Russia at war 1941-1945

speech in which (choosing to forget all that Stalin had said about the French at Yalta) he referred to them as "our real friends," and General Delattre de Tassigny—who was then in the midst of his flirtation with the French Communists—declared that he wished

France to be "a true democratic people's republic"— whatever that meant. Anyway, the Russians were very pleased with the French General, and a few among them perhaps

began to think vaguely of Europe in terms of some old-time revolutionary romanticism...

For all that, everything was calculated to show the Germans that the four Allies were monolithically united and that they would continue to be so once Berlin—now under sole Russian occupation— was split into four zones, in terms of the new arrangements made.

All the streets of Berlin—even the most devastated ones—were decorated that day with flags of all the four Allies...

At the Wendenschloss ceremony I had a talk with Marshal Soko-lovsky, whom I had not

seen since the grim days of 1941.1 reminded him of how, a fortnight before the all-out German offensive against Moscow, he had explained that the Red Army would gradually

grind down the might of the German Army. He gave a happy smile, and said he remembered that meeting with the press at Viazma. He told me that he was "quite satisfied" that Hitler was dead, although his remains had not been definitely identified.

"But there seems no doubt that he is dead all right," he said. So, he added, was Goebbels, together with his whole family—but that was more common knowledge. Sokolovsky's

statement was all the more interesting as the official Russian line at that time—and for a long time afterwards— was that Hitler might have escaped. Sokolovsky's "off-the-record"— or should one say "off-his-guard"?—remark was unique in its own way.

Zhukov's statement on the same subject a few days later was "on the record"—and much more cautious.

[There was a strong suspicion among Western diplomats that there was a shabby political purpose in the innuendo that Hitler had escaped to Spain or South America with certain Western complicities. Stalin persisted in telling Hopkins, about the same time, that Hitler was not dead.]

When I mentioned the talk about Russian troops having run wild in Germany,

Sokolovsky shrugged his shoulders. "Of course," he said, "a lot of nasty things happened.

But what do you expect? You know what the Germans did to their Russian war prisoners, how they devastated our country, how they murdered and raped and looted. Have you

seen Maidanek or Auschwitz? Every one of our soldiers lost dozens of his comrades.

Every one of them had some personal scores to settle with the Germans, and in the first flush of victory our fellows no doubt derived a certain satisfaction from making it hot for those Herrenvolk women. However, that stage is over. We have now pretty well clamped down on that sort of thing— not that most German women are vestal virgins. Our main

worry," he grinned, "is the awful spread of the clap among our troops."

No one who had known Nazi Germany, and had lived through the war—in France in

1940, in Britain during the Battle of Britain and the London blitz, and the rest of it in Russia—could avoid feeling a pang of Schadenfreude at the sight of Berlin. The capital of Hitler's 1,000-year Reich had been turned into a hundred square miles of mostly ruin and rubble. All down the endless Frankfurter Allee not a house—except one, where the commandant of Berlin now had his headquarters—had escaped destruction;

Alexanderplatz, Unter den Linden, Friedrichstrasse, Wilhelmstrasse, and then the

Potsdamerplatz, and the Kleiststrasse and Tauentzienstrasse and, beyond them, the

Kurfürstendamm (here alone a few houses had escaped)—all the old familiar places had been smashed. In the wastes of the Wilhelmstrasse, with Hitler's now shattered

Chancellery, there were only ghosts—ghosts of the million people who had bellowed

Heil Hitler on the day Hitler became Chancellor, ghosts of the S.A. marching, marching, marching past their Führer in their interminable raucous torchlight procession.

For once, Germany was no longer marching; she had come to the end of the road.

Between the ruins, the Wilhelmstrasse was silent now, without a living soul anywhere, and with only a stink of corpses rising from the ruins. The Tägliche Rundschau,

published under Russian auspices, was printing photographs of Berlin's ruins, and

recalling what Hitler had said in 1935: "In ten years' time Berlin will be unrecognisable."

This was Russian Berlin. The Russians were still in sole command. A month had passed since the German capitulation. Early in May Berlin was in a state of complete chaos, with millions milling round the ruins, not knowing what to do, and where to go, or where to find even a scrap of food. On May 4, two days after the capitulation of Berlin, the

Russian commandant, General Berzarin, issued his first Order: