Russia at war 1941-1945

[He said he had had to stay awake for six nights running. He and his officers had only been able to do this by sipping cognac. Vodka, though a good stimulant for the troops, was no good for generals as after a time it had a soporific effect.]

The main point is that the Germans were smashed on the Oder, and in Berlin itself it was, in fact, just one immense mopping-up operation. It was very, very different from the Battle of Moscow.

[More recent Soviet accounts of the Berlin Operation, notably in vol. V of the official Soviet history of the war (IVOVSS, V, pp. 288-90) published in 1963 show that it was a much more complex affair than Zhukov suggested. In this battle three-and-a-half million people were involved on the two sides, 50,000 guns and mortars, 8,000 tanks and mobile guns, and over 9,000 planes. In this Berlin operation, the Russians smashed seventy

German infantry divisions, twelve armoured and eleven motorised divisions. Before the actual capitulation of the Germans on May 8, the Russians captured 480,000 prisoners, besides 1,500 tanks, over 4,000 planes and 10,000 guns. The History stresses that the Berlin Operation was carried out not only by the 1st Belorussian Front under Zhukov, but also by two other Fronts, the 1st Ukrainian and the 2nd Belorussian. The Red Army,

according to the History, had "crushing superiority" in this operation. It also says that the German soldiers and officers, blinded by Nazi propaganda, went on fighting fanatically till the very end and that, between April 16 and May 8, they inflicted very serious losses on the Russians. The three fronts directly concerned with the Berlin operation lost

305,000 men in dead, wounded and missing— chiefly during the breakthrough on the

Oder and Neisse and during the fighting inside Berlin. They lost over 2,000 tanks and mobile guns, 1,200 guns, 527 planes. "The Anglo-American casualties during the whole of 1945 were 260,000 men." Several hundred, if not thousand, Russians were killed in the storming of the Reichstag alone. So the fighting inside Berlin was much more serious than merely "a vast mopping-up operation", as Zhukov called it. It seems apparent from the discrepancies between some of the above figures and those quoted by Zhukov that he spoke chiefly of his 1st Belorussian Front, rather than of the more "general" Berlin operation. The rivalry between him and other top generals may have had something to do with it.]

Somebody asked what the Russians' relations with the Germans would be. That, he said, depended on how the Germans behaved; the sooner they drew the necessary conclusions

from what had happened, the better. He (Zhukov) was certainly in favour of a quick trial of the German war criminals. He thought there was agreement on that point among all the Allies. "And on other points?" somebody asked. "On other points," he said, "there's also got to be agreement if we don't want to play into the hands of the Germans."

What rôle, if any, would now be played by the Free German Committee? "It's no longer of any consequence," Zhukov said, and smiled, thus pretty well confirming that it had never been more than a propaganda device. "And the so-called German anti-Fascists?"

"Why 'so-called'?" Zhukov said. "There are some genuine ones, though not perhaps very many yet. For twelve years they've had Hitler propaganda pumped into them... "

"And what happened to Hitler?"

Zhukov suddenly became very cautious (quite unlike Sokolovsky when he had talked to

me only a few days before). For one thing, he had Vyshinsky sitting by his side. "A mysterious business," he said, and then told for the first time the story that was going to be flashed all round the world:

A few days before the fall of Berlin he married Eva Braun. We know this from the

diary of one of his A.D.C.'s. But we have not discovered any corpse that could be identified as Hitler's. He may have escaped in a plane at the last moment.

"Wouldn't you say, Marshal, that that was most unlikely?" I asked.

Zhukov ignored the question, and went on:

"Martin Bormann who was in Berlin almost till the very end, appears to have escaped."

"And who was Eva Braun? " somebody asked.

Vyshinsky grinned and chipped in: "Maybe a girl, maybe a boy."

Zhukov (laughing): "Somebody said she was a cinema actress, but I don't know."

Vyshinsky: "Maybe a Jewess—". (Laughter.)

After saying that Goebbels and his whole family had been found dead, Zhukov then

turned to other things. Now that the war in Europe (he stressed in Europe) was at an end, a large part of the Red Army would be demobilised.