Drum head trials

Street executions were now commonplace as Hitler loyalists tried to motivate the exhausted and demoralized defenders of Berlin. The Führer was still giving out medals in another attempt to keep his men fighting, personally awarding the commander of the 503rd SS Heavy Tank Battalion the Knight's Cross after his remaining two tanks destroyed an estimated 101 Soviet tanks and 26 anti-tank guns.

Inside the Führer Bunker, Hitler was increasingly deranged by the failure of his generals to rescue him. When he heard about Steiner's failure to attack, his faith in the Waffen-SS was shaken to the core. The hammer blow was repeated when reports started to emerge that Himmler was trying to negotiate with the Western Allies.

Hitler realized the game was up and there was no prospect of Berlin being rescued. SS troops and Soviet soldiers of LXXIX Corps were now fighting inside the Reichstag building a few hundred metres from the entrance to the Führer Bunker. On 30 April he dictated his last will and testament and married his mistress, Eva Braun. Then the pair committed suicide. His last act as commander of the remaining German forces in Berlin was to authorize them to break out. The army commander of the Berlin Defence Zone, Lieutenant-General Helmuth Weilding, was having none of this. He decided to enter into surrender negotiations with the Soviets early on the morning of 2 May to put an end to the slaughter. Senior Waffen-SS officers in the Führer Bunker had persuaded Weilding to delay his surrender for 24 hours to give them the chance to escape. Berlin was now on fire as fighting raged through the length and breadth of the city. Isolated German strongpoints in the city centre were still putting up resistance, and in the suburbs small groups of German soldiers and refugees were already trying to find escape routes through the Soviet ring. The scene as Hitler's "Thousand Year" Reich came to its end was truly apocalyptic, with every aspect of civilization breaking down.

The end in Berlin

Surrender was not the Waffen-SS way. Mohnke and other senior Waffen-SS commanders resolved to break out of the city rather than give themselves up to the Soviets. Ten groups of Waffen-SS men from the Zitadelle defence force made their attempt to escape during the evening of 1 May, using Berlin's underground system to bypass Soviet positions. Several of these groups were ambushed and cut down by Soviet fire, including the group containing Hitler's close confidant, Martin Bormann. The 150-strong group led by Mohnke ended up in a brewery, and after a party they surrendered to the Soviets.

For the foreign Waffen-SS volunteers the surrender placed them in a very difficult position. They had good reason to fear that they would not get a good reception from the Soviets and readily decided to follow Mohnke's order to break out. The survivors of the Nordland Division gathered up five tanks and tried to drive out of the city, only to be ambushed by Soviet tanks. Only a handful of men made it to safety. The Latvian SS men decided to make their escape in small groups and disappeared into the night in civilian clothes. The French SS contingent, however, agreed to surrender with Weilding. Some 1500 defenders of the Zitadelle sector, including hundreds of Waffen-SS men, surrendered around the Reichstag at 13:00 hours on 2 May.

Moscow radio claimed the Red Army captured 134,000 German soldiers in the ruins of the city. Some individual Waffen-SS men were pulled from the columns and shot, but most were marched away. Those who survived in Stalin's Gulag prison system did not return home for more than a decade.

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