“Not with a submachine gun,” said another, a corporal. He raised his head to take a look, just far enough for a single bullet to penetrate his eye. He fell onto his back.
Maurice tasted something bitter and burning in the back of his throat. One of the other men looked at him, nodded, and the three remaining rose up as one, firing at a second-storey window. They dropped again before the German could respond.
More machine gun fire hit the pile of bricks in front of them. When it paused, a young Soviet lieutenant threw himself against the bricks beside Maurice. Where did he come from?
“There are two of the bastards on the first floor,” he said. He pointed at one of the Soviet soldiers, who carried a submachine gun. “You give us covering fire. You two,” he indicated Maurice and the other living man beside him, “come with me into the building. We’re going to kill those fucking Nazis.”
This is not the riskiest order I’ve had in this war, Maurice thought. But it’s close.
The officer took his sidearm revolver from its holster, unstrapped his helmet and raised it with his left hand over the top of the rubble. The German machine gun fired again, two short bursts that missed. “Now,” the lieutenant said.
The man with the submachine gun leaned to the side of the rubble and fired at the window where the enemy fire had come from. At the same moment, the lieutenant leaped around the other side of the pile, Maurice and the other man behind him. They dashed across the street, praying not to be hit, and reached the bullet-scarred building.
It had been a small tenement, its front door long since destroyed. The lieutenant led them to a wide staircase that rose eight steps before doubling back for another eight.
He paused on the second-storey landing, crouching low beside a banister that afforded not even the illusion of cover. Maurice and the other man crouched just behind him, looking along a hallway with doors on both sides. Which one is the right one? Maurice wondered.
The lieutenant seems to know. He pointed to the second door on the right, then nodded at Maurice and the other man. They pulled back the bolts on their rifles. The lieutenant stepped silently to the door, holding his revolver in front of him. He stood to one side of it, aimed his sidearm at the doorknob, and signaled to the men behind him.
They all fired at the same time, tearing three holes through the wooden door. Maurice and the other man pulled the bolts back on their rifles as quickly as they could as the lieutenant kicked the door open.
But he miscalculated. As the door sprang open, a single shot rang out and the lieutenant crumpled to the floor. Maurice and the other soldier fired their rifles through the door at the same time and saw a lone man in an SS uniform fall to the floor, dropping a submachine gun. Beside him another black uniformed body lay bleeding from a hole in its head.
Maurice turned to the lieutenant on the floor. The bullet had hit him in the stomach. Blood soaked the front of his uniform and spread in a growing puddle on the floor of the hallway. He looked at Maurice with fading eyes. “Did we get the bastards?” he asked. Blood leaked from the corners of his mouth.
“You got one, and we got the other,” Maurice said. He helped the lieutenant lie down.
The young officer coughed, and more blood flowed down his chin. He took one last breath that bubbled in his throat, and then he did not move again.
“Take his knees, I’ll take his shoulders,” Maurice said to the other man, who had slung the German submachine gun over one shoulder and was busy taking the boots from one of the SS men to replace his own.
They picked up the lieutenant and headed for the stairs when an explosion rocked the building. The man at the lieutenant’s knees dropped him and ran. “Wait!” Maurice called after him, answered only by more explosions, farther away.
“They’ve started shelling again. Get out of here!” called the third man from the entrance of the tenement.
Maurice lifted the lieutenant’s shoulders and dragged his legs down the stairs. His feet flopped comically and sickeningly over each step. When he reached the landing, the third man, the one who had provided covering fire with his submachine gun, urged him out again. “Forget him, unless you want a shell to land on your head.”
“Who’s shelling?”
“We are, you idiot! Forget him. He’s dead. It won’t matter to him anymore.”
Maurice grabbed the lieutenant’s Nagant revolver and shoved it into a pocket. It was only then that he remembered the Luger he had taken from the German he had fallen onto. It seemed so long ago.
“Come on,” the third Red soldier urged before he sprinted out the door, heading down the shattered street toward the Soviet lines. Maurice ran after him as explosions rocked the ground.
The town had put up expected resistance, so the Red Army field commanders issued orders to pull their men out. They then fired the heavy gun before all the Soviet soldiers had time to get out.
Hundreds of cannon and mortars and Katyushas opened up, reducing the town to a pile of broken masonry, even its medieval centre. The Red Army pushed past the smoking remains, closer to Berlin.
By April 22, the Soviet artillery was in range to strike the capital. A Soviet war correspondent reported that the bombardment began at exactly 8:30 a.m. Ninety-six shells fell in the centre of Berlin in a few minutes. The Soviet armies encircled the city by April 25. The next day, two armies attacked the airport. The Germans fought back, hard, slowing the advance, but it was hopeless. They had lost more than half the 100,000 soldiers they had defending the city when the battle began.
The Germans and Soviets fought house to house and hand to hand. On April 20, the Red Army attacked the Reichstag—ironically, because it had not been used since the Nazis had burned it in 1933. Still, the SS had fortified it and fought room to room. They also set up heavy guns on the roof of a tower in the nearby Berlin Zoo to fire on the attackers.
In and around Berlin, fanatics and SS men who knew they would not survive capture by the Reds continued to fight, either to kill as many of the communists they hated as possible, or to try to be captured by the Western Allies.
Hitler married his mistress, Eva Braun, on April 29. The next day, they both committed suicide in the Fuhrerbunker. The Fuhrer’s last will and testament named Admiral Karl Donitz President of the Reich, and Joseph Goebbels Chancellor.
The German armies fought on. By May 1, they had fewer than 10,000 men left, concentrated around the Tiergarten, a large park in the centre of the city.
North of the city, the army of which Maurice was part kept the remnants of the Panzer Armies at bay. Maurice’s company oversaw thousands of German prisoners marching into improvised camps, fields surrounded by barbed wire and well-armed Russians looking for revenge.
On May 1, Chancellor Goebbels dictated a letter to Red Army General Vasily Chuikov, Commander of the 8th Guards Army and the Soviet forces in Berlin, reporting Hitler’s death and asking for a cease-fire. General Hans Krebs delivered it under a white flag. Chuikov rejected the request, insisting on unconditional surrender.
Meanwhile, the Red Army, the U.S. Army Air Force and the Royal Air Force continued to pound Berlin. Fighting continued north and south of the city, in northern Italy, Yugoslavia, Austria, Bavaria and Holland. American and Soviet armies met at the Elbe River at points north and south of Berlin.
On the night of May 1, the remaining German troops in Berlin tried to break out, hoping to escape the Reds and surrender to the Americans, Canadians and British. Most did not make it.