Once more I was sent back into the Zoo gardens, this time with a soldier and orders to wait for the Russian tanks with a Panzerfaust in a slit trench. We laid the Panzerfaust down carefully some distance from our trench to avoid being blown up should it be hit by chance. It was already dark and no tanks came. Eventually we were relieved and returned to the Zoo Bunker.
When I unbuckled my pistol back in the barrack room, I saw that a shot had gone through the holster and smashed the spare magazine against the pistol. I had not noticed it happen and had been extremely lucky that the pistol had stopped me getting a shot in the stomach. That was on 30 April, and I remained in the bunker. The Russians were close by, packages of explosives were being thrown down on them from the gallery and being replied to with mortar fire. There were now about 25,000 people in the Zoo Bunker, including all kinds of servicemen, and it was a complete mix-up.
There was a female flak auxiliary working in the bunkers signals section, a very pretty blonde called Dora from East Prussia, with whom we were all in love, myself especially. It was nothing really serious, but as it is with one’s first youthful love, I could think of hardly anything else. On 1 May 1945, the last day in the Zoo Bunker, an officer cadet of the Luftwaffe with whom I had become friends, Dora and myself spent most of the time together. He had been seconded to us as there was no fuel left for flying.
At about 2300 hours on the evening of 1 May an announcement came over the loudspeakers to prepare for a break-out from the tower. We quickly put our things together. There was not much, just a haversack, water bottle, weapon and ammunition, and an emergency ration of chocolate. We three waited together until several thousand had left the tower, not wanting to be among the first to leave, as we did not know what awaited us outside. Several of the older soldiers, some of them highly decorated, remained behind as they said it was all the same to them if they met their fate there or elsewhere.
As we mixed in the stream of people and emerged outside, it seemed to be quite peaceful with only the occasional shot nearby coming out of the dark night, and we were not fired at. We could not understand how we could get out of the bunker so easily. Somehow this stream of all kinds of servicemen, without any leadership, found its way to Spandau via the Olympic Stadium. Apart from a few shots at the Olympic Stadium, we reached a newly built part of Spandau without any interference from the enemy.
On the morning of 2 May, combat teams were formed to fight their way over the Charlotten Bridge through the Russians occupying Spandau to the Elbe River in the west. We joined one of these teams, as we were determined to get through to the Americans. Our propaganda had made us afraid of falling into Russian hands.
The Russians defended their position on the opposite side of the Charlotten Bridge, but we were able to get across with the help of tanks and other heavy weapons, and to reach the street leading to the west. The buildings on either side of the street were occupied by Russians and we were fired on from the rooftops. It was difficult to go on and eventually we had to seek shelter in the entrance to a building. We kept Dora between us to give her the maximum protection, and were very lucky, as several times shots from rifles or sub-machine guns sprayed the road surface close to us.
At midday we sought shelter in a cellar with some other soldiers all waiting for nightfall to go on. Wounded were crying out with pain in the yard behind the cellar and begging us to shoot them, but it was absolutely impossible to do anything for them without exposing oneself to heavy fire.
We waited until dark and then got as far as a residential area without attracting fire. Vehicles were racing along the streets with soldiers hanging on to them like bunches of grapes. We tried to get on a vehicle several times in order to get through to the west quicker, but it was just not possible. (Later on as a prisoner I had to march through Döberitz and saw these shot-up and burnt-out vehicles with their many dead soldiers.)
Between us and the residential area was a big open space that we had to cross if we were going to get any further. We started crawling across it on our stomachs, but shots came toward us from the buildings up ahead, so we crept back again. We could see that we no longer had a chance of getting through, so we threw our weapons away and waited for things to happen. Dora put on a Red Cross armband in the hope of fooling the Russians. I gave her my parents’ address, as she had no one in Berlin to whom she could turn. After my time in captivity I learned from my parents that she had been to see them and had been given shoes and clothing, but that nothing more had been heard of her. During the first part of my captivity I could not get her out of my mind. I was always thinking of her. Such is young love.
On the morning of 3 May some civilians came into our cellar and begged us to give ourselves up. They were afraid that if soldiers were found in the building they would suffer for it. We said goodbye to Dora and left the cellar. A big Russian with a pistol in his hand took us. We had to walk ahead of him with our hands up. Whenever we passed dead Russian soldiers on the street he would say something in Russian that we did not understand. We were terribly frightened that he was going to shoot us. With my hands up, my ‘Mauthe’ watch that I had been given by my parents for my confirmation in 1944 was soon gone. In my fear, I did not care. I was also wearing a silver signet ring with a death’s head on it of a type that was all the rage with us youngsters. He took the ring, but fortunately did not associate me with the SS because of it. We were taken to a cellar that already contained some captured German soldiers. Frightening rumours were making the rounds, whoever had this or that uniform would be shot straight away, etcetera, but nothing happened. After a short while an officer appeared and climbed on to a table. He said that the war was over, Hitler dead, and we would now just be registered and then sent home. However, it did not work out that way and we began our period of captivity.
Taken prisoner by the Soviets, Schweizer was too frail in body to be of any useful work potential to them, and so was released in November 1945. He trained as a mason before qualifying as an architect and engineer in 1952.
Fifteen years later he was entrusted by the East German government with the planning and supervision of construction of a steel rolling mill in North Vietnam. From there he went to work on a project in Czechoslovakia before returning to North Vietnam to construct a glass works. Later he worked on similar projects in Algeria, the Congo, Cuba and East Germany, retiring in 1991. He now lives on the Baltic coast.
TEN
Halbe
HARRY ZVI GLASER
This is part of the quite extraordinary tale of Harry Zvi Glaser, whom I met in 1996 at an annual reunion of survivors of the break-out of the German 9th Army at Halbe, in which some 40,000 troops and accompanying refugees were killed. Most of those present were former Waffen-SS, but Harry had been on the other side, a corporal in the Red Army. A short, slim, bronzed figure armed with a large camera, Harry was happily conversing in imperfect German with his hosts. This was his second visit and clearly he was an honoured guest.
Yet Harry was a Latvian Jew who had fled his countrymen’s persecution ahead of the Nazi invasion and worked as a teenage coalminer in Kazakhstan before volunteering for the Red Army. With the eradication of the German forces in East Prussia, Harry’s 129th Division held an inspiring ceremonial parade at which it received the Order of the Red Banner. Then, after a short rest, the division joined Marshal Zhukov’s 1st Byelorussian Front east of the Oder River opposite Frankfurt/Oder. For two weeks they rested and rehearsed the battle tactics for the forthcoming operation, for which their parent 3rd Army was in reserve. On 26 April, the division reached the outskirts of Berlin.