When we watched the carpet bombing of the city from the tower, several times in the Lichtenberg direction where my parents lived, we thought that no one could possibly survive unharmed. I was especially pleased one day to get a short leave and to find that my parents were still well. The partition walls in the apartment were missing and the windows nailed over with cardboard, but that was normal in Berlin.
I visited my parents for the last time shortly before the Russians arrived in Lichtenberg. We could already observe their artillery fire. The people in the block told me that the war was lost and that I should put on civilian clothes and stay with my parents, but I had already seen several soldiers hanging from lampposts on the Unter den Linden with placards round their necks on which was written ‘I was too much of a coward to defend my country’. Fear of being arrested by the SS and of dying in that way was greater than that of the front line. I still reckoned that I had a chance of surviving and preferred to return to the Zoo Bunker.
The fighting bunker had been built with an elastic foundation to take the shock of the discharge of the 128s. Two twin-128s firing alone would have been sufficient to break a rigid foundation. The bunker had its own water and power supplies along with an up-to-date and well-equipped hospital in which, among others, prominent people like Rudel, the famous Stuka pilot, could be cared for. Rudel had a 37 mm cannon mounted in his aircraft, but we had later versions of the gun on the tower and he often came up to the platform to see the weapons in action during our time there. Normally only the gun crews were allowed on to the platform, but our superiors made an exception in his case.
During the last days the hospital was completely overcrowded and the wounded were even lying in the passage ways, the orderlies and doctors only being able to attend emergency cases. Our beds were removed from our accommodation for them and, as we had little time for sleep anyway, sacks of straw sufficed.
Apart from ourselves, some of the guns were manned by so-called ‘SS-Cadets’. These were White Russians of our age who wore a yellow-blue armband with a lion’s head in the centre. We got on quite well with them, but they were extreme fanatics with a great hatred of the Soviet Army. Any of them that fell into Russian hands would have been lucky to survive.
Even on the fifth storey the walls of the barrack accommodation were over two metres thick and there were 5 cm thick steel shutters hung on two hinges over the windows. Whenever there was an alert or we had to leave the room for a long period, these shutters had to be closed. When the Russians approached the bunker and started shooting with their anti-tank guns and other artillery at the walls and shutters, they eventually concentrated on the shutter hinges. The hinge outside the tailor’s shop was destroyed and the shutter hung askew. A shell entered the room and killed two people, so the room was cleared and further hits there were to no avail. The passage ways behind the outer rooms were so designed that nothing could happen.
On 26 April 1945, volunteers were called for the tank destroyer teams and many of my age group, among them myself, volunteered. We were quickly instructed and equipped for our new role. There were four men in a team, one with a Panzerfaust, one with a glass bottle containing a milky fluid which, when mixed with the oxygen in the air would cause a tank engine to stop, and two escorts armed with sub-machine guns to fire at the enemy as soon as they bailed out. Apart from this a Volkswagen jeep was put at our disposal to give us mobility, but was then taken away again next day because of the shortage of fuel, and since we were only intended for deployment in the Zoo area.
Our second lieutenant had some trees chopped down between the Zoo Bunker and the Zoo Railway Station to provide us with a good field of fire, and also had some anti-tank barriers erected at the station. Our command post was located in the Aquarium.
The first member of our small team was wounded at the anti-tank barrier when a burning beam fell from a building on his thigh. He was immediately taken to the hospital and fully recovered later, as he told me after the war.
A unit had paraded in front of the barrier. Why the person in charge had so badly misjudged the situation, I cannot say, but suddenly Russian aircraft appeared like lightning and started dropping shrapnel bombs, and many of the soldiers were wounded. We rushed to their aid but had no stretchers to carry them on, so used table tops from a nearby abandoned restaurant. It was frightful. I helped carry a table top on which a soldier lay whose leg had been ripped up to the knee. He spoke quite normally to us without complaining, but the pain must have been greater than we could imagine.
The only occasion we went into action against a tank was catastrophic for both sides. We had to destroy a tank on the corner of Wichmannstrasse and Keithstrasse whose gunfire was dominating the street. We crept through ruins and cellars until we could see the tank from a cellar window each. The tank stood across the street from us and was firing steadily down Keithstrasse. A Russian with a slung sub-machine gun was standing in a doorway near the tank watching it fire. We debated whether we should shoot the soldier or the tank first, deciding upon the tank since the tank crew would be alert. Comrade Hitzinger fired at the tank with a Panzerfaust from his cellar window and hit it, but at the same time cried out with pain, as he had not taken the back blast into account and was burning all over. The Russian in the doorway had vanished. We attended to our comrade and put out the flames with our jackets, and then took him back to the hospital in the bunker. (He too survived.)
Now only two members of our team were left. We reported back to the Aquarium and were given the order to report to an SS unit that was involved in the street fighting in the Budapester Strasse. We reported there and were ordered to fire out of a doorway at a Russian machine gun post that was dug in on a corner and keeping the street under fire. We left the safety of the doorway for a few seconds and fired in the direction of the Russian machine gun post, but whether we hit anything, I do not know. My friend, Bernd Vandre, who was bigger than me and perhaps also somewhat heavier, reached the cover of the doorway too late and was wounded in the lungs. He was taken straight back to the bunker and tended to. (Incredibly, he survived and we met again after the war.)
Now I was the only one left, and when I reported back to the SS unit I was sent to the Aquarium to get reinforcements. Eight elderly soldiers were detailed off to me at the Aquarium as reinforcements. When we came to a crossroads I asked a soldier lying on the other side of the street whether it was free from fire. He called back that everything was all right, so I ran across the street with three of the soldiers and got across safely. Then I beckoned the others to come cross quickly. They started off, but too slowly, for when they reached the middle of the street they were shot at and some of them were wounded, although they all got across. We took the wounded men to a nearby barber’s shop below street level and gave them first aid. They were later taken to the hospital.
I had now had enough of this and, instead of reporting back to the SS unit, I returned to my proper unit in the Zoo Bunker.