The Kindly Ones

The news I was bearing several times a day was rarely good. Day after day, the Soviets were advancing, entering Lichtenberg and Pankow, taking Weissensee. Refugees crossed the city in large columns, many of them were hanged, at random, as deserters. The Russian artillery bombardments caused more victims: on the Führer’s birthday, they had arrived within cannon’s range of the city. It had been a beautiful day, a warm, sunny Friday, the smell of lilacs filled the air of the abandoned gardens with their fragrance. Here and there flags with swastikas had been hung on the ruins, as well as large signs whose irony I hoped was unconscious, like the one that dominated the rubble on the Lützowplatz: WE THANK OUR FüHRER FOR EVERYTHING. But people’s hearts weren’t really in it. In midmorning, the Anglo-Americans had launched one of their massive raids, more than a thousand aircraft in two hours, followed by Mosquitos; after they left, the Russian artillery had taken over. It was certainly a beautiful fireworks display, but few appreciated it, on our side at least. Goebbels did try to have extra rations distributed in the Führer’s honor, but even that turned sour: the artillery caused many victims among the civilians standing in line; the next day, in spite of the heavy rain, it was even worse, a shell struck a line of people waiting in front of the Karstadt department store, the Hermannplatz was full of bloody corpses, scattered pieces of limbs, children screaming and shaking the inert bodies of their mothers, I saw it myself. On Sunday there was a brilliant spring sun, then showers, then sun again that shone on the rubble and the soaking ruins. Birds sang; everywhere tulips and lilacs were blooming, apple trees, plum and cherry trees, and in the Tiergarten, rhododendrons. But these gorgeous flower aromas couldn’t mask the stench of rotting and burned brick floating over the streets. A heavy, stagnant smoke veiled the sky; when it rained, this smoke grew even thicker, filling people’s throats. The streets, despite the artillery strikes, were full of life: at the antitank barricades, children with paper helmets, perched on top of the obstacles, were waving wooden swords; I passed old women pushing strollers full of bricks, and even, crossing the Tiergarten toward the zoo bunker, soldiers chasing a herd of mooing cows before them. At night it rained again; and the Reds, in turn, celebrated Lenin’s birthday with a brutal riot of artillery.

The public services were shutting down one by one, their personnel evacuating. A day before being dismissed, General Reynmann, the city Kommandant, had distributed to NSDAP officials two thousand passes to leave Berlin. Whoever hadn’t been lucky enough to get one could still buy his way out: at the Kurfürstenstrasse, a Gestapo officer explained to me that a complete set of valid papers fetched around eighty thousand reichsmarks. The U-Bahn ran until April 23, the S-Bahn until the twenty-fifth, the interurban telephone worked until the twenty-sixth (they say a Russian managed to reach Goebbels at his office, from Siemensstadt). Kaltenbrunner had left for Austria immediately after the Führer’s birthday, but Müller stayed on, and I continued my liaisons for him. I usually went by the Tiergarten, because the streets south of the Bendlerstrasse, by the Landwehrkanal, were blocked; in the Neue Siegesallee, repeated explosions had smashed the statues of the sovereigns of Prussia and Brandenburg, the street was strewn with Hohenzollern heads and limbs; at night, the fragments of white marble gleamed in the moonlight. At the OKW, where the city Kommandant now had his HQ (someone named Käther had replaced Reynmann, then two days later, Käther had in turn been dismissed to make way for Weidling), they often made me wait for hours before finally granting me a few useless fragments of information. To avoid being too much in the way, I waited with my driver in my car, beneath a cement roof in the courtyard, I watched, as they scurried about, overexcited, haggard officers, exhausted soldiers dawdling so as not to go back under fire too quickly, Hitlerjugend greedy for glory come to beg for a few Panzerfäuste, lost Volkssturm waiting for orders. One night, I was searching through my pockets for a cigarette when I came across Helene’s letter, pocketed at Hohenlychen and forgotten since then. I tore open the envelope and read the letter as I smoked. It was a brief, direct declaration: she didn’t understand my attitude, she wrote, she didn’t want to understand it, she wanted to know if I wished to join her, she asked if I was planning on marrying her. The honesty and frankness of this letter overwhelmed me; but it was much too late, and I threw the crumpled paper out of the lowered car window into a puddle.