“GOERING has reported that he has 3,000 planes available for the operation. You know Goering’s reports. Discount one thousand, and that still leaves a thousand for you and a thousand for Sepp Dietrich.” Thus spoke Adolf Hitler to one of his generals in the autumn of 1944, commenting on the Luftwaffe support he expected for what proved to be the last German offensive of the Second World War. This was to be the haggard Fuehrer’s final throw of the dice, the breakthrough in the Ardennes supposed to bring a last-minute German victory. For the Ardennes offensive, code-named Herbstnebel, or Autumn Fog, Hitler demanded all available men and war material—more than twenty divisions—and almost every remaining aircraft the Luftwaffe possessed. It was to be the famous Blitzkrieg technique all over again, a powerful blow spearheaded by armoured divisions cutting a great gash through the Allied lines all the way to the Channel coast. “I am determined,” Hitler said, “to carry out this operation despite all risks….”
On 16th December, 1944, the Ardennes offensive broke in fire and steel over the heads of the surprised Allied commanders. In one day, von Runstedt’s armour rolled forward a dozen miles, and within a week a wedge forty-five miles long had been driven into the Allied lines. In fog, sleet and snow the battle swayed through the Ardennes, with the American forces falling back in confusion, until at last the U.S. 10th Armoured Division met the German Panzers head-on outside Bastogne and in a series of bitter tank duels brought the offensive to a standstill. Von Runstedt hurled his élite S.S. troops into the battle, Lieutenant-General George S. Patton’s huge force of armour and infantry thundered through Luxembourg to relieve Bastogne, and thus began the Battle of the Bulge, which would delay the Allied advance for less than a month at a cost of 120,000 German casualties. The ill-fated Herbstnebel offensive never amounted to more than a hopeless gamble, and is memorable less for Hitler’s strategy than the outstanding courage of the American troops who fought and died to hold Bastogne, and the appalling weather conditions that winter, the unbearable, shocking cold of the Ardennes.
In the grey, cold dawn of 1st January, 1945, the last attack in any force by the Luftwaffe—Goering’s so-called “Great Blow”—struck at the Allied air bases from Brussels to Eindhoven. The previous evening the men of ten élite Jagdgeschwader had been sworn to secrecy and informed that they were to undertake a massive attack on the Allied airfields in Belgium and Northern France, at low level, with machine-guns, cannon and light bombs. Some two thousand fighters were said to be involved in the operation, but in fact General von Sperrle could only muster about 650 Focke-Wulf Fw 190s, 450 Messerschmitt Bf 109s and a few jet aircraft. As church bells all over Germany rang in the New Year, the weary Luftwaffe pilots were awakened to prepare for their “Great Blow” while Goering hurried from unit to unit scattering a few words of encouragement. On every German airfield, whirling propellers threw up clouds of snow as engines burst irritably into life in the icy air. Then the Fw 190s and Bf 109s were thundering away into the early morning sky, with cine cameras on the ground recording what had become an unusual sight—a massed take-off by German aircraft.
Led by three navigating Junkers Ju 188s, the huge formations of fighters flew at ground level towards the Allied lines. About 300 machines streaked over the Zuyder Zee, heading for Brussels; a second force came through Arnhem, seeking Eindhoven; and the third massive formation, passing over Venlo, struck at the American forward bases. For once, fortune smiled briefly on the Luftwaffe, and the surprise was complete. At unsuspecting Brussels-Evere, hundreds of Allied aircraft were lined neatly along the airfield perimeter, and soon cannon fire was jumping along the ranks of bombers and fighters, men running for cover were being mown down and black smoke was rising from burning hangars. A few Spitfires succeeded in taking off, others ran into the raking German fire and overturned or crashed in flames. Then the anti-aircraft defences were hammering away, and the first black-crossed fighters falling; but within thirty minutes over a hundred Allied aircraft had been destroyed on the ground.
Death and destruction struck at Eindhoven only seconds after a little unarmed Taylorcraft Auster artillery-spotting monoplane had frantically radioed: “Have just seen formation of at least 200 Messerschmitts flying low on course 320 deg.” Again it was a violent awakening, with tracer flashing in all directions, cannon shells striking along the lines of parked aircraft, fires blazing and men falling. The few Spitfires and Tempests already airborne whirled into battle, and within minutes the terrific anti-aircraft fire was taking a heavy toll of the attacking force. Nevertheless, the damage at Eindhoven proved to be devastating, with a Typhoon Wing and a Spitfire Wing virtually wiped out on the ground. On the twenty-seven Allied bases attacked, at least 300 aircraft had been destroyed, and for a week the sky over the Ardennes was strangely empty of British and American machines. But only for one week.
When the last German fighters had staggered back to their home bases, Hugo von Sperrle and his subordinate, Dietrich Peltz, were able to calculate their losses. More than a hundred Luftwaffe aircraft had been destroyed by Allied fighters and gunfire and many others damaged beyond repair; Galland later assessed the total as high as 300 machines. This was the price that had been paid for a week of grace at a time when new fighters were worth their weight in gold and experienced pilots were irreplaceable. In assembling the Fw 190s and Bf 109s needed to mount his “Great Blow” against the Allied airfields, von Sperrle had sacrificed all Luftwaffe fighter reserves—everything that remained, including night fighters—and the opening of 1945 saw Germany, now carpeted with bombs by day and night, with only the scattered remnants of an air force.
What, then, had the “Great Blow” achieved? In the west, the Allied armies were hurling the beaten Wehrmacht back and back, and within a month eighty-five divisions were closing in on the Rhine. General Eisenhower’s armour and infantry had slogged a long, hard road since leaving the Normandy beaches, and along that path the military might of the Third Reich had been broken: by way of the Falaise pocket, that vast charnel-house of German troops and vehicles; Caen, reduced to rubble by hundreds of Allied bombers; and more recently the Ardennes, scene of reeling tank battles and slaughter in the snow. Now the end was in sight. With the Allied forces about to flood into the German homeland, Hitler had played his last card. He had no more “bold strokes” to shake an unsuspecting world, no “eleventh-hour victories” to announce with unswerving confidence. But—“… I have never learned to know the word ‘capitulation’” he had stated at a conference during the Ardennes offensive, and now that battle was lost he was ready to blame his leaders—and not himself—for the catastrophic situation. On 10th March he dismissed the ageing von Runstedt and replaced him with Kesselring, who had stubbornly defended the Italian front until the bitter end.
Meanwhile, in the east, the great masses of booty-laden soldiers, tanks, cars, lorries, horses and carts and captured vehicles that composed the Red Army were rolling inexorably forward into Poland and East Prussia in the greatest Russian offensive of the Second World War; 180 divisions carrying all before them, capturing Warsaw, crossing the Oder, rumbling through the vital Silesian industrial basin. Before the end of January, 1945, the Soviet armies were within a hundred miles of Berlin, and Albert Speer, coldly accepting each new disaster, was drafting a memorandum on the loss of the Silesian mines. “The war is lost,” he reported calmly to Hitler, who surprisingly made no comment, but merely had the memorandum filed away. On 18th March, Speer personally handed Hitler a second memorandum, which stated: “In four to eight weeks the final collapse of the German economy must be expected with certainty…. After that collapse the war cannot be continued….”
The Allied round-the-clock bombing offensive continued without respite, although the German war potential was virtually paralysed. In fact, by 1945 all industry in the Third Reich had been destroyed to such an extent that the Allied Chiefs of Staff decided at a conference held in Malta on 30th January to revise the bombing offensive, switching top priority to “Berlin, Leipzig, Dresden, and other German cities where heavy raids would cause great chaos amongst the civilian population swelled by refugees from Eastern Germany”. The immediate result of this high-level decision was a thousand-bomber raid on shattered Berlin, laying waste to whole districts and killing at least 25,000 people. Other mass attacks on the German capital followed on 21st and 26th February, 6th, 13th, 18th, 20th and 24th March; a terrifying chronicle of merciless destruction from the air.
At the height of this wholesale slaughter now overwhelming every inhabited area in Germany, the lovely rococo city of Dresden became the target ever afterwards to be remembered by the Allies with a twinge of conscience and by the German people with agony and horror. Although it was a railway centre of some importance, in five years of total war Dresden had never been bombed, and slowly but surely the anti-aircraft defences of the city were whittled away for service on the eastern front. During 1944 many of the night fighters based in Saxony had also been withdrawn and hurled into the inferno of the daylight air battles, leaving Dresden unprotected. Helpless, and also unsuspecting in her nakedness, why should Dresden be bombed after five peaceful years, when Germany was on the verge of collapse?
Why indeed? Since the beginning of 1945, the roads and railways from the east had been packed with refugees fleeing in terror before the onslaught of the pillaging Red Army, pouring in wild disorder through Saxony and drawn at last in their thousands to the deceptive security of Dresden. By 13th February the normal population of the city—about 633,000—had swollen to a fantastic figure, perhaps a million people. The railway station was jammed with trains, all filled, yet still surrounded by masses of homeless men, women and children; carts and farm wagons piled high with household goods trundled through the crowded streets; and, with the approach of night, even the parks and river banks became strewn with exhausted wanderers seeking a place to rest. Dresden—“the German Florence”—was ripe for the slaughter, and the hour of execution was at hand.
On the night of 13th–14th February, 1945, a force of 250 multi-engined Lancasters of R.A.F. Bomber Command drummed steadily over Dresden, dropping a massive concentration of high explosive and incendiary bombs into the centre of the city. Fires began to sweep unchecked through the ancient buildings, and within an hour whole streets were burning. While the many conflagrations were still raging, a second wave of 529 R.A.F. Lancasters arrived over the target area, scattering heavy 4,000-pound block-buster bombs and thousands of incendiaries at random into the spreading fires. At dawn, as the last bombers throbbed homeward, the heat rising from the great sea of fire that consumed Dresden could be felt at 20,000 ft., and from that height every street could be seen etched vividly in flame. Dresden, beautiful doomed Dresden, was burning; and would continue to burn for seven days and eight nights.
The famous Allied triple blow, hall-mark of the Hamburg catastrophe, was repeated against Dresden. On 14th February—Ash Wednesday—a force of 300 Flying Fortresses of the U.S. 8th Air Force passed over the city, dropping over 700 tons of radar-directed bombs into the dense pall of black smoke rising many thousands of feet into the sky. During the three major raids at least 3,000 tons of high explosives and incendiaries had fallen on Dresden, but it seemed to the survivors that a juggernaut had been set in motion which could not be halted. To their horror, another huge formation of American B-17s returned to the city on 15th February, raining down a further 461 tons of bombs to effect complete saturation.
Afterwards, the scenes in the heart of Dresden defied description. At the height of the first attack, the thousands of fires had leaped together to create the last and most terrible firestorm to be endured by a German city; a great pillar of seething flame burning out everything within an area of eight square miles. This man-made tornado, reaching a temperature of 1,000 deg. at its centre, wrenched giant trees out of the ground and snapped them like twigs, seized hundreds of people and drew them into the inferno, tossed furniture high over the city and ripped the roofs off houses. As in Hamburg, nothing touched by the firestorm survived; jars, pots, pans, tiles and bricks were incinerated. The dead—numbering at least 135,000, and perhaps many more—choked the streets, the railway station, the parks, the river banks.
Consider this. So many people had been killed in Dresden that insufficient able-bodied survivors were left to bury the dead. During February, great mounds of mutilated bodies accumulated at the cemeteries, until the S.S. ordered that they be bulldozed into mass graves dug by excavators. The weeks passed, and the unidentified dead were still being tipped by the lorry-load into great pits; an awful stench of decay hung over Dresden, and doctors began to fear an outbreak of typhus, about 9,000 victims were cremated on five funeral pyres lit in the cordoned-off city centre, and the ashes reverently buried. Many bodies were still being recovered from the ruined streets two months later.
The destruction of Dresden carried Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris’s area bombing policy to its ultimate conclusion; even the atomic bombs dropped later on Hiroshima and Nagasaki could not equal such wide devastation or surpass the death-roll. In 1940, at the height of the Blitz on London, Harris had gazed at the great fires raging around St. Paul’s and remarked calmly to the officer at his side, “Well, they are sowing the wind.” Within three years, he had lit a mighty torch to Hamburg; in less than five years he had turned every major German city into a rubbled wilderness; and now Dresden had been taught the dreadful lesson.
Compare the bombing of London, Plymouth or Coventry with the deluge of fire and steel that consumed Berlin, Hamburg and Dresden. In truth, the German people had reaped the whirlwind.
Hands clasped behind his back, Hermann Goering wandered sadly through the great house-cum-mausoleum he had named Karinhall. Many of the rooms were empty now; for weeks a large staff had been carefully packing the hundreds of art treasures for transporting to Berchtesgaden and other places. Valuable paintings, statues, priceless glass and porcelain, all had departed by lorry and train to the south, to be followed very soon by the crockery, furniture and a mountain of personal baggage. Within a month, nothing would remain at Karinhall except empty showcases, leaving the last evidence of Goering’s years of triumph a deserted shell to be destroyed by high explosive on his orders. He was living in a nightmare: evacuating Karinhall before the Russian tanks and infantry blasted a path through the beautiful estate; trying to salvage a few baubles out of the wreckage of his former glory. He was already a commander without any forces; soon he would be a prince without a palace.
Thus far had the mighty fallen; and Goering wept to think that at a time when Soviet guns were massed against Berlin, at the moment Karinhall would crumble into ruins, the amazing new aircraft that could have saved the Third Reich—and the Luftwaffe—were entering operational service. The Me 262, haunted by Hitler’s interference; the Ta 152, Kurt Tank’s replacement for the Fw 190; the rocket-driven Me 163 interceptor; the tandem-engined Do 335; all exceptional fighters, yet available in such pathetically small numbers. And Germany had new bombers, too: the Me 264, intended for the bombing of New York; the Ju 287; the Ar 234, first turbo-jet bomber in the world. Dozens of other projects still lay on abandoned drawing-boards, soon to be studied by the Allies. Did Goering, as he walked aimlessly through the vastness of Karinhall, remember Ernst Udet, and the wonderful new aircraft he had been promised back in 1941? There had been too many delays, too many tactical errors, too many wrong decisions. Now, time was the strongest enemy; the trees with their ripening fruit were about to come crashing down.
There were other Wunderwaffen that had more than a hint of the suicidal about them. In 1941 the chief test pilot of the Junkers concern, Holzbauer, had experimented with a new device for automatic bombing, and the success of his trials had resulted the following year in the appearance of the Mistel (Mistletoe) pick-a-back aircraft. In this unusual combination, an Fw 190 (or Bf 109) fighter rested uneasily above a Ju 88A-4 bomber modified to incorporate a large hollow-charge warhead. The upper component of the Mistel combination controlled both aircraft, the fighter pilot releasing the Ju 88 on the approach flight and then directing it on to the target. The bomber leaders, Peltz and Baumbach, showed considerable interest in the Fw 190/Ju 88 “Father and Son” project, as it was commonly called, and permission was given for the construction of an initial batch of fifteen pick-a-back aircraft. During 1944, Mistel combinations were used operationally against the Allied invasion fleet, sinking the old French battleship Courbet and two or three merchant ships. Dazzled by these successes, the gullible Reichsluftfahrtministerium ordered the production of a further 100 pick-a-back machines.
Early in 1945, Werner Baumbach proposed that all remaining aircraft of the Luftwaffe bomber arm be thrown into a sink-or-swim attack on the vital Soviet power installations beyond the Urals. Code-named Eisenhammer, this offensive—yet another “Great Blow”—was entrusted to Kampfgeschwader 200, which received an assortment of bombers, including the Mistel combinations; in all about 200 aircraft, operating from bases in East Prussia. However, before the attack could take place the Russian armies flooded into East Prussia and the Eisenhammer operation had to be hurriedly abandoned. Another astonishing scheme involving pick-a-back aircraft, the destruction of the British Fleet at Scapa Flow, also never reached fulfilment. The last Fw 190/Ju 88 combinations were destined to attack the bridges across the Rhine and Oder, in a vain attempt to halt the Allied advance.
Meanwhile, the German engineer and inventor Erich Bachern had developed a “wonder weapon” at the last moment to serve a very different purpose. This was a short-winged manned rocket aircraft named the Natter, or Adder, intended to break up enemy bomber formations by taking off vertically to fire a devastating salvo of rockets into the masses of Fortresses or Liberators throbbing endlessly over the Reich. The Natter was then supposed to disintegrate, ejecting the pilot, who descended by parachute; a second parachute automatically opened to bring the complicated and expensive rocket motor to the ground for further use. Bachern credited the aircraft with a startling performance; a height of 30,000 ft. in ten seconds, and a maximum speed of 900 m.p.h. When he approached Galland and Albert Speer, they approved of the Natter project, but Goering refused to authorise mass production. Bachern, a man of great determination, at once sought an interview with Goering’s most powerful enemy in the party, Heinrich Himmler, who gave permission for the building of a number of Natter aircraft; but with the proviso that only convalescent soldiers and disabled men be used as labour.
Three months later, Erich Bachern found that he was being publicised as the inventor of a weapon capable of breaking the Allied bombing offensive. The Natter was given top priority, and within the space of a few weeks about thirty aircraft were ready for testing, using dummy pilots. It was found that the Natter unfailingly broke up as anticipated, the dummy pilot and the rocket motor returning to earth by parachute; but Bachern doubted if a human being could survive the terrific acceleration of the machine so unharmed. Despite his misgivings, Berlin insisted that a manned launching take place without delay, and in February, 1945 a young Luftwaffe pilot, Lothar Siebert, was strapped into the cockpit of a Natter and hurled into the air to the accompaniment of a loud explosion. The Natter reached five thousand feet, then flicked over on its back and, still inverted, fell into a steep dive. A moment later, the horrified spectators saw it crash in a sheet of flame. Siebert was instantly killed, his neck broken when the cockpit canopy became unfastened and wrenched his head back.
The Anglo-American forces had crossed the Rhine, the Soviet artillery thundered beyond Berlin, and necessity became the mother of Bachem’s invention. Three further manned tests proved to be completely successful, and by April, 1945, the first ten operational machines were ready for launching at Kircheim. Bachern and his team waited for the American bombers to arrive, unaware that Air Marshal Harris had already stated that his strategic bomber fleet could no longer find a worthwhile target in battered Germany, and the Allied bombing commission, code-named Jockey, had sent a final message: “Jockey has unsaddled”. On 10th April, the U.S. 8th Air Force attacked Berlin for the last time; but before that date American tanks had reached Kircheim to find the Natters destroyed to prevent capture.
So many contributions to the deadly art of war; so little time left to use them. The R4M anti-aircraft rocket, the most powerful weapon to be used against Allied bomber formations, had been developed by a woman, Fraulein Doktor Schwartz, of the D.M.W. laboratories at Lubeck. Carried on rails under the wings of fighter aircraft, these 55mm. calibre rockets could be electrically fired in salvoes from a range of 900 yds. into an enemy bomber formation, exploding simultaneously with tremendous force. By April, 1945, a number of Me 262 jet fighters had each been equipped with twenty-four R4M rockets, in addition to the normal armament of one 30 mm. cannon, all directed by the remarkable new Ez 42 automatic sight. Six Me 262s, led by General der Flieger Gordon Gollob—Galland’s successor—attacked a formation of B-17E bombers, blowing fifteen to pieces without loss to themselves, and a few days later a Geschwader of Fw 190s armed with R4M rockets destroyed forty American bombers. In all, some 20,000 R4M rockets were produced, large numbers falling into Soviet hands at the end of the war.
Suicidal or ingenious, the Wunderwaffen made no difference. The last Allied bombs crashed down; pulverising medieval Hildesheim; demolishing Nordhausen; ruining historical Potsdam. On 18th March, 1945, the last great air battle of the Second World War took place over Berlin, when 1,200 heavily escorted American bombers were engaged by Me 262 jet fighters of the Luftwaffe. Twenty-five B-17 bombers and five P-51 fighters were destroyed by the Me 262s, and at least sixteen more of the heavy bombers badly damaged by anti-aircraft fire. The following day, Germany’s small force of Me 262s again took a heavy toll of American aircraft, but the jet fighter successes were drowned in the vast ocean of Luftwaffe losses; in just one week during April 1,700 machines were shot down or destroyed on the ground. Their airfields pitted with hundreds of craters, Galland, Lutzow, Steinhoff and the remaining pilots of the Luftwaffe fighter arm fought on, while the Third Reich burned to ashes.
From empty Karinhall the booty-laden lorries drove away to run the gauntlet of Allied fighter-bombers, and a dejected Goering prepared to leave for Berlin. In the suburbs of that tortured city, trenches were being dug by women and children at cross-roads and wire barricades had been hastily thrown up, manned by old men of the Volkssturm in French Army overcoats and fanatical schoolboys of the Hitlerjugend in uniforms too large for them. Fires were blazing everywhere; tank columns rumbled through the streets and wretched civilians scurried about among the helmeted and armed defenders, seeking a little coal or food. The smell of smoke and dust hung over Berlin; it had become a city of the damned.
In an air-conditioned steel and concrete bunker fifty feet below the Reich Chancellory garden, the architect of more destruction than the world had ever seen was receiving a stream of visitors, despatching absurd messages and making futile plans for the future. Adolf Hitler, aged and trembling, stooped and ashen of face, had retired to what proved to be his last headquarters after the failure of his Ardennes offensive, and there he continued to live an unreal, troglodyte existence, attended by a few faithful followers. Goebbels was there, with his wife and five children, the golden voice still telling the German people that a great future lay ahead. Eva Braun, Hitler’s mistress, sat reading magazines and waiting complacently for the end; and always in the background lurked the sinister Martin Bormann, successor to Rudolf Hess. Yet in the Wagnerian atmosphere he had created in the bunker, the Fuehrer still reigned supreme, a megalomaniac determined that when he fell from his pedestal the world would tumble with him. He had already ordered Field Marshal Walter Model, who had replaced von Runstedt, to undertake a scorched-earth policy in the Ruhr, leaving only wreckage to be captured by the Allies. Albert Speer hurried to the bunker to protest against such useless waste, and Hitler told him: “If the war is to be lost, the nation also will perish…. The nation has proved itself weak, and the future belongs solely to the stronger Eastern nation. Besides, those who remain after the battle are of little value; for the good have fallen.” Nevertheless, Speer persuaded Model to ignore the scorched-earth order, and it was never carried out.
During the period 1st–18th April, 1945, the twenty-one divisions of Model’s Army Group B were encircled in the Ruhr and destroyed by the Allied forces, 325,000 prisoners being taken, including thirty generals. Field Marshal Model shot himself in a wood near Duisburg. The German front in the west was now ripped apart, and the U.S. Ninth and First Armies were racing through the gap, over the Elbe and then beyond; the road to Berlin lay open, defended by only a few scattered divisions.
On 20th April, Hitler’s fifty-sixth birthday, the Nazi hierarchy—Goering, Goebbels, Himmler, Bormann and von Ribbentrop—brought the Fuehrer their congratulations and pleaded with him to leave Berlin and withdraw to the Obersalzburg. Hitler said he could not make up his mind; he appointed Grand Admiral Doenitz supreme military commander in the north, but refused to delegate a southern commander. Meanwhile, he would await developments. After the conference, Himmler and Ribbentrop left the bunker, and the same evening Goering took his leave of Hitler, whom he would never see again. In the early hours of the following morning the unfortunate General Koller, trying to gather together the threads of the Luftwaffe, saw Goering drive past his house at the head of a long convoy of cars and lorries without even a word of farewell to his last Chief of Staff. All the cars were travelling at high speed; the road to the south might be cut at any time.
In Berlin the evacuation of the ministries continued. Hitler, a pale ghost clutching sweat-stained maps with trembling hands, had ordered a final do-or-die attack by all the German forces in Berlin, led by an S.S. general, Obergruppenfuehrer Steiner. The telephones never stopped ringing in Roller’s chaotic office; the familiar harsh voice screamed a strange mixture of instructions and insults into his ear without pause for a reply. “You will guarantee with your head that every man of the Luftwaffe is used! All Luftwaffe forces transferred immediately for ground fighting under Steiner! The whole Luftwaffe command should be executed for incompetence!” And so on and so on, while Koller wondered who Steiner was and rummaged through masses of paperwork.
During the night, contradictory reports of the Steiner attack poured into the bunker, culminating in a statement by Generals Jodl and Krebs at the morning conference that the Luftwaffe had never gone into action; the Steiner “offensive” had not been mounted after all. The very walls of the bunker resounded to the ensuing storm. “I have been deceived!” Hitler shrieked. “This is the end… everyone has deserted me… nothing but treason, lies, corruption, cowardice!” For the first time, he said, he despaired of his mission; nothing remained now but death. He had made his decision; he would stay in Berlin until the end.
Thus Hitler raged and ranted, the insane ruler of a kingdom bounded by steel doors and concrete walls, fifty feet under the ground. In the northern suburbs of Berlin, boys in oversized helmets hurled futile Panzerfausts at mammoth tanks and old men of the Volkssturm died under the clanking caterpillar treads as the Russian armoured spearheads thrust relentlessly forward to pierce the heart of the city. Finally, the human gramophone in the bunker began to run down; the needle was broken and almost worn out. “I will never leave Berlin—never!” Hitler repeated to Keitel and Bormann, then sat back highly pleased with himself. He did not know if he had convinced anyone else; but he had succeeded in convincing himself. The last “irrevocable decision” had been made.