Victory Day in Berlin, 8/9. May 1945

Berlin Tempelhof Airport. Morning. No one has arrived yet, the airport is empty. Just in the center, a fat little Soviet colonel is practicing the machinery of the shop with an honor guard in front meeting with allies. He practiced for a long time, over and over again – during the war they had weaned themselves off all that stuff.

Konstantin Simonov, war correspondent and book author Shortly before silence. From notes from 1945. years, that May 8, 1945, he is lying on the grass with other correspondents and is bored.

Finally, the first plane lands. Vyshinsky (Andrei, in 1945 was the deputy minister of foreign affairs responsible for Soviet preparations during the trial of German war criminals before the International Military Tribunal) is dating several Soviet diplomats. They immediately get into the car and leave...

An hour and a half later - another "Douglas" lands. Seeing that it was not Marshal Georgy Zhukov but Sokolovsky who came to meet, the correspondents realized that Eisenhower (commander of the advisory forces in Europe, American General and later President Dwight Icke) would not arrive, but someone else. British Air Force Chief Tedder and US Strategic Air Force Commander General Spats arrived.

The orchestra played three allied anthems, according to the notes that were delivered by special mail in sealed envelopes from Moscow a month earlier to the full military orchestras with the directive to rehearse each note well. They knew Maseljeza, and practiced the British and American national anthems.

The guard of honor that welcomed the allies was right in the middle between the plane that brought the Germans: Keitel (Wilhelm Bodewin Johann Gustav, Generalfeldmarschall, head of the command of the German armed forces), Admiral Friedeburg and Colonel General of Aviation Stumpf and several other German officers.

The Germans had to make a detour, on the other side, in order to bypass the honor procession in a wide arc. Keitel, wearing a long coat and a high general's cap, was imposing, walking first with big, wide steps without looking around. While the allies were being welcomed, the Germans sat in the car and familiarized themselves with the text of the capitulation document.

In the confusion of iron, wood, weapons, suitcases, papers, mutilated human bodies...

In the notes from 1945 Shortly before silence, Konstantin Simonov, a writer with a socialist realist orientation, and at the time a war correspondent with the status of a commissar, writes that it is difficult to imagine a more painful scene than the one that greets the German generals on the way to the place where they have to sign the capitulation:

"Berlin is in front, to the right is a clearing, completely filled with something completely incredible - a bunch of tanks, cars, armored vehicles, trucks, special vehicles, ambulances. All of it literally piled on top of each other, lifted, overturned and, apparently in an attempt to turn and save, crushed hundreds of trees around it.

And in this mess of iron, wood, weapons, suitcases, papers, among something incomprehensible, burnt and blackened - a mess of mutilated human bodies. And all this goes along the glade literally into infinity. And all around in the forest again corpses, corpses, corpses of people fleeing under fire. Corpses mixed, as I suddenly notice, with the living. These living - the wounded - are lying on their overcoats, on blankets, sitting leaning against trees, some bandaged, others bloody and still unbandaged. Some of the wounded, I don't notice right away, are lying on blankets and coats by the very edge of the road. Then I notice - also not immediately - figures of people wandering among them, apparently doctors and paramedics...

Near the overpass of the city railway near the Zoo in Berlin, many corpses lay, some on their backs, some face down. There is liquid blood on the sidewalk that has not yet darkened. On the overpass there are two destroyed machine guns and about fifteen corpses, among them two dead women in SS uniforms...

When I saw the women who died in the war, and here, despite everything, despite their SS uniforms, I felt a special chill and pity."

In the brick monkey house, which, according to an old German, housed the largest gorilla in Europe and the largest chimpanzee in Europe, on a platform, separated by a crossbar, lie, dead, a huge gorilla and a very large chimpanzee. On the concrete edge, above which the grate begins, two dead SS men lie. The third, also dead, sits with his back against the edge and holds a machine gun on his knees.

"Already darkened streams of blood stretch from them down the concrete. The guard is standing next to us at the door. He seems to feel very sorry for the monkey. He stands silently and shakes his head like an old man... A table with one end leaning against the wall and the other on the bed, with a chair in front of the table. On the chair is a jacket with SS insignia. On the bed, facing the door, lies a dead general with open eyes, a tall, forty-five-year-old man with short hair and a beautiful, calm face. His right hand, holding a parabellum. His left arm is wrapped around the shoulder of a young woman, who is lying with her eyes closed. She is wearing either a short-sleeved blouse or a uniform skirt. The General is holding an unfinished bottle of champagne between her legs.

BERLIN OPERATION

For the Berlin Strategic Offensive Operation, which was carried out from April 16 to May 8, 1945, the Soviet Headquarters of the Supreme Command concentrated about 2,5 million soldiers. The first to go on the offensive were the troops of the 1st Belorussian Front Georgi Zhukov (opposite Berlin) and the 1st Ukrainian Front Ivan Konyev, who, having crossed the river Nisa with tanks, quickly advanced towards the southeastern outskirts of Berlin. Troops from Konstantin Rokosovsky's Second Belorussian Front were to join the attack north of the German capital. By the way, the front in Russian and Soviet terminology corresponds to a group of 3-5 armies in the terminology of other countries.

The Soviet fronts were opposed by German army groups Vistula and Center with about a million soldiers. Berlin was literally full of SS units, among them were killers of various nationalities. The Volkssturm units were to be stationed at the barricades that were set up in the huge city (900 square kilometers), and were filled with old men and boys aged 13 to 16, the kind Hitler greeted with trembling hands when he last appeared outside the bunker on April 20, 1945.

In preparation to repulse the Soviet offensive, the German command built numerous defensive structures along the western banks of the Oder and Neisse rivers. Berlin itself was turned into a powerful fortified area with three outer defensive rings. On 88 thousand hectares in Berlin, divided into nine defense sectors, more than 400 permanent reinforced concrete structures were built. The largest – six-story bunkers dug into the ground – could accommodate up to a thousand people. The most complex engineering structures were created in the central sector, which included the main government institutions, including the Reichstag and the Reich Chancellery.

The Berlin subway was used for maneuvering forces. And in order not to slow down the advance of the Soviets, Nazi troops flooded and destroyed a third of the metro stations and blew up 225 bridges.

According to the simultaneous orders of Zhukov and Konev, Soviet units reached Berlin and surrounded it by April 22, and on April 25, on the Elbe River, soldiers from Lieutenant Grigory Goloborodzhek's company met with a group of soldiers from the US 69th Infantry Division, commanded by Lieutenant Kotsebu, which isolated the German forces south of Berlin.

Hitler ordered the 12th Army to turn from the Western Front to the east and liberate Berlin from the encirclement, but the troops of the 1st Ukrainian Front managed to repulse the counterattack quite quickly.

According to Zhukov, from April 21 to May 2, almost 1,8 million artillery shots were fired at Berlin - a total of more than 36 thousand tons of metal. It was fired at by cannons, howitzers, cannons and fortress cannons, the shells of which weighed half a ton. Of the 250 thousand buildings in Berlin, about 30 thousand were completely destroyed, more than 20 thousand buildings were in a dilapidated state and more than 150 thousand were damaged.

During the Berlin operation, Soviet troops surrounded and eliminated 70 infantry, 23 tank and mechanized German divisions and captured 480 thousand people. About 150.000 German soldiers and about 120.000 civilians died. In the battle for Berlin, 78.291 Soviet soldiers died and 274.184 were wounded.

Some historical revisionists will write that the Berlin operation of the Red Army (April 16 - May 8, 1945) may not have had such a decisive character that it would have been paid for by so many victims.

It is difficult to dispute, however, that from the very beginning of the German war against the USSR, the vast majority of the Soviet people believed that the enemy would be driven from their native land and that the Red Army would take Berlin and destroy fascism. After all, from the destroyed Stalingrad, Moscow, besieged Leningrad and Sevastopol and Rzhev, from the discovered crimes in Bab Yar and Auschwitz, millions of Soviet soldiers stormed with the slogan "To Berlin!" All the road signs on the Eastern Front showed how many kilometers remained to Berlin.

In Moscow, the memory of the victory in the Great Patriotic War, achieved at the cost of the lives of 26,6 million Soviet people, is cherished as - in the poetics of the Internationale - the last decisive battle, and repeated in the renewed Russian patriotic poetics, as a kind of holy war (Svyashennaya voyna).

People of all nationalities of the USSR died, but still, when one takes into account the number of victims in the Second World War and how the monuments to the winners in the Baltic countries and Eastern Europe are being torn down, and the revisionist relativization of that war, one can say with less and less guilt that it was a conflict between Germans and Russians in which others also participated. Czechs - from May 5, 1945.

Simplified historical chronicles say that the Russians have conquered Berlin three times so far: for the first time after the Seven Years' War in 1763 under the yoke of Catherine; the second time after the defeat of Napoleon and the third time after the defeat of Hitler.

photo: wikipedia

RED FLAG ON THE REICHSTAG

On April 150, 171, Soviet soldiers of the 3th and 1st Rifle Divisions of the 30rd Shock Army of the 1945st Belorussian Front launched a decisive attack on the Reichstag, a massive gray building that was considered a symbol of the Third Reich - although at that time the center of power was not in the Reichstag but in the Reich Chancellery built by Speer, and in the last days of the war in the "firebunker" next to it.

The Weimar Republic (one of) was proclaimed in 1918 from the balcony of the Reichstag, which, since it was built from 1884 to 1892, was the seat of the parliament. Until 1933, it was the center of German politics. However, on February 27, 1933, the Reichstag building burned down. Marinus van der Lube, a Dutch-born left-wing radical and lunatic, was arrested and charged with arson - which was probably true - but also with conspiracy, which was an obvious lie, which the Nazis used. During the reign of the Nazis, the parliament was moved to the neighboring building of the Kroll Opera House, and in 1942 the parliament was finally dissolved. The Rajstag building itself was used for various purposes from time to time, from a maternity ward to a place for propaganda exhibitions, and at the end of the war it was turned into a citadel, a fortification with bricked-up windows and machine gun nests.

The fighting in the burning Reichstag, surrounded by the semicircular flow of the Spree on one side and the canal from the unbuilt section of the metro on the other, continued in waves. Even at the moment when Zhdanov praised the soldiers for conquering Rajstag, there was an assault wave.

And as the Reichstag fortress was conquered room by room, dozens of handmade red flags (which many fighters wrapped around their chests as they charged) were displayed on the windows and pillars - as symbols of victory and signals to the artillerymen not to fire on that part of the building.

The historical Victory Flag, the assault flag of the 150th Rifle Division of the 79th Rifle Corps of the 3rd Shock Army, was raised on the roof of the Reichstag on the night of April 30, 1945, at around 22 p.m., by Sergeant Mikhail Yegorov and Junior Sergeant Meliton Kantarije, together with Lieutenant Alexei Berest. At first, it was not so prominently visible, so they say that, as was the case with the American flag on Iwo Jima, another, more visible one was displayed, with an "Eisensteinian" repetition of the assault in daylight and the raising of the flag on May 1, in front of the cameras.

Hundreds of Kolyas, Ivans and Yegors then carved their names and messages on the marble walls and pillars of the Reichstag. “From Moscow to Berlin we went, Major Yakovlev”, “Galina-Anatoly; My dreams came true” and the like.

In 2002, the Bundestag raised the issue of removing those autographs of the winners, but the proposal was rejected by a majority vote. After the reconstruction of the Reichstag, during which the British architect Foster designed a glass dome of the Reichstag, different from the original, some of those autographs engraved in marble were preserved, as well as bullet marks on the inside of the left gable.

"The scoundrel finished! It's a pity you didn't manage to take him alive..."

At 4:1 a.m. on May 1945, 1942, Zhdanov was called on the phone by General Vasily Chuikov, the commander of the Eighth Guards Army in the Berlin operation. This is the general who was awarded the Order of Suvorov of the first degree when he made a name for himself in the six-month defense of Stalingrad (43/1982), whose ashes, after his death in 30, were buried at the Mamayev Kurgan next to the pedestal "Ródina-matь zovët!" (Mother tribute is calling!), where many of the fighters he commanded are buried. Chuikov reported that General Krebs, the German Chief of the General Staff informed that on April 15.50 at XNUMX:XNUMX Hitler committed suicide.

Zhukov: "I immediately contacted Moscow and called Vissarionovich Stalin. He was at the dacha. The head of the security department, General Vlasik, answered the phone and said: 'Comrade Stalin has just gone to sleep.'

'Please wake him up. The matter is urgent and cannot wait until morning.'

I reported Hitler's suicide. Stalin replied: 'The scoundrel has finished his game! It's a pity he wasn't caught alive. (Доигрался падлец! Жаль, что не удалось вызывает его живым)'.

photo: ap photo

Konstantin Simonov describes the "spectacle of the Reich Chancellery" damaged by a bomb and covered in rubble. One of the adjoining rooms, which he was told was Bormann's office, was intact, but everything in it had been turned upside down. Among the scattered papers there are also two old drawings that he thinks might be drawings of Hitler himself, and he notices a photograph on which it is written: "Battles with the Spartacists - Munich, May 1919" (the Spartacists are participants in the left-wing rebellion led by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg in 1919). In that picture, several soldiers sitting on carts are numbered in ink. Among them, number one is Hitler's deputy Rudolf Hess. Besides bookplates, there are also postcards lying on the floor. Three of them show a smiling Hitler with little girls. On the fourth is a picture of a wagon in Compiegne. Square-faced Keitel pushing a paper across the table to a skinny French general - Armistice Terms (1940)…

HITLER'S TEETH

They are looking for Goebbels' body - it was already found once, but then someone suspected that it was him, and now they are looking for it again, and they are also looking for Hitler's body, notes Simov.

On May 1, members of Smersh found Goebbels and his wife badly burned, and took them out into the street on a door torn off its hinges to show them to the people of Berlin.

The bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun were found almost by accident on May 4 when a soldier noticed loose soil with a piece of blanket sticking out of it. There, in a shell crater, were the charred remains.

photo: wikipedia

Among the first to enter Hitler's bunker under the Reich Chancellery was Smersh translator Elena Rzhevskaya (Elena Rzhevskaya/ Berlin, May 1945. Zapiski voennogo perevodchika).

Her real name was Elena (Lena) Kagan. She chose the literary pseudonym Rzhevskaya, after the very bloody and neglected Battle of Rzhev (1942), about which she published records, which were considered too pessimistic in the Soviet era.

When the war started, she was 22 years old and a student at the Literary Institute in Moscow. In the summer of 1940, she separated from her husband, the poet Pavel Kogan, who also studied at the Literary Institute. Their surnames differed by only one letter. Their daughter Olga was evacuated to Novosibirsk with Pavel's parents. Elena got a job at the Moscow Watch Factory, but not to make watches, but cases. In the evening, she attended nursing courses.

After completing the courses, Elena wanted to go to the front. From the second attempt, in October 1941, she managed to enroll in a course for military translators, so that on October 15, she disembarked from the steamship "Karl Liebknecht" in Stavropol on the Volga River with other translators. There, the Institute of Military Sciences was evacuated from Moscow to the sanatorium in Lesno. Among the cadets who arrived on the same ship was Pavel Kogan. Because of my short-sightedness, he was ineligible for mobilization, however, and he found his way into the army through courses for military interpreters. In less than a year, Pavel will die in the Battle of Novorossiysk. And Elena went with the army - the 1st Belorussian Front under the command of Zhukov: Rzhev, Smolensk, Belarus, Poland... And as a military translator in Smersh (Death to spies!) she reached Berlin.

According to her records from Berlin, the first most valuable testimony about Hitler's death was given by the person responsible for the ventilation of Hitler's bunker and the technician in the garage. The first one was called to fix something, so he saw them carrying the bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun, wrapped in a blanket. He recognized the Führer's boots. And the serviceman said that on April 30, they asked him for gasoline and that he heard that it was for burning the fuhrer. And on May 1st, they demanded it again, but he didn't have any more gas, so he pointed it out from the car. The commission for the identification of the German Führer was headed by the forensic expert of the 1st Belorussian Front, Faust Shkaravsky.

Hitler's charred remains were autopsied on May 8, 1945 by Medical Service Major Anna Yakovljevna Marantz, who served as the chief pathologist of the 1st Belorussian Front and voluntarily joined the Red Army on June 23, 1941 in Kiev.

The bodies could only be identified by their teeth. Colonel Gorbushin, Major Bystrov and translator Elena Kagan, who was assigned by the group commander to guard the only evidence of the identity of the burnt corpse found in the courtyard of the Reich Chancellery, set out to search for Hitler's dentist. She carried Hitler's dental bridges in a perfume box or for cheap jewelry. It was emphasized to her that she is RESPONSIBLE for the contents of the box. They found Kathe Heusermann, an assistant to Hitler's dentist who had escaped, and she identified the Führer's teeth, crowns and bridges.

After the identification, she was allowed to go home, and as a reward she received cans of food. Then they took her to the USSR and for some reason imprisoned her for ten years. After returning from captivity, she did not say anything publicly during her life. Elena Rzhevskaya scribbled in thicker ink the sentence in her front notebook written in May 1945: "I have Hitler's teeth."

Until the end of her life at the age of 98 (she died on April 25, 2017 in Moscow), she searched the archives for permission to see the details of the historical event she was a direct witness of. The full version of her testimony was first published in literary form, then in documentary form in 1965, and in 2005 it was translated into many languages.

Professor Oleg Budnitsky, director of the International Center for the History and Sociology of the Second World War at the Moscow Higher School of Economics and editor-in-chief of the annual Archive of Jewish History, in a presentation of its Notes of a military translator writes: "Not in his worst nightmare could the Führer, who had put so much effort into the extermination of the Jews, imagine that one Jewish woman would search his entrails and describe the anatomical features of his corpse, including 'disgusting' details like the absence of his left testicle, while another would carry a box of his teeth and be annoyed that she was being prevented from celebrating the capitulation of the Third Reich. Maybe God does exist..."

"That whole day, filled with the approach of Victory, it was very difficult to carry the box in my hands", later recalled Elena Moiseyevna Kagan - Elena Rzhevskaya.

And in front of the Reichstag and the Triumphal Arch, Soviet soldiers eager for life played legzinka in those moments and chanted to demand that the empress of Russian folk music Lydia Ruslanova Katyusha, talismanic songs of millions of soldiers - sings a song about old warm felt boots that Russians call "valenki".

Judge people, judge God as she loved
She walked with bare feet in the frost
Valenki valenki eh nepodshity starenki...
Oj ty Kolya Kolya Nikolay stay at home, don't walk...

(Judge, people, judge, God, how I loved,
She gladly walked barefoot in the frost,
Valjenka, valjenka, eh, unstitched, old
Oh, you Kolya, Kolya, Nikolai, sit at home, don't go out...)

Pop artists did not receive military decorations, but they say that Zhukov took off his Order of the Patriotic War of the first degree from his lapel and awarded Ruslanova...

FIRST THE SIGNATURE, THEN THE HANGING

In the Berlin suburb of Karlshorst, on May 8, 1945, correspondents hung around for hours around the former officers' club of the Wehrmacht School of Miners, which housed the headquarters of the 5th Shock Army under the command of Colonel-General Berzarin, later the first commander of Berlin, during the battle for Berlin. The capitulation, originally scheduled for two o'clock in the afternoon, was not signed until late in the evening.

"Finally, the representatives of the allied command enter the hall: Zhukov, Telegin, and with them Vyshinsky, Teder, Spats and Delatre de Tassinyi, whom I am now seeing for the first time", writes Simonov. "He is an elegant general, barely older than forty-five.

Our generals, who sat down at the table intended for the capitulating Germans, jumped from it as if they had been stabbed and went to other tables.

Zhukov smiles.

Tedder smiles.

Delattre de Tassinyi smiles.

Photographers and videographers went crazy. They jump on the tables, lean their bellies on the general's shoulders and film, film, film...

One of our cameramen hits an American admiral on the head with the long handle of his camera. The admiral, obviously used to the commotion of the correspondent, smiles good-naturedly and waves his hand: 'OK!'

But, ours are not used to this, they almost dragged the poor operator out of the hall.

When they sat down at the center table, they look very different.

Spats' face is expressionless.

Vyshinsky is getting excited…

Tedder, with his pleasant but expressionless appearance, smiles slightly and says something through the translator to Zhukov, and for some reason it seems to me that this very man, the only one of them all, retains a certain amount of irony in relation to the upcoming solemn procedure.

Delattre de Tasigny (a Frenchman who was recognized as a victor and honored to sign the act of capitulation as a witness, pr. aut.) looks like a man who arrived later than the others and is busy hurrying to familiarize himself with these things.

Zhukov radiates…”

Simonov then describes the strong, heavy face of Zhukov, whom he last saw in his heated dugout after the defeat of the Japanese on the Khalkhin Gol River in 1939 during the so-called Manchurian Campaign of the USSR Army Group in Mongolia. He remembers the mocking calm with which he listened to the report of one of his informants in whom he does not believe at all, and he says it coldly, harshly, irrevocably.

Zhukov gets up and, turning to the officers standing at the front door, says dryly:

"Bring the German delegation!"

The door opens and Keitel, Friedeburg and Stumpf enter, followed by several officers, apparently adjutants. Keitel reaches his desk in just three steps, stops behind the middle chair and, extending his hand, makes a quick movement back and forth with a short field marshal's baton, for some reason it reminds Simonov of gymnastics with weights. He moves the chair back, sits down and puts the bat in front of him. Friedeburg and Stumpf are also seated. Their adjutants stand in the back.

Zhukov asked the Germans if they had the capitulation document in their hands and if they knew its contents. Keitel confirmed with a nod. The day before, that part of Germany headed (if he was) by Admiral Karl Dönitz had signed a similar document of surrender to the Allies in Reims, France. The Soviet Union did not recognize that document as enforceable, so in the new document it was specified that immediately after signing the German forces would be ordered to cease fire not only in the west but also in the east.

At the central table, Zhukov, Tedder, Spats, and finally Delattre de Tasigny begin to sign the document.

Zhdanov invites the German generals to come to the winner's table and sign the document on Germany's unconditional surrender in Russian, English and German (only the Russian and English versions were official).

Keitel approaches the table and expects to be handed a document.

Zhdanov points to the papers next to him: "Not there, here!"

The last of the three Germans signs the act and returns to his seat. An adjutant zealously runs a blotter over the paper so that the ink signatures do not smudge.

The capitulation was signed on May 8, 1945 at 23.01:9 p.m. Central European time, that is, on May 1945, 1.01 at XNUMX:XNUMX a.m. Moscow time.

Zhukov stands up and says: "The German delegation can leave the hall."

The Germans stand up. Keitel makes the same motion with his club as he did when he entered, turns and leaves. The others follow him outside. The door is closing. The war reporter does not miss the general sigh of relief and relaxation.

Immediately after the signing, the capitulation document in Russian was sent to Moscow by special plane along with the flags of various units of the defeated German army, including Hitler's stand. At the first victory parade on Red Square in Moscow on June 24, 1945, they will be thrown to the ground.

A few days later Keitel was arrested. He was tried in Nuremberg for war crimes (among other things, he signed the order to shoot 100 hostages for one murdered German soldier in order to suppress the uprising in Serbia). He was sentenced to death. His request to be shot was rejected. He was hanged on October 16, 1946.