Masterpiece of Madness

Berlin, keystone city in the shoddy Nazi structure, was the masterpiece of all the senseless, suicidal last stands the Germans had painted in blood and flames along the roads back to it.

The world's fourth city, in its dying hours, was a monstrous thing of almost utter destruction. The once-wide Chaussees were mere lanes in a jungle of enormous ruins. Even the lanes heaved and quaked to underground explosions. The Germans, driven from the streets, had carried their final fighting to the subways, and the Russians blasted and burned them out. The Germans had burrowed into the sewers to get behind the attackers, and Russian sappers went systematically about the foul business of blowing out great sections. Avalanches of stone thundered into the lanes and blocked them off.

The Spree River and the canals near the university and the palaces of the Kaisers, along whose banks Berliners had once promenaded, now bore a sluggish parade of corpses. Towers of fire surged into the pall of smoke and dust that overhung the dying city. Here & there Berliners risked a dash from their cellars to the bomb craters filled with brackish water. Berlin's water system had gone; thirst was worse than a possible bullet.

Red Dream. By night big Russian searchlights focused their rays down the battle-broken streets into the wide Alexander Platz, where Soviet shells clipped at the Gestapo headquarters and its hundreds of fanatics. Other beams poked into the last little fortress of scorched chestnut trees that had been the cool, fresh Tiergarten.

This was the Berlin that every krasno-armeyets (Red Army man) had dreamed of entering in triumph. But in his wildest dream none could have imagined these vignettes etched by a madman. Once the Red storm had passed and the German shells had run out of range, waiters from a Bierstube stood in the rubble with foaming steins, smiling tentatively, offering them to the Russians, going through the motions of tasting the brew, as if to say: "See, it is not poisoned."

Where the searing breath of battle had not touched them, luxuriant apple blossoms bloomed along the side streets. Where shells had not amputated the trunks of century-old lindens, there were soft, green leaves, and they fluttered down and stuck like bright greeting cards on the Russian tanks' hot grey armor. In the gardens multi-hued tulips swayed to the gun blasts, and lilacs offered a faint fragrance through the acrid fumes.

But up from the caldrons of the subways came a hot, sour, brownish odor--a smell of sweating men, of dank nests burned out by flamethrowers. Out of the subway's stench emerged boys in grey-green and hobnailed boots. These were among the last--the Hitlerjugend. Some were drunk and some reeled from weariness, some sobbed and some hiccupped. One more Platz in the last long mile to the Wilhelmstrasse had been won, and one more Red banner flapped over a scene of dead bodies and discarded swastika armbands.

Into that Platz, then into others, and finally into the vast wreckage of Unter den Linden came tanks and guns. Katusha rockets screeched over the Brandenburger Tor. Then, against a background of flames, the Red banner of victory was unfurled over the gutted Reichstag building. But, even after the ten-day battle was won, Germans died hard.

Red Monument. But Berlin was a masterpiece in another way -- the finished-canvas broad-brushed by Marshal Georgi Konstantinovich Zhukov in 41 months of battling back from Moscow. In the dust and ashes of death, Berlin stood as a monument to the enormous sufferings and the monumental resolution of the Red Army, and imperturbable Marshal Zhukov had been the chief instrument of that Army's victory. Up from the darkest days before Moscow, up from the bloody pit of Stalingrad and the snows and mud and dust of the Ukraine and Poland, he now stood before Berlin as one of the truly great military leaders of World War II.

More than any other man, except his chief, Joseph Stalin, strong-shouldered, heavy-legged Deputy Commander in Chief Zhukov had carried the responsibility for the life or death of the Soviet nation. No Allied field commander had deployed and employed larger numbers of troops and guns; for the attack on Berlin and north and central Germany he had 4,000,000 men. No Allied commander had plotted strategy on a grander geographic scale; none had matched his complex tactics and massive attacks.

Zhukov seemed to be marked for more history. Stalin's politically reliable, pious Communist confidant, he might now be the instrument for the delicate tasks of governing a beaten Germany and a destroyed Japanese army.

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