On the 20th April a telegram arrived. ‘To Katukov, Popiel! The 1st Guards Tank Army has the historic task of being the first into Berlin and to hoist the banner of victory. The organisation and execution I will take over myself. Send the best brigade of every corps to Berlin and give them the task by at the latest 0400 hours on the 21st April, cost what it might, to break through the city perimeter. I await the immediate report so that Stalin can be informed of the event and that the information can be published by the press. Zhukov. Telegin.’
We read this telegram with mixed feelings. On one side we were happy and proud about the honourable task, but on the other side we were peeved that our tank army was to be committed like a normal formation. We had no idea yet what awaited a tank army in street fighting.
But the feeling of pride won the upper hand. With the elements of the 29th Guards Rifle Corps, we had already penetrated the suburbs of Berlin on the 21st April.
The tanks thrust forward. Our longed-for goal came ever closer. But the nearer we got, the more bitter the fighting became. Our tanks were unable to fully use their fighting capacity in the narrow streets. Although we were used to dealing with incendiaries, we came up against a no less dangerous enemy: the Panzerfaust.
The Hitler clique undertook desperate efforts to avoid their downfall. One ‘hold on’ slogan followed another. Those who retreated without orders could expect death. Until then I had believed that these words applied only to the members of the Fascist armed forces who dared not throw away their weapons. But later, when I read the memoirs of former Fascist officers, I realised how much the consciousness of the population had been poisoned.
‘We were soldiers,’ wrote Guderian, ‘to defend our Fatherland and to bring up our youths as upstanding and fighting men, and we were happily so. Soldiering was for us a high duty born out of the love of our people and our country.’
In order to ‘defend their fatherland’ they had to occupy Austria and Czechoslovakia, Poland, Greece, Yugoslavia, Norway and Denmark? Were there not enough of these for Guderian to overdo the hypocrisy? Do you see anything of the love of their people as they sent millions of people to the ovens of Auschwitz and Maidanak? The end was getting nearer and all further resistance was futile, but blind obedience and fanaticism had no limits. On the walls of buildings gleamed large boasting slogans like: ‘Berlin remains German!’ One of us had added in crayon, ‘But without Fascists!’
Berlin was surrounded. From the north moved in the 2nd Guards Tank Army and the 3rd Shock Army, from the east the 11th Independent Tank Corps and the 5th Shock Army. In the west elements of the 47th Army and the 9th Guards Tank Corps took Nauen and on the 24th April connected with the 4th Guards Tank Army of the 1st Ukrainian Front breaking in from the south. In the south-east were fighting the 8th Guards Army and 1st Guards Tank Army, as well as the 3rd Guards Tank Army and the 28th Army of the 1st Ukrainian Front, which were already in the city.
So there lay Berlin before us. Our first objective was not its architectural beauty, although quite near must be the university at which Marx and Engels had studied and where Albert Einstein had been a professor. In Berlin masses of people drunk with victory had celebrated the taking of Prague, Warsaw, the Hague, Brussels and Paris. This is where Fascism had grown. But there was also another Berlin, in which Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg had founded the German Communist Party, a Berlin where at the Reichstag tribune Ernst Thälmann had warned of the dangers of Fascism.
The West German historian Jürgen Thorwald wrote in his book The End on the Oder:
On the morning of the 21st April, as Marshal Zhukov’s breakthrough to Berlin became irrevocable and refugees from the east appeared on the streets of Berlin, Goebbels lost control for the first time.
The sirens sounded the tank alarm once more as Goebbels’ fellow workers assembled for an eleven-hour conference in the cinema at the Goebbels Villa. Goebbels’ usually sunburnt face was dead white. He understood for the first time that the end was near. His unbearable inner tension erupted in passionate hatred. The German people, he shouted, the German people, what can one do with a people whose men will no longer fight when their wives are being raped. All the National Socialist plans, all its thoughts and aims were so big and so precious for this people. The German people had become too cowardly to involve themselves. In the east they ran away. In the west they hindered the soldiers from fighting and greeted the enemy with white flags. The German people have deserved the fate that now awaits them.
There was fighting everywhere in Berlin. Our soldiers drove the enemy out of the cellars and buildings from the ground to the roofs. The tanks slowly crept through the streets, the sappers finding the de-mining of the routes not easy.
Our corps staff were accommodated in a lovely building, at the urging of Colonel Vedenitshev, who had a weakness for art and architecture. When General Katukov sought us out I invited him to enter our apartments. However, he rejected my hospitality, turned his back on the building and stood back a few paces. ‘I’ll not put a foot in that building. And I recommend you to clear out of this palace as soon as possible. This place simply reeks of mines.’
While Vedenitshev was seeing to the immediate removal of the staff, I stood with Katukov in the grassed area in front of the building listening to the roar of the engines of aircraft taking off from the Tiergarten for the west. ‘Hitler and his chums are decamping,’ I said out loud.
‘That is not impossible,’ agreed Michael Yefimovitch Katukov.
Towards the morning the palace blew up. General Katukov had been quite right.
Danger threatened every step in the street fighting. If we shut the enemy up in one building, he escaped by underground passages and appeared again in another building. He also used the extensive drainage system for manoeuvring underground.
Firing was going on everywhere. Leaflets in the Russian language were meant to raise fear in our soldiers: ‘In Berlin there are 600,000 buildings. Each one will be turned into a fortress and will be your grave.’ But our soldiers did not allow themselves to be frightened by them. They had come here to put an end to Fascism and to liberate the German people.
Neither the water supply nor the electricity worked in the destroyed city. Women and children were huddled in the cellars. In order to rescue them we sent in special troops. They carried the people out of the rubble and administered first aid. Where the enemy had mined apartments, numerous Soviet soldiers were killed in these rescue operations. Our soldiers helped the women and their children out of the dangerous areas and shared their rations with them.
The little Berliners came to our field kitchens without the least fear, thrust out cups and spoons and begged for food. Kuschatch – food – was the first Russian word they learnt. Our cook filled the bowl of a little lad to the brim. ‘Danke schön,’ said the little one but made no indication of leaving.
‘What do you want then?’ asked the cook in Russian. ‘Shall I make some more?’
‘For Mama,’ explained the little one, dipped a finger in his bowl, licked it and vanished as quickly as his little legs could carry him. ‘He’ll certainly come again,’ said the cook happily.
Sergeant Darinkov’s submachine-gunners saved about twenty women and children from danger of death from the upper storeys of a burning building. Perhaps these were the wives and children of those men that had been firing at us with Panzerfausts? We Soviet citizens were drawn in the spirit of humanitarianism and discriminated precisely between the Germans and the Fascists. Every time I returned to Berlin later, I visited the Soviet Memorial in Treptow Park. The Soviet soldier with the sword and the child in his arms has become the symbol of members of the Red Army.