Read After Hitler: The Last Ten Days of World War II in Europe for Free Online

Soviet Union, the creation of typhus camps where more than 50,000 civilians in the region of Parichi were deliberately infected, and then left in the path of the advancing Red Army, with the hope of causing a major typhoid epidemic among the Russian soldiers. In the words of General Pavel Batov, commander of the Soviet 65th Army, ‘this atrocity we would neither forgive nor forget’. The fight for Berlin would always have been bitter, but the presence of LVI Panzer Corps in the city, which quickly became known to the Russians, ensured the battle was particularly savage.
    Over the next few days German troops mounted a desperate defence, but the Russians closed inexorably on Berlin’s centre. On 27 April General Weidling wrote in his diary:
At 5.00 a.m., after a violent bombardment and with very strong air support, the Russians attacked on both sides of the Hohenzollerndamm. Defence Zone Headquarters is under heavy fire. The account for the sins of past years has arrived.
The Potsdamer Platz is also under heavy artillery bombardment. Brick and stone dust hangs in the air like a thick fog. The car in which I am driving can only make slow progress – shells are bursting on all sides and we are showered with their fragments.
Everywhere the roads are full of craters and broken brickwork, and streets and squares lie desolate. To take cover from a Russian heavy mortar bombardment we took shelter in an Underground Station. In the two-level building many civilians had taken refuge – a mass of scared people, standing packed together. It is a shattering sight.
In my afternoon situation report, I spoke of the sufferings of the population and the wounded, about everything I had seen with my own eyes during the day. Hitler seemed in a disjointed state of mind, unable to properly comprehend what I was saying.
    Time was now running out. On 28 April Admiral Karl Dönitz flew a battalion of naval cadets into stricken Berlin as a gesture of solidarity with his Führer. The commander, Lieutenant Franz Kuhlmann, remembered his nightmarish arrival: ‘Towards the end of our flight we recognized the capital, burning from a recent bombing raid. It was a truly apocalyptic picture. Despite the lack of contact from the radio tower, our pilot immediately attempted a landing and the plane careered wildly all over the runway.’
    In the circumstances, a rough landing was hardly surprising. On 27 April both Tempelhof and Gatow airports had been lost to the Russians. An emergency landing strip was then prepared in the grounds of Berlin’s zoo. This was where Kuhlmann had arrived. By the evening of 28 April this landing strip could not be used either, because of the deep shell holes.
    Kuhlmann continued:
When we came to a juddering halt there was a sharp command – ‘To the shelters – at the double!’ – and we raced towards an enormous concrete silo, where military stores and equipment were kept.
In a while, an SS officer appeared, and told us we had been ordered to the Zoo Bunker [a key defence point in the centre of Berlin]. When I objected, and said we had been instructed to go immediately to the Reich Chancellery, to defend Hitler’s own quarters, he looked completely bewildered. Eventually we set off in an easterly direction, towards this seemingly prestige objective – along a bombed-out military road. Time and time again we were forced to dive for cover, as Russian planes swept down, strafing the route ahead.
The SS officer accompanied me to Mohnke’s command post – in one of the underground shelters of the Reich Chancellery – announced my arrival to the general, and then disappeared. SS General Mohnke, the commander of Citadelle [the government district of Berlin, with Hitler’s bunker at its heart] was surprised and delighted to see us, showing a degree of interest that was flattering in view of our relatively insignificant combat strength.
    General Mohnke had about 2,000 men under his command – including 800 soldiers from the