. And the initial attack, as you've just pointed out, at least as far as Zhukov's concerned, against the Zelo Heights,
did not go well, did it? I mean, they lost a lot of people getting through that position, the attack put in by the 8th Guards and the 5th Shock Armies. But then, as you say, the advance on Berlin is now open. Was there ever a point after the 18th when they make their breakthrough that actually the Germans could have done anything about the defence of Berlin? Or are we talking about a one-way street here really now, Roger?
No, I think by that stage, it is pretty much a one-way street. The Battle of the Zelo Heights is really, that's the sort of gateway to Berlin. And it's, you know, the land, anyone that's been to Berlin and the sort of hinterland around it will know that it's very, very flat. But what you've got at the Zelo Heights, which, as I said, is just to the west of the order, the order there flows pretty much south to north.
And just on that western side, you've got an escarpment, which is where all those defences at the Salew Heights are located. So in a sense, they know that's the gateway to Berlin. And it's very well defended. And they'd had time to put defences in there, fortifications and so on.
And they could defend it in reasonable depth. Of course, they're up against armies almost of an order of magnitude larger than the Germans had themselves. But still, as I said, the Zeller Heights is a significant battle. But once that is lost, then really there's not much that Berlin can do really to save itself.
What they do, of course, as elsewhere, I mean, there is a military plan put into place. They have various sectors are drawn up and three concentric rings of fortifications, one of which is the S-bar and the sort of the commuter railway, overground commuter railway, much of which runs up on an embankment.
So using that, one of the rings of that concentric defence is the ring of the S-Bahn around the city, for example. And they've pulled together pretty much anyone and everything that they could find that half-decent troops of
Obviously Waffen-SS troops are there. There's some paratroopers there. But all the way from those very battle-hardened, very experienced troops down to members of the Volkssturm. So about half of the troops available for the defense of Berlin itself are actually members of the Volkssturm, which is this sort of ragtag army that had been raised the year before at the end of 1944 by Goebbels, essentially as a sort of propaganda exercise for
but it was old men and young boys, basically. And they were sort of paraded in...
many of them not even in uniform. They paraded in their sort of civvies with, you know, an old sort of, you know, 19th century rifle over their shoulder or whatever they could find. And it was supposed to show the sort of determination of the German people to defend themselves, you know, against Bolshevism. It was supposed to be this sort of a display of German determination. And it comes across, actually, when you look back at it, it looks like a sort of show of German desperation rather than anything.
And especially as there are eyewitness accounts of those Volkssturm units are sort of sworn in and they have to sort of publicly give their oath and so on. There's accounts of regular soldiers watching this scene and actually laughing and thinking, well, you know, what the hell are we doing? This is insane.
So even their own side didn't take it very seriously. So half of the unit got about 80,000 troops on the German side and half of those fully are Volkssturm, you know, as I said, old men and young boys.
And the remainder is, you know, a mixture of, as I said, Waffen-SS, paratroopers and ordinary Wehrmacht. So it's a real mixed bag. There's some very good, you know, solid fighting soldiers there, very experienced soldiers there, all the way down to, you know, people who were essentially militarily useless.
So a really mixed situation. And you've got, you know, some attention has been paid to sort of building barricades, to, you know, fortifying, you know, positions with, you know, to work out fields of fire and so on. One thing that they did do in Berlin was to sort of use, you know,
the turrets of knocked out tanks, but to actually set them into the ground so that you could still use the turret as a sort of static artillery piece. So, you know, there's an awful lot that is done to defend Berlin. But as I said, after the defeat at the Zelo Heights, there's really, you know, this is just to a large extent a foregone conclusion.
I mean, it's worth pointing out that there's a little bit of competition between Zhukov and Konev, which is one of the reasons why Zhukov is so desperate to get through the Zelo Heights defences. And this has almost certainly been encouraged by Stalin. I mean, if you get two of your most famous generals vying for the honour of capturing Berlin, or at least getting to the Reichschancery and finding out what's happened to Hitler, then, you know, hopefully you can speed up the whole process. So I think there's no question that that was a deliberate fostering of competition.
So Zhukov's desperate to, you know, take part, as it were. And on the 20th of April, if we just move on a couple of days, that's two days after they break through the Zelo Heights. And this, of course, is Hitler's 56th birthday. So it's an important moment, a day celebrated in relatively muted fashion. I think we'll come on to the bunker in a minute, Roger, but I think celebrated in relatively muted fashion today.
Zhukov's 3rd Shock Army, so one of his armies, opens fire on the northern suburbs of Berlin. And if you move forward a week, the encirclement of Berlin is complete. So really, the endgame is going to play itself out over those next three days, which is why we get all the drama in the bunker. In between those times, though, Roger, Hitler has entirely lost faith that some of his armies outside Berlin can actually fight their way through as he
Yeah, it's true. I mean, Hitler actually disappears down into the bunker in March already. So already about a month before he was down in the bunker.
So it's highly questionable the degree to which he was sort of properly aware of what was going on on the ground and, you know, the extent of the armies that he was moving around on his sort of plotting table. You know, there was great faith in two particular armies. And this actually comes across. It's almost become a meme in itself. And it's come across from the very good film Downfall, which came out 20 years ago. The two armies, one of which is the army Venk. So there's a number of scenes in that film.
where Hitler sort of rants and says, where is Venk, Wojst Venk? Venk was in charge of the 12th Army, which was out to the west. And Venk was actually going in the other direction. So his orders were basically to try and break out west. And that's what he was trying to do. And he actually, you know, to a large extent, succeeds, so much so that Venk actually saves his own life by getting to the Americans and surrendering to the Americans.
So the army of Wenck, which Hitler is still sort of imagining can play some role in the defense of Berlin, is actually going in the wrong direction. And then the other one is this battle group of Steiner. So those that remember the film will have in their heads this, again, the rant scene where Hitler's talking about, you know, where is Steiner? And Steiner was this battle group, which again, much of which was actually sort of scratch SS and, you know, sort of gathering together of SS units that were available.
Steiner's an interesting character. He'd actually played quite an important role in the development of the Waffen-SS, you know, in the years prior to that. But even Steiner is not able, with all of that, you know, they had some hardware as well. They still had a few tanks that they had a bit of,
bit of fuel in and things like that. But even Steiner was not able to resist the Soviet juggernaut. So it's an extremely difficult situation and not really helped by the fact that, as you'd said, Hitler is down in his bunker with an increasingly tenuous grip on reality, the reality which is everything that's happening above ground. And he's marshalling these armies on his plotting map and most of them actually don't exist anymore.
So it's a really difficult situation.
Reality is beginning to dawn on Hitler, though, isn't it? Of course. And one of the reasons it dawns on him is because of a number of betrayals as he would see it. And the first one is from Himmler. So tell us a little bit about what's going on with Himmler, because it's quite interesting, given that the SS really are the kind of, you know, the vanguard, the elite started out as the elite bodyguard of Hitler. They've become this army alongside the Wehrmacht or this armed force alongside the Wehrmacht. And yet,
in many ways, they were the first ones to desert the sinking ship, weren't they? We had Wolf in Italy and, of course, Himmler himself opening up negotiations with the Allies. Yeah, I mean, Himmler in this case is an interesting example because he'd actually had some sort of contacts
again, tenuous at least, but he did have contacts with Western powers, usually through intermediaries. But for example, there'd been a couple of trainloads of Hungarian Jews whose freedom had been purchased from Himmler the previous year. So he'd already had these contacts. He'd already been...
to some extent, I mean, flirting is probably the wrong word. It's sort of over-egging it a bit. But he'd already had these contacts and wanted to sort of find some sort of political solution and was putting the word out of trying to make some sort of peace with the Western allies with the intention, I think, he thought, of continuing fighting against the Soviets, who he saw ideologically as their primary enemy. So in a sense, trying to arrange some sort of separate peace.
And those contacts did get made right at the end. And this is what sort of ticks Hitler off so much. Through Count Bernadotte, who's a Swedish intermediary, had been close to the Red Cross and so on, and actually negotiated the release of Scandinavian prisoners from the concentration camps, which is another one of Himmler's sort of sops to the West, you know, to say, OK, well, I'll let some of these prisoners go as a sort of signature sign of goodwill, you know.
So, you know, he is making those sort of overtures, which are not really being reciprocated the other way, but he is making some of those overtures to the Western powers.
And Hitler finds out about this, obviously, and is outraged. He sees it as a betrayal. He sees it as treason. And, you know, straight away, he asks, again, go back to the film. The film is a really good historical record, really, because it sort of works from a lot of the material that we know from memoirs and from the historical record.
you know, calls for Himmler's adjutant to come and explain his boss's actions to Hitler. And that was Hermann Fiegerlein, who has basically gone AWOL and is, you know, in a brothel drunk. Fiegerlein is then sort of dragged out of this brothel and ends up being executed.
for treason himself. So there is this sort of falling out between Himmler and Hitler at that point, which should really have had a knock-on effect to the SS more generally. But in those last few days of Hitler's life and of the war, that didn't really come to pass.
And the Waffen-SS, particularly SS troops, do provide very much the backbone of the German defence in Berlin, such as it is. And weirdly, particularly foreign soldiers. So particularly French, Dutch, Belgian, even Danish soldiers of the various, you know, sort of national divisions and national regiments within the Waffen-SS. A lot of them were left, you know, in the defence of Berlin and actually acquitted themselves quite well in some examples as well.
And then to go back to your point, you know, so we've got the betrayal by Himmler, first of all, again, from Hitler's perspective, and then Goering as well. So Goering is down in Berchtesgaden, down in Bavaria, and he sends a message up to Hitler from memory, I think it's the 27th, 28th, where he basically says, you know, he's aware that the capital is going to fall and the Reich is going to be cut in half by Allied advances. Right.
And he says, you know, should your freedom of action be, you know, inhibited, you know, I'm just to let you know that I'm willing to sort of take control. So if I don't hear from you, then I will take control, which is a sensible thing to do, really, if you're going to try and fight on with this, as you mentioned, that sort of southern redoubt in the Alps. If you're going to try and do that, you need to have some sort of coherence of command, as it were.
But that's interpreted in Berlin and particularly with the spin that's put on it by Martin Bormann, Hitler's party secretary, who hated Goering, by the way. He hated most people, but he hated Goering. He saw Goering as a sort of puffed up drug addict, which to some extent was true. This was sort of spun with Bormann in Hitler's ear saying this is treason, my Fuhrer sort of thing.
So he is then stripped of all of his posts and his positions as well by Hitler. So he's seeing this sort of paranoia is really kicking in at the end of Hitler's life. And he's seeing betrayal at every turn, even where there isn't any.
So it's, you know, that sort of scene, if you go back to the film, that scene of him ranting and saying how he's been betrayed by everyone and even the generals are lying to him. And, you know, it's all over. And, you know, it's a wonderful scene. You know, that is very true to life, actually. That's how he saw it at the end of his life. He saw everything as a betrayal.
And the reason you know this in so much detail, Roger, quite apart from having read all the available first-hand accounts, and there are an awful lot of them, aren't there, of people who were actually in the bunker for the last few days. But I've noticed that not only have you read them and used them in your book, Berlin...
at war, you've also written the foreword to quite a lot of the more recent editions of these. So this is information that's pretty familiar. Can we trust all of these accounts, do you think? Yeah, up to a point. I mean, some of those, I call them the household series because it's sort of members of Hitler's household. It's like his valet, his driver, his pilot, for example, a couple of his secretaries, they all wrote memoirs.
And they were sort of published, most of them in the 50s or 60s in German. Some of them were translated into English, but a lot of them weren't. And then Frontline Press, which is run by a good friend of mine called Michael Leventhal, started translating these a few years ago and asked me to do the introductions for them. And they're really useful. They're really interesting in that you get that sort of very close-up view. You know, someone like Christa Schröder, who was Hitler's secretary, essentially for all
all of the period of the Third Reich. She first came to his service in 1933 and
you get a very close up and to some extent warts and all, but also quite strangely affectionate. I mean, someone like, like Krista Schroeder, she obviously saw him as, you know, he was her boss and, and she sort of on a personal level, she got on with him. You know, he had, he had Viennese manners, he kissed hands and he, and he, you know, used to refer to her as, you know, you know, honorable, honorable lady, Gnedigus Freulein and that sort of thing. So it's kind of,
It's a weird contradiction in a way that we have this image collectively of Hitler as a sort of carpet biting, you know, paranoid genocidare, which of course is not unrealistic and not untrue. But at the same time, these accounts give you a different view of him very much as a human being.
And I think we have to take that on board. And actually, it's not certainly not intended in any way as a sort of in an exculpatory way. I think actually acknowledging his humanity actually makes his evil deeds much more horrific, in my opinion. But I think they're generally pretty good. The one that I think you have to be wary of these days is Albert Speer.
And Albert Speer's account, which is all in Inside the Third Reich, which came out after he came out of prison in 1970, and then a bit more in the Spandau Diaries. So there's a couple of books that he wrote on which cover some of this stuff. I mean, it's still a brilliant resource, but I think the opinion has shifted a lot in the last sort of 15 years or so.
on spear and and he and he's generally seen now as probably an unreliable narrator probably mainly because he's sort of he he lets himself off the hook essentially sort of lies about his own involvement lies about what he thought uh was uh was going on what he knew about for example
So he's one that I think we have to be particularly careful of. But the others, you know, they're not that scheming in a way. It's quite a sort of a simple view. It's in many ways quite sort of affectionate even towards Hitler. But they're very useful eyewitnesses of events from this period. Okay, we'll take a break there. Do join us in a moment when Roger will be telling us exactly what went on in the Führerbunker during those last few days of the Battle for Berlin.
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Okay, we'll come on to the last few days, these incredibly dramatic last few days. But I've actually got sitting on my knee as we speak, Roger, a book called Albert Speer, His Battle with Truth. And it's written by Gita Sireni, that wonderful Hungarian writer who, in my view, pretty much skewered Speer and got him just about right. Of course, it's very difficult for any biographer to get your subject exactly right. But
I think she really exposed some of the deceit and some of the window dressing, as you've already mentioned, that he was trying to...
to place on his career. I didn't know the worst aspects, even though he was in charge of armaments industry, which is basically run by slaves at points. Serini makes a number of times and of course tries to get Speer to confess to his crimes, in inverted commas, which he never quite does, but he's not far off it either. So if any of the listeners are interested in following the Speer story, I would certainly recommend that. It's actually about 15 or 20 years old now. So this is not a new bit of work, but it is a fabulous piece of work.
Let's get on to the drama of the story, Roger. I mean, I suppose everything really cranks up after the Zhukovs men in particular crossed the Landwehr Canal. And that presumably is one of the last inner lines of defence, the last major obstacle before the government district. And really, it's just a matter of days now before the bunker is going to be and the Reichschancery are going to be overrun. So this is a point at which a couple of days later,
it all accelerates. First of all, Hitler marries Eva Braun. And of course, that same day dictates his last will and testament in the Führerbunker. And those both happened in the early hours of the 29th of April. He also appointed Dönitz, who's a military man, of course, as president of the Reich.
that instead of, of course, Goering, who'd really been his deputy for many years. And also, interestingly enough, Roger, a character we've spoken about before, and that's Karl Hanke, who is still in the fortress of Breslau at this point, if I get it right. He's going to replace Himmler as Reichsführer SS. Yes, that's right. And Goebbels was appointed as his successor as Reich Chancellor as well in Hitler's Testament.
So, yeah, there's sort of all change at the top or, you know, musical chairs at the top to some extent. Yeah, at that stage. So Hitler already had a pretty close eye on the defense of the inner sort of sanctum of Berlin, if you like, the government district, which was an area that was it was given the codename of Citadel. And it was actually run in charge of that was a rather nasty SS officer by the name of Wilhelm Muncher.
who was linked to, amongst other things, the massacres of British and Canadian POWs at Wormhout in 1940 and massacres of American POWs during the Ardennes Offensive at Malmedy. So he's a pretty unpleasant character, is Malka.
But he's in command of this citadel of the innermost concentric ring of defences. And as you said, it's primarily made up at that point of waterways in Berlin. There's lots of waterways in Berlin, the River Spree and also the various canals. And the most important sort of crossing there was actually just the River Spree, just north of where the Reichstag is, right in the centre of Berlin, for those that know the city.
And the Soviets cross or Red Army cross the Bulo Bridge, which is sorry, Moltke Bridge, rather, which is just to the north of the Reichstag on the 29th of April. And at that point, this is reported to Hitler.
Hitler says, you know, how long can you hold? And they sort of, they come back and say, well, you know, not more than 24 hours sort of thing. And that's the point at which he then sort of accelerates all of his, I suppose what we call end of life planning. He, as you said, he arranges to get someone in, get a public notary in so that he can marry Eva Brown, sort of formalize that relationship and arrange for his last will and testimony to be dictated to one of his secretaries, actually dictated to Traudl Junger. It's,
Interestingly, from the Soviet perspective, the Soviets had been given the target of the Reichstag as a building, which is kind of strange when you think about it. Of course, it's a very prominent landmark in the center of Berlin, but it's not really the symbol of the Nazi dictatorship in a way. If anything, it's the symbol of the Weimar Republic and the democracy that died in 1933. Because of that, of course, that was the building that was burnt out in the Reichstag fire in February 1936.
February 33, and played that sort of rather infamous role in the creation of Hitler's dictatorship. So to have that as the sort of target, almost as the symbol of the Soviet conquest of Berlin, seems to me rather incongruous. But anyway, that's what they chose. And they fought their way across the square in front of the Reichstag.
very bitter battle to get to the Reichstag in the first place and then into the Reichstag building and then sort of fight their way from floor to floor.
to get up through it. So it's, it's actually one of the sort of bitterest battles in a way, uh, of the war. It's the whole, uh, battle for Berlin itself is actually the battle for the Reichstag culminating in that sort of very famous picture that I'm sure everyone knows of, uh, uh, red army soldiers sort of waving the, uh, the hammer and sickle off the, uh, off the East side of the roof of the, of the Reichstag building. Um,
One of the most famous, famous pictures of the war. So, yeah, so that's then at that point, the Soviets are then essentially about, let's think about about sort of three, 400 yards away from,
from the site of Hitler's bunker. So everybody in the bunker knows that this is the end game that they're entering. They know that the arrival of the Soviets could be imminent. It could be within hours. You know, you've got artillery, of course, is falling all the time around them. So that's the stage at which Hitler then decides to, as I said, make his sort of peace with the world and finally take his own life.
And we're not in any doubt, Roger, are we? One, that Hitler did take his own life. And two, how he did it and what happened next, are we? I mean, there's still conspiracy theorists who are convinced that Hitler got away.
Yeah, there are. Unfortunately, there are always going to be conspiracy theories about every aspect of these narratives and particularly where there is any doubt to be sort of exploited. Then these things sort of crop up. Hitler gave orders. The root of the sort of confusion, as it were, was Hitler gave orders when he realized what had happened to Mussolini in Italy. Mussolini had been captured by Italian partisans.
a few days earlier and had been strung up by the heels along with his mistress and a couple of other flunkies from a petrol station in the middle of Milan. So basically lynched is rather messy end for Mussolini. And Hitler was told about this and essentially said, OK, well, you know, this isn't going to happen to me. So he ordered his adjutants to gather together as much fuel as he possibly could and
They managed to come back with something like 200 liters of fuel with which to burn his body, which just in terms of context is about four car petrol tank loads. So it's not a huge amount of fuel.
But in the context of Berlin in 1945, that could have actually powered a couple of tanks for half an hour or so. So it was still a substantial sacrifice from a military perspective. So they gathered together this fuel with the intention, as Hitler described to his adjutant, that his body and that of Eva Braun
should be burnt beyond recognition so that they could not be taken either dead or alive, but they couldn't be taken and paraded in Moscow because that was his great fear that he would end up essentially, his body would end up like Mussolini's being, you know, put on public display and sort of abused in that way. So, you know, he gave that order.
The circumstances of his death are pretty clear. Again, there's a degree of sort of Soviet muddying of the waters here because the Soviets obviously discovered the bodies or what was left of the bodies. And they had a very thorough investigation as to the circumstances of the deaths.
So investigating and interrogating all of those that were present in the bunker, pulling in people like not Hitler's dentist, but those that worked for Hitler's dentist who were in Berlin. So Hitler's own dentist actually was down in the south at that point. So they pulled in various people that had worked on Hitler's teeth, for example, and got them to sketch Hitler's teeth, which were very distinctive. Hitler had very bad teeth. He had quite bad halitosis throughout his life.
By the end of his life, he only had six of his own teeth in his mouth and some very elaborate dentistry making up the rest. So once you had his dental assistants were sort of sketching his teeth from memory, it was very easy for them to sort of match that up with the fragments of jawbone and so on that were left in the crater after the bodies had been burned. So we're really not in any doubt that that was Hitler. Absolutely not. Those sections of jawbone, incidentally, with teeth,
are still in Moscow. They're in the sort of special, I think it's called the Trophy Archive in Moscow. Which you and I plan to visit as soon as the Ukraine war is over. Absolutely right. One day we'll try and do that, Saul. It would be a lot of fun.
What just to sort of muddy the waters, the Soviets actually come in and they do this very thorough investigation and work it all out and investigate and interrogate everyone that's remotely involved with the death. And that they satisfy themselves that that it is Hitler's body that they've got the remains of which.
but then they sort of go on this campaign of disinformation, which sounds very familiar now, now that we know how the Kremlin tends to work a little bit better, which was part of a thing that was known as Operation Myth. And they basically start spreading the idea that Hitler's got away and pointing the finger at their erstwhile allies, the Western powers, and saying, well, which one of you helped him get away? So they saw this as an opportunity to essentially, you know, a stick with which to beat their Western allies.
And they carried on that pretense, you know, for decades afterwards, effectively. And this is really where the root of all of this conspiracy theory nonsense comes from. There's a very good book by Luke Daly Groves on all of this, where he really puts it all to bed. He goes through all the conspiracy theory nonsense, investigates all of the sources on this and puts the circumstances of Hitler's death absolutely and conclusively to bed.
So, you know, great, great service to us all to clarify that one. But yeah, it's just it's just frustrating how often you still hear this sort of nonsense that Hitler might have got away. He didn't. And we should also mention a rather wonderful Russian source, Roger, which, again, like the other books you were talking about, you've written the foreword to.
And that is Yelena Rezhivskaya's memoirs of a wartime interpreter. I think that's her nom de plume, isn't it? Or a nom de guerre rather than her actual name. But she was Yelena. She was a young literature student studying at Moscow State University. And tell us why she knows so much about the story, Roger. I mean, she was a firsthand witness to a lot of this, wasn't she?
She was. She was actually working as an interpreter. She was brought in to interpret in that investigation I was talking about. So she was sitting in, you know, for example, with the dental assistants when the two of them were sketching Hitler's teeth and things like that. So she acted as the interpreter in those initial investigations.
And in a sense, that sheds a really important light on the Soviet investigation. There was another book which came out a few years ago, which was called, I think, Operation Myth, which was a sort of archival revelation of those files from the Moscow archives.
to show exactly what they were doing. First of all, investigating the circumstances of Hitler's death, and then later the deliberate disinformation campaign to muddy the waters. So it's pretty clear now we know from those sources and from, as you say, Elena Shevskaya, which is a really good book, actually. She writes really well and a really, really interesting book. It's pretty clear from the combination of sources that we have that that narrative that's unfortunately still disputed is the right one.
Yeah, it's remarkably a good book in terms of the quality of the writing. And that, of course, is also down to the quality of the translation, isn't it, Roger? But in any case, that's interesting. I didn't know about the book about Operation Myth. I'll have a look at that. Well, let's tidy up the rest of the story then. I mean, I think clearly Hitler's death brings everything to a head as far as his lieutenants are concerned, doesn't it? Because he's gone. There's no longer an absolute need to fight to the finish in Berlin.
anymore people are obviously thinking about some of them are thinking about saving their own skins but it's interesting that the person who sets in train the negotiations that lead to the surrender of the berlin garrison is actually goebbels himself isn't it yeah so that what goebbels wanted was a essentially a ceasefire in berlin he didn't want a capitulation or surrender
but he does want to cease fire. I mean, he succeeds Hitler as a chancellor, as Hitler had ordered. And he sends General Weidling, who was essentially the military commander of the Berlin garrison, to go and make contact with the Red Army, which he does. He has an interview with General Tchoukov down at Tchoukov's headquarters, which is down in the south of Berlin, near Temple Hall Airport, or the site thereof. And
Weidling initially sort of suggests that they should have a, you know, some sort of ceasefire, cessation of hostilities, but doesn't mention the word surrender. And Tchikov basically says, no, you know, go back and say, we, you know, we want to surrender. This is not going to be a ceasefire. We need to surrender.
So Weidling has to go back. And Goebbels is actually, you know, absolutely against that. He wants to try and rather like Dönitz in the up in Flensburg in the north, who, of course, is now the sort of nominal leader of the Third Reich.
He wants to try and string things along. Again, it sounds rather familiar to what we're dealing with today in Ukraine. He wants to sort of string things along to fool the Soviets as much as possible to, you know, enable some sort of agreement to be found perhaps with the Western powers, if that's possible.
or if nothing else, to enable as many civilians and soldiers to get away from the clutches of the Soviets as possible. So this is what Dönitz himself says he's trying to do with his negotiations with the Western powers as well. So this is very much the line that they're taking. When it comes back to him that this is not going to fly, the idea of some sort of cessation of hostilities rather than surrender,
That's probably yet another of those factors that decides Goebbels' mind for him, that it's the end. And of course, infamously, his wife, along with an SS doctor, give their six children cyanide in the bunker and kill them and then kill each other or kill themselves. So the Goebbels family is no more. That's on the 1st of May.
And at that point, Weidling essentially goes back to Tchoukov and says, OK, you know, I've got I've got license to negotiate a proper surrender, which he does. And that's then proclaimed on the 2nd of May, the day after Goebbels' suicide. So, yeah, there's some there's still some effort being made at that point to, you know, to sort of play politics, if you like, with, you know, the capitulation of Berlin. But in the end, it's, you know, it's an unconditional surrender, effectively.
But there are still some units that try and escape. They try to break out. You know, there's a breakout to the north that's attempted. There's a breakout to the west. And some of those are reasonably successful. So some of those units do get out. Mornka, incidentally, surrenders to the Soviets and survives, which is surprising given his track record. Senior SS officer, I would have, you know, you'd assume that he'd be one of those that would be put up against a wall. I
I suspect that his knowledge of, you know, the final days in the bunker, for example, probably saved his life because as we, as I've just said, you know, the Soviets were very keen to investigate every aspect of the end of Hitler's life.
So someone like Munker was a sort of prime witness. So I'm sure they kept him alive in the Lubyanka for that reason. And eventually he was repatriated to Germany. Remarkably, he only died in 2001, Saul. Don't, really? You know, thoroughly unpleasant man, but quite an astonishing life. And you'll be telling me, Roger, he worked for West German intelligence in a minute. Did he? I don't think he did in this case. There are some cases of that. So, yeah.
Walter Wenck, the famous, you know, Wo ist Wenck? Where is Wenck? He actually worked for the West German army, the Bundeswehr after the war. So he found a position. He wasn't SS. I mean, he was Wehrmacht. So I don't think Mohnke did. He's very controversial. He's one of those people that, you know, everyone was agitating in the sort of 80s and 90s that he should finally be prosecuted and brought to trial. And I think he managed to actually evade all prosecution once he was back in the West from his Soviet sojourn.
And another one, Helmut Weidling, of course, was the guy that negotiated the surrender and was the commander of the garrison. He disappeared into Soviet captivity and didn't survive the experience. He died in 1955 in a Soviet prison. So, yeah, it's a brutal end. And actually, for a lot of those, you know, people like Bormann, I'm just back from Berlin, actually, Saul. I was there for the weekend. And, you know, Bormann's another one of these that for a long time was this conspiracy theory that Bormann had survived.
We now know that that's not true. You know, his body was found in the 1970s, was subsequently identified thanks to actually to DNA technology. So through his son's DNA, once the DNA technology was there to do it, you know, his body was matched up with his son's. So we know that he died in Berlin, not far from what is now the main station in Berlin. So, and
And his was one of those efforts, you know, for various people to try and escape in these desperate last couple of days. But some people do manage it, but the vast majority don't. And they're sort of mown down by Soviet troops. So it's absolutely brutal. The death toll, just to give you a sort of summary of that.
the battle for Berlin. About 80,000 Soviet troops are killed in the battle for Berlin, which is a pretty high figure. 100,000 plus, again, the figures are not really clear, of German military personnel
And about the same again, if not more, so 120, 140,000 German civilians. We haven't talked much about the civilian fate in all of this, but theirs was, as you can imagine, grim in the extreme, basically with the military developments sort of going past their window and through their block and so on. And everything that brought with it, I mean, the Soviets were very keen on
how do we put this gently, to avenge themselves, shall we say, on the Berlin population, particularly the female population of Berlin. So you've got an epidemic of rapes in the capital and elsewhere, which is absolutely hideous. So yeah, it's an extremely tough situation. I describe a lot of this in my book, Berlin at War. I did a lot of interviews with Berliners of that generation. So I wrote it 15 years ago. So there's still a few people around. But some of the accounts that I heard at the end of the war, particularly from women,
were, you know, absolutely blood-curdling and quite astonishing stories. Just that people lived through that sort of thing and stayed sane is frankly astonishing. It's tough reading, I have to say, Roger. I mean, great book, but those last few chapters are tough reading. And just to give a little bit of context to that in terms of figures, I mean, I've seen figures, I don't know if this comes from your book, of up to 130,000 people
German women in Berlin raped by Soviet soldiers, many more than once. They included Jewish inmates of Schulstrasse Transit Camp and no doubt one or two others that came their way. And one doctor estimated that 10,000 women and girls had died from gang rape or suicide. So it's pretty grim stuff, isn't it? And on the other hand, of course, while you've got these Soviet soldiers meeting at these uprisings,
appalling revenge acts against German civilians. You've also got enormous loss of life, as you've already spoken about, on the part of the Soviet soldiers themselves. And again, we're seeing the same sort of behaviour, aren't we? The complete lack of interest in their ordinary soldiers' lives by Russian commanders today, and also a willingness to let their men, not only let their men run amok, but also to encourage them to do so.
Yeah. And on that point, actually, interestingly, Saul, you know, you give the figure, which is the one that's generally accepted of 80,000 Soviet dead. There are three mass graves and war cemeteries of Red Army dead in Berlin. But the total of those and they're all in mass graves. I mean, that's just the way the Red Army tended to roll.
It's all about the collective rather than the individual, even in death. But if you count up the official accounts of the numbers that are in those three cemeteries, it doesn't get beyond about 15,000, which, do the maths, leaves you something upwards of 60,000 Soviet dead,
you know, somewhere in Berlin. I mean, they didn't repatriate their dead. That's an American affectation. So there's 60,000 out there somewhere whose skeletons are still sort of propping up buildings in Berlin, presumably. But it's an interesting piece of context in the light of what you just said about this traditional and historic Russian lack of concern for their own soldiers. That's reflected even in death.
Great stuff, Roger. Thank you so much for that. An absolutely gripping 45 minutes or so on the fight for Berlin. Do join us on Friday when we'll be having another episode of Battleground Ukraine and also next Wednesday for Battleground 45. Goodbye. Goodbye.