Harry Schweitzer also described the announcement that came through internal tannoys for a breakout from the Zoo tower at about 2300 hours on 1 May. The tower was surrendered to the Soviets about an hour and a half later. A Luftwaffe doctor present, Dr Walter Hagedorn, estimated the numbers inside at more than 30,000 – mostly civilians – including 1,500 wounded and 500 dead. Miraculously, most of the survivors were able to leave unharmed. The circumstances of the final day in the tower are hazy, but provide a basis for the fictional scenario in this novel. On the evening of 30 April, the Russians sent German prisoners to the tower to try to persuade the garrison to surrender, assuring them that there would be no executions. The following morning, the Russians received a reply, signed by Colonel Haller, garrison commander, saying that the surrender would take place at midnight. But Haller had not been the official garrison commander, suggesting that there had been a coup; the reason for the delay was apparently to allow time for a breakout, on the assumption that the Russian assurances were worthless. In the event the breakout never occurred and the Russians reached the tower and took the surrender from Haller, who apparently told a Russian officer that two high-ranking generals were hiding inside. The Russian writer Konstantin Simonov was led to a concrete room, where he found one of the generals lying dead, eyes wide open and clutching a pistol, a dead woman by his side, and between the general’s legs ‘a bottle of champagne, one third full’.
The idea that Hoffman could have flown out of Berlin in a Fieseler Storch is based on a true-life episode from those final days of Nazi power, when the celebrated Nazi aviator Hanna Reitsch (herself also treated in the Zoo tower hospital, in 1943) flew the wounded Luftwaffe general Ritter von Greim into Berlin and then out again after he had visited the Hitler bunker. They survived Russian anti-aircraft fire and landed on a Berlin street in a badly damaged Storch on 27 April, leaving two days later in an Arado Ar 96, hours before Hitler’s suicide. Both aircraft types were lightweight, but the Storch in particular excelled at short take-off and landing.
After the surrender, the Zoo tower was used as a hospital and a shelter for the homeless, but in 1947 it was demolished by the British Royal Engineers, a huge job requiring a staggering thirty-five tons of dynamite. The resulting mountain of rubble – 412,000 cubic metres of it – was ground up and used for road construction during the 1950s, and in 1969 the foundations of the tower were removed. Today the site is occupied by the hippopotamus enclosure of the Berlin Zoo. To get a sense of its appearance, you can visit the remains of another of the three huge towers, the Humboldthain flak tower, which still survives on one side to its original height and has been converted into a memorial and viewing tower. Since 2004, the Berliner Underwelten Association has offered tours inside the ruins, and their efforts have revealed much that was previously buried. Whether or not more remains to be discovered at the site of the Zoo tower is unknown, but the enormous effort that went into its construction in the heart of Berlin suggests that more secrets of the Nazi period and those apocalyptic final days may yet be revealed beneath the modern city.
B-24 Liberator FK-856 is fictional, but is based on RAF Liberators that flew out of Nassau in the Bahamas as part of 111 Operational Training Unit until July 1945. The fictional pilot’s experiences with Bomber Command are inspired by the wartime career of my great-uncle, Flight Lieutenant William Norman Cook, DFC and Bar, RAF, a Lancaster pathfinder pilot who flew 59 operations over Nazi Europe. 111 OTU also carried out anti-submarine patrols, and their losses over the ‘Bermuda Triangle’ – no greater than the losses in any other training unit anywhere – included one Liberator that disappeared without trace on a training mission in 1945. Whether U-boats entered the Caribbean after the German surrender in May 1945 may never be known; the possibility is suggested by the extraordinary voyages of U-977 and U-530, whose captains refused to surrender and did not finally give up until 10 July and 17 August respectively, at Mar del Plata in Argentina.
The Prologue invokes imagery from The Epic of Gilgamesh, the ancient Near Eastern poem also known in its Akkadian version by its first line, Shanaqbai-muru, ‘He who saw the deep’ (in the Prologue I have imagined a similar meaning for the name Uta-napishtim, in a lost language). The passage quoted at the beginning of the book is my own rendering, though the translation of words and phrases owes much to previous scholarly versions including those of Reginald Campbell Thompson (1928), N. K. Sandars (1960 Penguin edition) and Andrew George (1999 Penguin edition). The modern poems referred to in this novel are Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’ (Chapter 7), Wilfred Owen’s ‘Strange Meeting’ (Chapter 16) and Walter de la Mare’s ‘The Listeners’ (Epilogue). The cover image is based on the Nazi Sonnerod symbol in the floor of the SS Generals’ Hall at Wewelsburg Castle in Germany. Other images of sites and artefacts in this book are on my website www.davidgibbins.com