There is no good outcome for Wenck. Yet Field Marshal Keitel demands an answer right now.

“Of course,” Wenck tells him. “We will do as you order.”

But Gen. Walther Wenck is lying.

*   *   *

Some 2.5 million Russians ring Berlin, outnumbering German soldiers three to one in men, tanks, aircraft, and artillery. The city’s inner limits are defended by teenage Hitler Youth, the Volkssturm people’s militia, and units of elderly Home Guardsmen. Few of them are battle-tested.

It will be a slaughter. Hordes of approaching Red Army soldiers, many of whom have marched a thousand miles to see their nation’s flag raised over the capital of Germany, are eager to brutalize its citizens.

Forty thousand Russian artillery guns hammer the city around the clock, filling the streets with rubble and setting homes ablaze. In time, the Russians will drop more tonnage of explosives on Berlin than the American and British air forces combined.

Berliners no longer pretend that life is normal. Thousands of refugees leave the city each day, hoping to find safety in the countryside. They walk, push their belongings in carts, and choke the roads in vehicles that are often abandoned when gasoline runs out. They sleep in churches, forests, abandoned railway cars. Everyone travels west. Only a fool would travel east.

For those who choose not to leave Berlin, the nightly ritual of sleeping in cellars and underground stations has become revolting. The rancid odor of excrement and unwashed bodies makes these fetid spaces appalling. Of course, the wealthy are somewhat immune to these problems for now. For instance, the family who owns the tony restaurant Gruban-Souchay enjoy a fine life in their cellar, complete with a French chef and countless bottles of champagne, which substitute for water when it comes time for brushing teeth.

Aboveground, roving gangs of Nazi thugs and SS units travel from house to house, searching for Wehrmacht deserters and then hanging them from lampposts. Signs bearing the word traitor are pinned to the offenders’ chests, and their bodies are left to swing freely as a warning to others who might wish to quit the war prematurely.

At the notorious Lehrterstrasse Prison, Nazi fanatics finish their dirty work. A special Gestapo contingent known as the Sonderkommando pretends that it is freeing political prisoners. As the men depart their cells, however, they are forced at gunpoint to kneel. Armed Gestapo agents then fire bullets into the back of their necks.

There is no gas. There is no electricity. There is little food. (The only item that remains a normal part of daily life in Berlin is beer. Citing its “essential” nature, the government has ordered eleven local breweries to remain open.) German women kneel in the streets butchering workhorses that have been killed by Russian shelling. Other citizens seek food by trekking to the city’s rail yards and breaking into freight trains, searching for canned goods and anything else that will fill their bellies.

Uniformed Hitler Youth members walk into grocery stores and demand food at gunpoint. “You are a godless youth, using American gangster methods,” one woman screams at her nephew after she watches him terrorize a shopkeeper into giving him a hidden cache of food.

“Shut up,” the Hitler Youth sneers. “It’s now a matter of life and death.”

In some parts of Berlin, shopkeepers give away everything on the shelves, not wanting their supplies to fall into Russian hands.

Throughout the city, department stores are being looted—among them, the cavernous Karstadt, on the Hermannplatz. Late on the afternoon of April 25, as otherwise law-abiding citizens steal boots and heavy jackets, an explosion brings the building crashing down. It is not the Russians who destroy Karstadt and kill innocent civilians, but the SS. They have hidden a fortune worth twenty-nine million German marks in the basement, and they do not want the Russians to get it.

The worst, however, is yet to come. Many of the Russian invaders are professional soldiers with civilized manners and bearing. But far more of them are barbarians, men who grew up in the remote Eurasian steppes, those vast wild plains far from the big city lights of Moscow. These illiterate and unkempt hordes wear fur hats and carry knives in their boots. Many have never seen a flush toilet. They chug vodka by the tumbler and believe that the women of Berlin are their just reward for years of fighting. Their leader, Joseph Stalin, agrees.

George S. Patton does not refer to these crude invaders as Russians. Instead, he prefers “Mongolians,” in reference to Genghis Khan and the Mongol hordes who ravaged eastern Europe six centuries ago—for many of these men are their direct descendants.

Now the barbarians are coming to stay.

*   *   *

A week passes. Russian troops advance street by street, slowly taking control of the city. The outmanned young boys and old men enlisted as a last line of German defense now tear off their uniforms and armbands, frantically changing back into civilian clothing to avoid being murdered. Those who choose to stand and fight are now retreating into the heart of the city. An attempt to blow up vital bridges to stall the Russian advance ends in tragedy when an underground railway tunnel is mistakenly detonated. Inside are thousands of civilians and wounded soldiers trying to avoid the aboveground artillery. They drown as the four-mile-long tunnel floods with water.1

Nazi leaflets litter the city, dropped from one of the few remaining Luftwaffe aircraft. “Persevere!” they read. “General Wenck and General Steiner are coming to the aid of Berlin.”

Wenck is certainly trying, although not in the way that Nazi officials had hoped. He has turned the Twelfth Army back toward Berlin, surprising Russian forces near the suburb of Potsdam. But the Germans are vastly outnumbered and can soon go no farther. Rather than fight onward, Wenck orders his troops to open a corridor from the city that will allow refugees and elements of the German Ninth Army to follow him back to the safety of the American lines. “It’s not about Berlin anymore,” he tells his army as they turn their backs on the German capital. “It’s not about the Reich anymore.” In time, Wenck will lead hundreds of thousands of German civilians and soldiers westward across the Elbe, where he will surrender to American troops.2 The Russians chase Wenck’s long columns of civilians and soldiers all the way to the American lines, shooting at them right up until the moment they cross the Elbe.

But even if General Wenck had succeeded in reaching Central Berlin, there would have been no stopping the Russians. Berlin is a city with 248 bridges, and only 120 have been destroyed as the Soviets penetrate closer and closer to the Führerbunker. With every new block they capture, the Russians pause and take what they believe to be theirs. The stories of their savagery will become legendary: the two Russian soldiers who rip a nursing infant from his mother’s breast, calmly place the child in his carriage, and then take turns raping the mother; the soldiers who silence an eighty-year-old woman by stuffing a stick of butter in her mouth before violating her. Incredibly, countless women in maternity wards throughout Berlin, some about to go into labor and some who have just given birth, are raped. Horrified screams echo up and down hospital corridors as heartless Russians have their way.

Everywhere, there are suicides: the mother so ashamed by her rape that she ties two shopping satchels full of bricks to her arms, hugs her two infant children, and jumps into the Havel River with them clutched in her grasp; the woman gang-raped all night long who staggers home in the morning to find that her own mother has hanged her three children to protect them, and then hanged herself; the distraught woman sees no other choice but to slash her own wrists.