I have to say, I missed writing these two guys. Whenever I did something for AAO, they were on my mind, but somehow it never shook out that way. Since they are about to do something I had in mind for them since... I think Davy C had moved into Downing Street a year or two earlier, and writing them again was something I did gladly. Anyrood, if you want to know how I imagine this version of Berlin, think Downfall, without all the bombing by the Western Allies and those oh so annoying, tasteless, stupid meme videos.
Mind you, as unrealistic as events of the second half of this chapter are, they were planned from the moment I put Ian and Felix together as a team.
Chapter 393
To both Ian and Felix Berlin seemed just empty, but they knew that what population wasn't conscripted to work on or man the defences of the Government district. Getting in there wouldn't be easy, but that was what they had trained for for the last seven months. Both could navigate much of the city in general and that quarter in particular without a map, both knew the plans of the New Chancellory upside down, and both hoped that their family never found out that they had actually volunteered for something that could very easily turn into a suicide mission. Felix had kept trying to convince Ian that Sandra would understand, but Ian cursed himself as well as the world in general for having him find out that Sandra was once again pregnant a mere two weeks before they deployed back to Germany. That had been three months ago, and the one thing Ian liked about rushing this mission a lot earlier than planned was that he would be back in the UK long before his child was born. If the Admiral about that, Felix knew that Ian would resign his commission on the spot, and hang the war.
But to get there...
Berlin was, on the face of it, a city that was well suited for the motorcar as long as you stuck to the main streets, and Ian said that he knew from his pre-war experience that the drive they were making would be taking maybe twenty minutes during peace time at this time of the day, when normally most car owners would be at work. It had taken them three hours to get past all the roadblocks, improvised barricades and scared children that held rifles that were sometimes almost as long as they were tall. These kids would be massacred once the Army arrived and expected mechanized death to be coming around the corner at any moment. What they couldn't know was that the Allied forces had no intention to advance anywhere beyond the outskirts for the next six hours, which did of course put a clock on their mission. Luckily they were about to reach the point from where they would be able to accomplish everything, ironically aided by the fact that the Army had advanced so fast that there was little in the way of organized units in Berlin.
Felix knew that Rundstedt had left the useless units that would do little more than annoy the British at the outskirts and concentrated his SS brigade, as well as maybe another brigade's worth made up from various scraps and the filing clerks at the OKW being handed rifles around what was called the Government district on the Allied side of the fence. On the maps they had trained with, this was defined as an area defined by the Brandenburg gate and the intersection between Behrens and Wilhelmstraße in the north and the New Chancellory in the south. It was around this section of town that most of the defenders were concentrated, and getting in there would be difficult at best.
It was incredibly ironic to Felix that taking the larger part of Berlin would be incredibly easy in spite of the largely flooded subway, and it was only at the core that whoever reached this first would be getting the fight that everyone had been dreading since Nuremberg. The city hadn't really been bombed, so it was very likely that Berlin would be getting off a lot easier than most other western European cities. It annoyed him, but war was war, and he had a job to do.
They drove up Hermann Göring Straße, but a few blocks south from the New Chancellory, they were forced to stop. Not because they ran out of fuel, but more because, of all things, one of the few Tiger tanks that hadn't been scrapped was parked as the centre-piece of a barricade that was made from abandoned cars and manned by actual soldiers wearing a number of different uniforms. At first glance, Felix could identify Luftwaffe Field Division, Paratroopers, members of the Naval Battalion and a smattering of normal Heer troopers. All of them looked as if they would rather be anywhere else, but that was taken care of by the group of Leinstandarte goons Felix spotted.
What those Germans couldn't know was that their defensive perimeter was in exactly the worst place for Ian and Felix to accomplish their mission. Instead of keeping ahead of the fighting, they would be in the middle of it now, but they only glanced at one another, and without words they had decided that they would continue.
“Stop! Who the fuck are you?”
The person that had yelled spoke in German, with an accent that made it obvious that he was from somewhere in eastern Saxony. Putting up their best cold, teutonic expressions, Ian and Felix stepped out of the car. They walked up to the barricade with the arrogant confidence of senior field-grade SS officers, which they both most assuredly were not.
“Who we are is none of your business, Gefreiter, and we have no time to wait while you pull your finger out of your arse.” Ian yelled back.
“Advance and be recognized!”
They approached the barricade and could see that next to the Tiger, people could walk through the barricade single-file. The commander of the iron behemoth popped his head out of the turret. Upon seeing that the two men were hardened SS veterans and also wore the rank insignia that made them the equivalent of a Lieutenant-Colonel and Major respectively, he paled and dropped back down. Seconds later an SS Lieutenant barely old enough to shave came running, throwing a parade-ground Nazi salute when he saw their rank insignia.
Without words, Ian and Felix showed their passes, but both were unsure how much these would be worth, given that Germany was about to cease to exist as a coherent state, but hopefully this chap had the sort of ideological blinds on that they needed for their mission not to fail catastrophically.
“What are you doing here?” he asked, “The Reich needs you at the front!”
“This is none of your concern, Unterterscharführer.” Ian said with a voice cold enough to make Felix almost shiver. “And in case no one has told you, at this moment the Reich extends about that far.”
Ian pointed to the muzzle of the 75mm gun on the tank. “The Reich extends exactly that far right now, and unless you want to responsible for it staying that way, I suggest that you get out of our way and stop asking questions. The enemy is at the edge of the city.”
The young SS officer almost fell over his own two feet, but before he decided to let them through, he looked back at Ian. “So why aren't you at the front then, Sir?”
“THAT'S NONE OF YOUR FUCKING BUISINESS, UNTERSCHARFÜHRER! SO UNLESS YOU WANT TO BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE BY THE FÜHRER, YOU BETTER STEP ASIDE!”
It was a sign of the times that the young fool actually hesitated, as he had probably shot his share of so-called deserters and defeatists, had probably heard every kind of story, but in the end, the fact that they were heading into the defended sector instead of out of it, carried passes that were signed by the highest figure in the SS and were generally in the lofty heights of superior rank, he decided that it wasn't worth it.
He stepped aside and yelled for some of the actual soldiers to pull one of the carts away to let Ian and Felix through.
They walked past the barricade and away from it's doomed defenders without a word or even looking at them again, but when they were out of easy sight, Felix allowed himself a short grin. The distance to where they wanted to go was easily covered. In the complete and utter chaos that was this part of Berlin, two more officers among those giving orders, carrying them out, lugging ammunition crates that they had found somewhere and generally trying to convince themselves that the promised Endsieg was more than an empty phrase.
~**---**~
“So, what do we do if we discover that he is still in Berlin?”
Felix, knowing that it wasn't merely a question, but a very real review of their orders, chanced looking around.
“Steal a wheelchair, you push me in, I stand up while yelling 'Mein Führer, I can walk!'?”
“Rather.” Ian replied with a dry grin. The joke was an old one between them. Felix meanwhile sobered up quickly.
“No, then we proceed by our own discretion.”
Nothing further was said, but they both knew that the other wondered what the SOE down in Stuttgart had been thinking when drawing up those orders. Trying to find if Hitler was still in Berlin was one thing, but opening the door like that... the Admiral had darkly hinted that the orders had been 'suggested' from on high, and that they had been asked because he knew that they wouldn't be doing anything too reckless.
Their destination was one of the many empty buildings that were located next to the Chancellery, having long since been emptied either voluntary or by coercion, but when they walked up to it, much to their mutual surprise, they found the main entrance to the monument to Nazi megalomania not specially guarded. They may have been because of the semi-steady stream of people walking in and out, but it still flipped a switch in both British Officers. With only an exchanged look, they decided to risk it, as after all, what they were doing couldn't get any more dangerous, and the very genuine-looking orders they had were signed by Hermann Fegelein, one of Hitler's favourites, Liaison Officer to his staff and safely tucked away in a cell while surrounded by Redcaps for the last three days after having tried and failed to reach Berlin before the city was surrounded. Never one not to take advantage of someone's laziness, the powers that be had decided that this advantage would be used. Getting some genuine sounding orders typed up had been a matter of minutes.
These orders authorized the two of them not only to move about Berlin as they wished, but technically also to enter the Führerbunker, which both considered to be the height of lunacy.
Still, no one challenged them as they moved ever deeper into the massive structure of the Chancellery, both men fighting not to reach for their guns at every turn.
Ian wanted to turn back, he really did, but even as he kept thinking that what they were doing was beyond ridiculously stupid, he could not help but see their continued movement as a sign that the oh so famed Reich was finally and fully dissolving into very tiny pieces. By the time his urge to turn back had finally grown to the point that he was about to turn to Felix and say as much, they were finally challenged by a sentry, and even though not a single muscle on his face showed it, Ian felt the cold run down his back, because those two not only still wore immaculately pressed uniforms, but they also stood in front of the doors that led out into the garden.
Where the entrance to the bunker happened to be located.
That moment, the only thing Ian wanted more than be turned back now was to be back with his wife, preferably somewhere warm, with a cup of tea in one hand and a cricket bat in the other.
But alas, the sentry only examined their orders and then quickly stepped through the door.
Ian briefly considered making a run for it, but the long, wide corridor would see them both mowed down before they had taken three steps. At the same time, the corridor was empty, and he knew that a side-corridor would lead to a suite of offices and then a side-exit that led out onto the backstreets...
The first sentry was back. “You bring news from Gruppenführer Fegelein, you say?“
“We do.”
“Then the Führer wants to speak to you. Go straight through, but...” he glanced at the P-38s they had hanging on their hips. Both men handed them over without a thought, being far from unarmed anyway, thanks to Winston's Department of Ungentlemanly Warfare, more commonly known as the SOE's Technical Section.
Before they could do anything more, the sentries opened the doors, and the two Allied Officers stepped through. With the doors closed behind them, the only other person in the walled in garden was a slightly stooped, aged figure they both knew from newsreels and pictures. That moustache was unmistakeable, and all of a sudden, something basic, raw and very, very human inside Ian wished that he had something more than the small derringer and the knife in his boots to shoot the other person with.
Something in Ian broke when he looked Hitler in the eyes.
He glanced at Felix, the other's face contorting in a 'Really?' sort of way for a second, before both of them threw a perfect salute.
“Mein Führer,” Ian said, “we bring a report from Gruppenführer Fegelein. He...”
A sound like ripping linen came in. Ian recognized it as a shell from heavy artillery, of British nationality. Followed by more.
Everything happened all at once. The two sentries busted through the door, presumably to take Hitler back down into the bunker.
Hitler was already moving in that direction, but Ian and Felix, working together for years, knew how to communicate without words. Ian stood closer to Hitler, Felix had his backup gun in easier reach. Using the noise of the artillery barrage, that, as Ian noted in a detached second, was coming hours ahead of schedule, they moved.
Felix turned to the sentries and ejected the pistol from the lower arm holster in one fluid, well-practised motion. The small .22 calibre pistol was in his hand before the two young men realized that anything was wrong, and he shot one of them in the throat. Due to the size and type of the holster, the weapon was single-shot, so he dropped it, turned and quickly kicked the other guard in the family jewels before grabbing his head and twisting it around very quickly and in a very unnatural direction.
“I'm getting too old for his shit.” he mumbled in English.
Ian meanwhile had grabbed the Dictator who clearly was even more ill than intelligence had suggested, his own emergency weapon now in hand. He rammed the weapon over the back of his head, and Hitler collapsed like a rag-doll with strings severed.
“Heads or tails?”
“We can't do this here. Get the door.”
They had to get to those offices, that was their only chance to live more than another minute or two.
So with both of them having 'Stupid, stupid, stupid!' hammering in their heads, they dragged one of the two mosted hated men in Europe through his own office building.
The corridor was still empty, and the door Ian was going for was only a few short steps away.
To both their amazement, they made it inside and only then did they realize that they were entirely unarmed except for a single MP40 that Felix had scooped up, knives and one single small-calibre pistol.
“In there, quickly!”
It was an office like a million others all over the world. What was different was that when Felix cracked open one of the desk drawers, he found something that he would cherish for the rest of his days.
“Look at this.”
Ian, who was searching the unconscious Hitler without finding anything really interesting, looked up to see his brother in law hold up something that he would have expected to find just about anywhere but here. A vintage, pre-civil war, Colt manufactured, still in original packaging M1911 pistol in 9x19mm Parabellum. Yes, this was something that Felix would love as a Christmas present.
The packaging was quickly discarded, as was the box inside even though Ian noted that Felix kept the spare magazine and cleaning tools. With quick movements and what later generations would call muscle memory, Felix loaded the rounds into the magazine and loaded one into the chamber. With a wolvish grin, he looked at their captive.
“Where to next?”
Once more, getting out proved surprisingly easy, especially so after they barred the door that led back to the corridor and the garden with a filing cabinet. Between them, they could drag their captive from the office and through the side exit without being observed. After that, it got harder. Thankfully, the scene outside had slipped from barely organized chaos into utter bedlam. It was clear to Ian that von Rundstedt wouldn't have much commanding to do, so after removing the had and tossing it back through the door, they somehow managed to drag Hitler once across the street and then into an abandoned building. Some of the ground-floor appartments opened up to the back, so they went into one of them. Only then did Ian allow himself to say out loud what he'd been thinking.
“That was apocalyptically stupid, what we did.”
“True. But then...”
He looked down.
“I repeat. Heads or tails.”
Unlike so many others, this was not one either of them would have nightmares over. Later, once they were safely back behind Allied lines, he would question the wisdom of doing it, of risking getting caught, but at that moment he did not care.
“Tails.”
He pulled out a two Reichsmark coin and tossed it into the air. He caught it, and the Nazi eagle showed. He grinned. “I win.”
Felix harrumped and handed over the pistol. Ian turned and saw that Hitler was waking up. Good. Did he know any English? In the end, Ian didn't care, nor did he care what the dictator was babbling at the muzzle of the pistol.
“In the name of humanity in general, Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II in particular and because I bloody well feel like it, I hereby end your all too long existence.”
Artillery was now joined by the chatter off small arms fire at the barricades. Ian knew no one would hear the shot. He pulled the trigger.
“Well, that hit the spot.”
Felix laughed and pulled out the small, Latvian-made, Minox camera. Pictures were needed as proof.
“That was rigged, mate.”
~**---**~
The remainder of the Battle of Berlin can be summed up by calling it nasty, brutish and short. The Irish Expeditionary Corps, as well as elements of the 51st Highland Division advanced from the south and south-east, a handful of Australians belonging to the to the British 6th Division by way of the 17th Battalion, one of the few Australian units remaining in Northern Europe, attacked from the west. Elements of the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler opposed them and fought hard, but the Australians had access to the products of having near complete air superiority, and thus it happened that ninety-seven percent of the pre-wear park were ash before the day was out and what was left reminded many an older Berliner of the Western Front in the previous war. Because all this happened so quickly, it was the 17th Battalion that secured the Brandenburg Gate with little damage to the structure. The Reichstag, only a handful of steps away, was a different story. There a company of SS die-hards was holed up. The Reichstag had been repaired after the fire in the 30s, but the few times the assembly had actually met to rubberstamp something, it had been elsewhere. Due to this, the only importance of the building was symbolical as well as plainly being an enemy stronghold, and it was considered to simply bomb the building flat. In the end, the symbolism was what saved it, and that the defenders were heavily outnumbered. Close Quarters Battle was not yet something formalized in training, but after fighting across one of the more urbanized countries, the Allied troops in Europe were rather more experienced at it. Especially in this case, as this part of the Leibstandarte was now hampered by it's status as a Pretorian Guard. Fighting raged for six hours, but eventually, it was the Australian flag that was raised over the building even before it was fully secured, producing a very iconic photograph.
Elshere, the city suffered more damage, but since the defenders were anything from almost entirely untrained teenagers to veterans that had been in the war since 1939, the fighting depended on where, and against whom it took place. It was near the end of the day, after hours of combat, that a machine gun section from the 51st Highland discovered the mortal remains of the German Führer. The only clue to what had happened was the presence of an empty 9x19mm Parabellum casing. At the time, it was assumed that Hitler had tried to flee and then shot himself when realizing the futility. The truth would not be discovered by the general public until the mid-1990s, so that was the theory touted through the Allied and global press when the good news became known. Suffice it to say, the populations, both free and still occupied, were jubilant. 'One down, two to go!' as a Canadian newspaper put it.
The fight for Berlin was, in many ways, a symbolism for the war as a whole since the Allies had taken Vienna. In that they fought hard, and well, but were ground down by superior firepower. While modern Allied artillery doctrine was born in those days, for the Germans this meant that at last, even the most ideologically blinded started to see that the Allied Pact was going in for the kill. By the end of the 6th of June, the defenders were reduced to the Reichskanzlei itself. Major General O'Doherty, commanding the Irish units as well as the battle as a whole, was by his own account done with playing around and decided to give the remaining defenders exactly one opportunity to surrender. The offer was rebuffed. According to interrogations conducted with the few German survivors afterwards, at this point, von Rundstedt had already decided to shirk his responsibility and shot himself in Hitler's old office in the bunker, so the Allied response was to bring up a number of field and self-propelled assault guns and blast what was left of the building into a pile of rubble.
By the time the Allied infantry started clearing the rubble, less than twenty were still alive to be captured.
Inside the bunker, those that had not killed themselves, surrendered at that point, among them his secretary, her two colleagues. Von Runstedt, Josef Göbbels, as well as his family, were not among them.
Berlin was declared fully secured by the end of the next week.
That the higher Nazi leadership seemed to have chosen death over facing their responsibilities was an object of worry for the Allies, given that unless they wanted to fight a potentially never-ending insurgency as well as face a second Dolchstoß, they needed someone to formally surrender Nazi Germany and acknowledge that they had lost the war in the field. The former was a valid concern, though the latter was much less so, given that most Germans had seen the war come through their streets with all the death and carnage that such things entailed even then.
Somewhat ironically, the actions another high-ranking Nazi took to save his own skin prevented this from happening.
A week after the fall of Berlin and Hitler's death became public knowledge, a message arrived in London via the Embassy in Kopenhagen, offering negotiations for conditions under which Germany might surrender.
The British reply can be summed up as “unconditional or no deal”, but a Sir Thomas Sinclair, British Ambassador to Denmark and future Foreign Secretary, was instructed to approach the Germans, in order to hear what those conditions might be. Sir Thomas telegraphed the answer to London, but noted in his diary that 'the entire visit was most revolting, and not because of the Nazi memorabilia they still displayed. No, my revulsion was of a moral fashion at the way Mister Bormann had chosen to act.'
In short, in exchange for being let off free, Bormann, as the highest-ranking Nazi official that had not fled to East Prussia, was offering the unconditional surrender of all German forces and the country as a whole. Churchill, being elated at how things were going and preparing to fly to Germany to inspect Hitler's corpse, personally telegraphed Sir Thomas with the order that the only thing he was allowed to offer was that no one would be shot out of hand.
Bormann originally intended to reject this offer out of hand, but General der Fallschirmjäger Kurt Steiner, the highest-ranking officer present after Dönitz was stuck in La Rochelle and the rest of the OKW had perished in Berlin, suggested, using his pistol as an encouragement, that those terms were not so bad after all, in a meeting that most people think must have been dramatic, but that Steiner later described as banal and over in less than two minutes.
A meeting was quickly arranged, with Steiner having arrested Bormann and so, on the 20th of June 1944, the German Reich surrendered.
Steiner signed for Germany and duly issued orders to all German forces to surrender to the nearest Allied formation. Marshal of the Empire Alexander, who had been hastily promoted and given appropriate rank insignia just in time for the ceremony, signed for the Allied powers, with Field Marshal Wilson, General LeClerc and General Sikorsky acting as whitnesses.
When he handed over his sidearm, Steiner pointed out to the Allied leaders that while he had issued orders to all forces to cease hostilities and surrender, he was unsure how many would follow his orders, and that his formal authority over any Soviet units, even as acting head of the OKW, was very limited at best. True to this, a number of Axis units refused surrender. Most Waffen-SS formations were quickly dispatched, either by the Allies as they advanced to secure Germany and extend the front to the Polish coastline, or by the Wehrmacht. The few Soviet units still in the west mostly fought, but they were hampered by logistics even more than the Germans.
France and the Low Countries were a different story. Here the Germans mostly evaporated and the Soviets only had a token presence, which allowed the French to liberate Paris with no fighting and little damage by the 25th, but several individual German strongholds fought. La Rochelle, under the command of Großadmiral Dönitz, fought on until the 7th of July, the garrison of Brussels only surrendered after the city exploded into open revolt, and the largest Waffen-SS unit outside of Germany, SS-Kavallerie-Division Florian Geyer, holed up in the city of Brest and was destroyed in a fanatical fight over the course of three days that left the city in ruins. On the whole though, Western Europe was free, and on 11th July, 2nd Division, King's African Rifles, entered Amsterdam, one of the last major cities in the country to see Allied units. The Dutch cheered the black-african Soldiers, among them a Jewish Family and their friends who had hidden behind a cupboard since 1940.
tbc
Phew.... that was a long one. If it feels rushed... Germany evaporated so fast that it really was only a matter of driving towards their victory points and they folded. Mopping up the various pockets was done quickly too.