…
He described the atmosphere in those final weeks with a bluntness that cuts through retrospective narrative.
Even in the last hopeless days, there was no question of laying down our weapons.
When pressed on why, when the outcome was clear, he and the men around him continued to resist.
He spoke about wonder weapons, the VW weapons, the jet aircraft, the rumored new technologies that German propaganda had been feeding to the frontline soldiers throughout the war’s final year.
We knew important things were going on.
He said that sensational weapons would soon be put into action and thanks to that the war would take on a completely new character.
We knew that even better things were coming.
He was wrong.
But the belief was real and for the men in the rubble of Nokun in April 1945, real belief was the only fuel that remained.
While Nordland was settling into its positions in the southeastern suburbs, a smaller and stranger force was making its way toward Berlin from a different direction.
The Stern Battalion Charlemagne, the assault battalion of what had been the 33rd Waffan Grenadier Division SS Charlemagne, the French SS formation, arrived in Berlin on April 24th, completing a journey that had begun in Nistritz 70 mi to the north with a route specifically chosen to avoid the Soviet advanced columns that were already cutting across the road south of the city.
The battalion numbered between 300 and 330 men.
They were the survivors of survivors, the remnant of a formation that had been destroyed in Pomerania in February, rebuilt from its shattered fragments, and was now marching voluntarily into a city that was already surrounded by five Soviet armies.
These Frenchmen had made the most conscious choice of any formation in Berlin.
When SS Bardafura Gustav Kruenberg received the order on the night of April 23rd to gather his remaining men and proceed to the capital, he assembled them and gave them the choice directly.
They could go, they could return to France.
He would not compel them.
What was waiting in France was arrest and trial.
The liberation government had already made clear that serving in foreign SS formations constituted treason, and the penalties being applied were severe.
Several of their comrades, who had already reached Allied lines, had been executed by French authorities within days of capture.
But a man who chose to march to Berlin with a Soviet ring already around the city, was choosing something whose outcome was equally certain.
Approximately 350 men chose Berlin.
the French divisional chaplain, a 72-year-old Catholic priest named Keshon de Mayel de Lupe, who had served as a French officer in the First World War and had joined the LVF, the Legion of French Volunteers against Bulcheism, as its chaplain in 1941, gave a sermon before they marched.
He told them to embrace the end as soldiers and as men of faith.
He was 72 years old.
He marched with them.
The 350 Frenchmen walked through West Berlin to East Berlin on foot to a brewery near Hammond Plats in the Crober district where they were assigned their positions.
The city surprised them when they arrived.
After the chaos of the roads clogged with refugees moving west, columns of retreating troops moving in every direction, the constant crump of artillery growing louder with every mile.
Central Berlin was almost silent.
The civilian population had gone underground.
The streets were empty.
The only sound was the distant percussion of Soviet guns, which had been shelling the city outskirts without pause since April 20th, Hitler’s birthday.
The French soldiers moved through the empty streets of a capital city that had not yet decided it was finished, past the shells of buildings that had been hit months ago, and left where they fell into positions alongside Nordland’s men in the southeastern sector.
They were not the only foreigners arriving at the end.
Smaller contingents were filtering into the city through whatever routes remained open, drawn by the same logic that had brought the French.
No retreat being better than retreat into captivity.
From the remnants of the Latvian 15th SS division, elements that had not joined the mass marched toward the Ela were present in the city, fighting alongside Nordland in the government district in the battle’s final days.
Spanish volunteers under SS Hubster Fura Miguel Escera, the remnant of the Blue Division veterans who had refused to go home when Franco recalled his soldiers in 1943, arrived in the city with three companies of men, approximately 250 Spaniards who were technically fighting in defiance of their own government’s declared policy of neutrality.
There are even accounts, though the documentation is fragmentaryary, of British men present in the battle’s final stages, members of the British Free Corps, the small SS formation recruited from British PWS, some accounts placing them in the government district as the perimeter collapsed.
Their numbers were small enough and their documentary records sparse enough that specific verification is difficult, but the accounts exist.
By the end, the men standing between the Soviet advance and the Furbunker spoke French, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Latvian, Spanish, and German, and possibly English.
The Soviet assault into the southeastern suburbs began in earnest on April 24th.
Triov’s eighth Guards Army and the First Guards tank army drove through the outer districts toward Templehof Airport, which sat inside the Esban Ring, the elevated railway line that served as the primary defensive perimeter of the inner city.
The Esban Ring was not a fortified line in any conventional sense.
It was a railway embankment that provided a degree of elevated cover, a series of stations that had been converted into strong points and a mental threshold.
The point inside which the defenders believed they must hold regardless of what happened beyond it.
Against Tikov’s forces came the full weight of Soviet combined arms.
T34s moved in formation down the main approach roads, preceded by infantry who swept the side streets and cleared buildings, followed by self-propelled guns that engaged any German strong point that the tanks could not suppress directly.
Soviet artillery fired direct support missions into individual buildings when the infantry reported resistance.
The method was systematic, patient, and appallingly expensive in lives for both sides.
The attackers because clearing urban positions costs men at every doorway and staircase.
The defenders because each position once identified was hit with overwhelming fire from weapons the defenders had no means to match or suppress.
Nordland’s men and the attached French battalion fought this battle with whatever came to hand.
The primary anti-armour weapon available in quantity was the Panzer Foust, a disposable singleshot recoilless launcher that fired a shaped charge warhead capable of penetrating the armor of any Soviet tank in service.
The Panzer Foust required the man firing it to let the tank come within 30 to 50 m before engaging.
Close enough to feel the heat from the exhaust.
close enough that a miss or a misfire left him standing in the open with a Soviet tank crew who would not need to be told what to do next.
The men who were best at killing tanks with panzerasts were the ones who had learned to suppress the instinct to fire early, who could wait while several tons of Soviet armor closed the distance, who understood that the angle of the shot and the range determined whether the warhead penetrated or deflected off the sloped glasses plate.
This was not a skill that could be taught in a training barracks.
It was a skill that accumulated from proximity to moving armor under fire and the men of Nordland and Charlemagne had been developing it since the Baltic campaigns.
On April 24th, as the main Soviet push came toward Treau Park, Nordland’s armored component, the few remaining Tiger tanks of SS Panza Battalion 11 Herman Vonzaltza, launched a counterattack under SS Oashm Banfura Kaus.
The Tigers drove into the Soviet advance at Trepau, engaging T34s and the heavier Soviet IS-2 Stalin tanks in the streets and the park approaches.
A Tiger tank in a city street was a different proposition from a Tiger on open ground.
Its gun could engage Soviet armor at ranges where the Soviet guns had difficulty penetrating its armor in return, and its bulk made flanking it difficult in the narrow urban corridors.
Kosher’s counterattack temporarily halted the fifth shock army’s advance buying hours that the defenders used to strengthen their next line.
By the afternoon, the weight of Soviet numbers reasserted itself and the Tigers fell back toward the Herman Plats area, reduced in number by mechanical breakdowns and anti-tank fire, but still functioning.
The same day, a German officer named Hans Gisendorf watched what was happening from a position to the south, where a battle group that included a reconstituted Nordland battalion had been attached to another formation to defend a village south of the city.
He recorded what he observed of the Danish soldiers fighting in those positions.
The Danes of Panza Grenadier Regiment 24 Denmark fought heroically, he wrote.
He described men who had by that point been in combat for so long that the specific quality of their resistance had changed.
Not desperate, not reckless, but calibrated in a way that comes from having had the option to stop and having decided not to take it.
The Danes fighting in Gisendorf’s account were men who knew exactly what they were doing and why, and who had made a choice about it that could not be reversed at this late stage.
April 26th was the day the French arrived at their first real fight.
The Stern Battalion Charlemagne, having moved to its positions around Herman Plats and the Noon district, was committed alongside Nordland’s men and Tiger 2 tanks of the 11th SS Panza Battalion in a counterattack against Soviet forces that had penetrated into Noon.
The counterattack pushed forward into streets that Soviet infantry had been holding since the previous night.
Fighting through the same building to building, roomto room method that characterized all the close combat in the city.
The French advanced until they ran into a Soviet trap.
Soviet troops had captured a German Panther tank, one of the Panthers that had been abandoned when it broke down during the retreat and turned it against its former owners.
The French soldiers advancing down a nollan street found themselves taking fire from what appeared to be a German tank.
The confusion was brief but lethal.
The column lost half its men in Null before the day was out.
Frenchmen killed in a Berlin street by fire from a German tank operated by Soviet crews in a battle for a city that was not theirs for a cause that their own country had already condemned them for embracing.
Enriet was commanding the battalion.
He was 25 years old, a former student of literature at the University of Paris, who had joined the French army at the beginning of the war, been wounded twice and decorated with the cuadigar and had then made the sequence of choices, Vichi Armistice Army, Meliss Rafen SS officer training at Bad Tuls that brought him to command what remained of France’s most controversial military formation in a ruined Berlin suburb.
He was not a fanatic in the sense of a man beyond reason.
He was a man who had made a decision in 1943 that had placed him on a trajectory from which no satisfactory exit existed and who had organized his remaining options around the only coherent framework available to him.
He led his men followed.
When the Nylon counterattack stalled, he reorganized the survivors, fell back to the Noon town hall, and established a new defensive position.
He continued to command despite a foot wound that had been insufficiently treated and that worsened through the following days.
That evening, the Frenchmen who had survived the day in Noon held their position in the town hall and in the apartment building surrounding it, using the rubble and the destroyed vehicles in the streets as cover.
Soviet artillery worked over the district through the night.
The buildings around the town hall took direct hits.
Men in upper floors were buried when ceilings collapsed.
The wounded were moved to sellers and treated with whatever medical supplies remained, which by this stage of the battle amounted to bandages, morphine in quantities that were running short, and the knowledge that no evacuation was possible.
The seriously wounded would die where they lay in Berlin in April 1945 in a battle whose outcome had been determined weeks earlier.
As Nordland and Charlemagne fought in the southeastern districts, the Latvian elements present in the city were engaged in their own calculation.
One that produced a different answer from the one the French and Scandinavians had arrived at.
The 15th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS, the first Latvian division, had been ordered toward Berlin in the preceding weeks.
It had retreated through Pomerania with approximately 8,000 men fighting continuous rear guard actions as Soviet forces overtook and bypassed German formations throughout the northeastern approaches to the city.
The division’s commander received orders on April 11th to transfer his remaining forces to the Coland pocket, the German enclave in Latvia, where Army Group North was still holding out, supplied by sea, and where any formation sent would eventually surrender to the Soviet Union when the pocket fell.
The Latvian officers understood what this meant.
Surrender to the Soviets was not simply military captivity in the way that surrender to the Western Allies might be.
For Latvian SSmen, men from a country the Soviet Union had annexed in 1940 and intended to reabsorb the moment the war ended.
Soviet captivity meant interrogation, the gulag, and in many cases execution.
The Latvian commander Wafan Standardan Furer Villis Yanoms gathered 824 men and made a decision that technically constituted desertion from the German order of battle.
They would not go to Kand.
They would march west toward the Ela River and surrender to the Americans.
Other Latvian elements, unwilling to disobey German orders, but equally unwilling to march into Soviet captivity, navigated toward Berlin and fought there in the battle’s final days.
Present in the government district and the inner defensive ring alongside the French and Scandinavians.
These men carried a specific weight that even the other foreign formations did not share.
The Norwegians and Danes were fighting for an idea.
pan-uropean anti-communism, the specific ideological framework that had brought them to the Waffan SS in the first place.
The Latvians were fighting for their country.
Latvia had ceased to exist as an independent state in 1940.
The Soviet reoccupation was not an abstraction or a political concern.
It was the end of the nation these men had been born in, the eraser of the world they had grown up in, the permanent termination of any future they could construct that involved returning to Latafia as Latafians rather than Soviet subjects.
The 15th Division’s German commander had written in a report on January 27th, 1945, summarizing his assessment of his Latvian soldiers, “They are first and foremost Latvians.
They want a sustainable Latvian nation state.
Forced to choose between Germany and Russia, they have chosen Germany.
Because they seek cooperation with Western civilization, the rule of the Germans seems to them to be the lesser of two evils.
Latvia’s occupation deepened hatred of Russia.
They consider the fight against Russia to be their national duty.
That is the most precise statement of why these men were in Berlin.
not ideology, not loyalty to Hitler, not faith in the thousand-year Reich.
A calculation made under impossible circumstances that identified one outcome as marginally less catastrophic than the other and organized everything around it.
By April 27th, the defensive lines in the southeastern districts had been breached in multiple places, and the scattered formations defending them had been forced back toward the Herman Plats area and the next line of the inner city.
Nordland’s headquarters established its new position near the Herman Plat’s Uban Station, the underground railway station that sat beneath one of Berlin’s major commercial intersections, now a fortress of concrete tunnels and platform areas that provided overhead cover from artillery and could be defended from a handful of positions covering the stairways.
Kruenberg moved his own headquarters to a railway carriage in the Statita Uban station deeper in the city as the pressure from the Soviet advance compressed the defender space with each passing hour.
The Soviet method of urban assault by this point had been refined through weeks of practice in the outer districts.
Each Soviet assault group numbered approximately 80 men and was built around a core of submachine gunarmed infantry who led the entry into buildings.
a sapper element who used explosive charges to breach walls and create movement corridors between buildings without exposing men to the streets and a tank or self-propelled gun that provided direct fire against any position the infantry identified as hardened.
Soviet heavy artillery, 152 millimeter and 203 millimeter guns, was used in direct fire mode against building facads, firing point blank into concrete and brick at ranges of a few hundred meters to collapse floors and bury defenders.
Kaduca rocket batteries fired saturation barges into residential blocks to suppress anti-tank teams before the armor moved.
The noise level in the inner city by this stage of the battle was described by survivors on both sides as physically overwhelming.
An uninterrupted den of explosions, collapsing masonry, and weapons fire that made verbal communication at normal range, impossible, and produced in extended exposure a specific kind of disorientation where the body no longer registers individual detonations, but processes the entire soundsscape as a continuous vibration.
The Frenchman fought through this for days.
By April 28th, the combined tally of Soviet tanks destroyed in the Esban ring sector had reached 108.
The Charlemagne Battalion accounted for approximately half of them.
This was not an abstraction or a propaganda figure.
It was the count that emerged from the afteraction reports compiled by Krookenberg’s command and cross- refferenced against Soviet records examined postwar.
Panzer House teams working in pairs with one man firing and one watching the approach had been going out into the rubble to engage Soviet armor at the ranges that made kills reliable.
This required leaving covered positions, moving through streets under artillery fire, and approaching burning or disabled tanks close enough to confirm kills and recover any unexpended ammunition from the dead.
The men doing this were Frenchmen, former students, apprentices, civil war veterans from the French side of the Spanish conflict.
Men who had made their way to this specific apocalypse through a specific sequence of political commitments and personal decisions that had all led here to a Berlin street with a panzer.
Eugene was 21 years old, born in Paris in June 1923.
He had trained as a plumber before the war, had volunteered for the Legion of French Volunteers against Bolecheism in 1941, fought on the Eastern Front, been wounded badly enough to be invalided out in 1943, recovered, volunteered for the German Navy, transferred to the Charlemagne formation when it was assembled and made it to Berlin.
In No.
On April 26th, he destroyed two Soviet tanks.
He reportedly said to the men around him afterward, with a lightness that the accounts preserved without explanation, that he had done so just to get in shape for the battles yet to come.
On April 28th, during the Soviet offensive into the central government district, Volo took his Panza into the streets near the Vilhelmstraasa, the avenue running through the heart of the government quarter where the Reich Chancellery stood, and destroyed four Soviet tanks advancing on the Furbunka complex.
He was nominated for the Knights Cross by SS Brigade Furer Monka, the battle commander of the central government district for this action and the previous day’s kills.
On April 29th, Gustaf Krookenberg personally presented Vololo with the Knight’s Cross in whatever space served as a command post in the shrinking perimeter.
Vololo received one of the last knights crosses awarded in the Second World War.
He was a Parisian plumbers’s apprentice, aged 21, in the ruins of the German capital, holding the highest combat decoration the Third Reich possessed.
3 days later, on May 2nd, he was part of a small group attempting to break out through the tear garden.
The great park that ran through the heart of the city and which by this stage was cratered, burning, and crossed by Soviet lines.
After crossing the park, the group moved toward the Charlottenberg road and encountered Soviet infantry.
A sniper killed Vololo a few hours before Berlin’s formal surrender.
He was 21 years old.
He had survived the Eastern Front, Pomerania, and 5 days of street fighting in Berlin.
He was killed during the breakout, holding a decoration he had worn for 72 hours.
Fenet was alive, wounded in the foot.
Command of what remained of the battalion still exercised despite the wound, he would survive to face trial.
But by the evening of April 30th, when the news of Hitler’s suicide reached the command posts in the tunnels and cellers of the inner city, the defenders of Berlin consisted in the central government district almost entirely of these foreign formations, Charlemagne Nordland’s surviving elements, scattered Latvian soldiers, Escera’s Spaniards, and what remained of the Livesandata SS Adolf Hitler, the flagship German formation that had been bleeding in these streets for a week.
Miguel Escera had brought his Spaniards to Berlin from positions further north.
Three companies of men who had originally belonged to the Blue Division, the 47,000 strong Spanish volunteer force that Franco had sent to the Eastern Front in 1941 as a gesture of ideological solidarity with Germany.
The Blue Division had fought around Leningrad, suffered enormous casualties, and been recalled to Spain in October 1943 when Franco came under Allied diplomatic pressure to demonstrate neutrality.
Esgua, like many of his comrades, refused to go.
He remained in German service, was incorporated into the Huafan SS, and by early 1945 commanded the 1001st Spanish Volunteer Company, which eventually absorbed two additional companies of remaining Spanish volunteers to become Unit Desquera.
These men were fighting in explicit defiance of the Spanish government, which was simultaneously telling the Western Allies it was neutral and trying through diplomatic channels to have its nationals removed from German service.
Franco had said in 1942 that a million Spaniards would defend Berlin if necessary.
By April 1945, the actual number was approximately 250.
They were around the Furabunka complex in the government district in the final contracting perimeter fighting alongside the Frenchmen and the Scandinavians.
The 25th and 26th of April produced the moment of greatest tactical competence in the entire battle of the foreign formations.
As Norland fell back from the Herman Plats area toward the inner government district, its soldiers, including the Hitler youth who had been attached to their units, boys of 15 and 16 who had been issued panzerasts and integrated into defensive positions, fought a series of engagements along the approach roads that destroyed Soviet armor at a rate the attackers did not anticipate.
At the Halency Bridge, a single machine gun position manned by Nordland soldiers held Soviet infantry from crossing for 48 hours.
48 hours, a machine gun, a bridge, and men who understood that their job was to make crossing that bridge cost enough that the Soviets would find another route.
The position was eventually overrun, but the 48 hours it bought allowed other elements of the defense to consolidate further back.
These were the small, specific, unglamorous acts of military competence that characterized the foreign SS formations in Berlin.
Not heroic last stands in the cinematic sense, but professional defensive work conducted at the edge of what was physically possible by men who had nothing to gain from continuing except the continuation itself.
The question of why has no single answer.
For the Scandinavians, it was a combination of ideology, the panuropean anti-communist framework that had brought them to the WaffanS in the first place and the practical reality that returning home meant arrest and prison at minimum, execution in some cases.
Norwegian and Danish volunteers who had fought in the Waffan SS were facing treason charges.
28,750 Norwegians were arrested in the liberation period.
37 people were executed.
The men in Berlin with regiment Nor and Regiment Denmark knew this.
Going home was not a better option than staying and fighting.
For the French, the same calculation applied with French specifics.
Fenet would eventually receive 20 years at hard labor.
Volot died in the tear garden before the question became relevant.
For the Latvians present, it was the purest form of the calculation.
Soviet captivity meant the gulag and in many cases death.
The western option, the elba, the Americans, was worth dying for because it was the only version of survival that remained open.
For the Spanish, it was the most complex of all.
men who had been abandoned by their own government, who were fighting in explicit defiance of official Spanish policy, for whom the war had long since ceased to be about Germany’s survival, and had become about their own refusal to accept, that the fight they had committed to in the Spanish Civil War could simply be called off by a head of state, who had decided the arithmetic had changed.
There is a spiritual dimension to what these men were doing that the military record does not capture fully.
The letters and diaries and postwar accounts left by the survivors describe consistently a specific state of being that is not well served by the word courage and is not the same as recklessness.
See, a Norwegian serving in regiment nor wrote to his brother and sister in April 1945 shortly before he was killed in the fighting.
There can be no death better than to die for one’s home, one’s fatherland, and everything that one loves.
He was Norwegian, fighting in a German uniform, in a German city, for a German cause that his own country had opposed from the beginning.
His home and fatherland were not Germany.
They were an idea, a specific vision of what Europe should be, what the alternatives to Soviet domination meant, what the men he had fought beside for years represented to each other, if not to any government or nation.
The ideology behind it was deeply compromised and in many respects monstrous.
But the attachment to each other, the refusal to leave while others remained, the specific weight of having been in the same foxhole with the same men for long enough that their survival was indistinguishable from your own.
These are real phenomena documented across every military history from every side of every war.
And they were present in the rubble of Berlin in April 1945 as intensely as they have ever been present anywhere.
By April 30th, when Hitler put a pistol to his head in the Furabunka and Ava Brown swallowed cyanide beside him, the perimeter of the government district was measured in blocks rather than miles.
The chancellory was taking direct artillery fire.
The Reichag to the northwest was being assaulted by Soviet troops who had been fighting through the building floor by floor since April 28th.
Mona’s force in the government district, the 2,000 men who had started the inner battle, was down to a fraction of that number.
Nordland’s surviving soldiers had been absorbed into the central defense and were fighting in positions indistinguishable from those of the Livstandata or the Charlemagne or the Latvian elements or Escera Spaniards.
The national distinctions that had organized these men into separate formations had been dissolved by the compression of the perimeter into a single mass of defenders connected by nothing but proximity and the impossibility of moving anywhere that was not also under Soviet fire.
On April 30th, Kruenberg gathered Fenet and the remaining Charlemagne men and informed them that Berlin was going to fall the following day.
The attempt to hold had failed in the only way it could fail.
Not through collapse of individual will, but through the simple arithmetic of five Soviet armies against a garrison of thousands progressively reduced by casualties and ammunition exhaustion, to the point where the defensive line no longer existed in any continuous sense.
He told them they could attempt a breakout to the north, following the route that Mona had organized for the main escape attempt under cover of darkness.
By the evening of April 30th, the Charlemagne soldiers serving under Fenet had destroyed another 21 Soviet tanks in the fighting around the government district.
That figure needs to sit for a moment.
On the evening of the day Hitler died, a battalion of Frenchmen who had come to Berlin voluntarily, who had been fighting for 5 days in a battle they had no hope of winning, who had no country they could go back to, destroyed 21 Soviet tanks in the streets around the ruins of the Furbunker.
Then they prepared to break out.
The breakout on the night of May 1st to 2nd, was chaos organized as best it could be under the circumstances.
Multiple groups, each led by an officer who knew only the general direction, north then west, toward the Ela, toward the Americans, moved through the ruins of the government district in the darkness, trying to pass through Soviet lines that by this point were not a continuous front, but a series of positions that could be bypassed if the group was small enough and moved quietly enough.
Wallin and Pearson, the two Swedish soldiers from Nordland’s reconnaissance battalion, had formed a plan of their own.
They had acquired civilian clothes, specifically Italian refugee documentation, and the kind of clothing that would support the identity of men displaced by the war rather than soldiers attempting to evade capture.
They moved through two Soviet checkpoints on the strength of this disguise, reached the Ela River, boarded a ferry, and crossed into British controlled territory on the western bank.
It was by any standard a remarkable escape.
Two Swedish Ruffen SS soldiers in Italian refugee disguise, crossing Soviet lines in the ruins of Berlin, surviving what tens of thousands of others who attempted the breakout did not.
Most who tried to break out did not make it.
The Soviet lines around the city were not permeable to organized military groups moving at night.
Many soldiers were killed in the first minutes of the attempt.
Others were captured within hours.
The French soldiers who reached Soviet hands were transported to camps and then handed to French authorities.
12 of the captured Frenchmen were turned over to French military tribunals and executed without extended legal proceedings in the days immediately following capture.
Fenet was handed to the Soviets who sent him first to a hospital to treat his foot wound, then began transporting him to a P camp.
In the postwar confusion, camps being dissolved, prisoner lists being transferred between administrations, the vast machinery of Soviet prisoner management straining under the volume of people it was processing.
The camp FET was being transported to had already been moved.
His escort arrived at an empty facility.
Not knowing what to do with him, they let him go.
He returned to France on his own, was arrested, convicted, sentenced to 20 years at hard labor.
He served 10 years then ran a small car repair business in Paris.
He died on September 14th, 2002.
He was 83.
The Latvians who had marched toward the Elbe under Yanams did not all make it cleanly.
The 824 men who surrendered to American troops at Gutaglook near the Ela on April 27th.
The ones who had disobeyed the German order to go to Corland and walked west instead were the lucky fraction.
Others from the 15th Division who had tried to make it to American lines had been caught by Soviet forces during the retreat through Pomerania.
Several battalions, approximately 3,000 men, were captured by the Soviets and processed into the filtration camps.
Some were executed as SS members.
The rest were sent to the Gulag system.
Almost 50,000 Latvian soldiers total became Soviet prisoners of war across all formations.
Some of the surviving Latvian Legion veterans who eventually reached the West continued fighting Soviet rule in Latvia itself as the Forest Brothers, the armed partisan movement that conducted guerrilla resistance against Soviet occupation for up to 10 years after the war’s official end.
A man who had fought at the Tannenburgg line in 1944 and in Berlin in April 1945 might still have been carrying a weapon in the forests of Latvia in 1952.
The Spaniards who were captured went to Soviet camps.
The Soviet Union and Francois Spain had no diplomatic relations.
A product of the Spanish Civil War in which Soviet forces had supported the republic that Franco’s nationalists defeated.
Without diplomatic relations, there was no mechanism for repatriation.
The Spanish prisoners sat in Soviet camps while Franco Spain made awkward diplomatic overtures through third parties.
It took until April 1954, 9 years after the end of the war, for the 286 surviving Spanish prisoners to be repatriated.
They sailed from Odessa on a ship called the Seamis, supplied by the International Red Cross.
Of the 372 originally captured, 94 had died in Soviet captivity during the 9-year wait.
The men who came home to Spain returned to a country that officially denied they had been there.
No recognition, no pensions, no public acknowledgement of their service.
The Franco regime that had sent the Blue Division to the Eastern Front with enormous fanfare in 1941 and had disavowed its own soldiers by 1943 could not acknowledge the men who had stayed in German service without reopening questions about Spanish neutrality that the postwar settlement required to stay closed.
Essera himself escaped Berlin, was captured, escaped again, and eventually returned to Spain.
He became a school teacher.
He died in 1984.
Some of his claims about the Berlin battle, including an oral Knight’s Cross awarded personally by Hitler, the kind of detail that makes a memoir compelling and is impossible to verify, have been questioned by historians.
His presence in Berlin, his command of the Spanish unit, and the unit’s actions are confirmed by multiple sources.
The embellishments, if that is what they are, do not change what the documented record shows.
a group of Spaniards who were officially the nationals of a neutral country who had been abandoned by their government who fought in the defense of the Furabunka among the last defenders of the Reich.
The Reich target itself was taken by Soviet soldiers of the 150th rifle division on April 30th.
Soviet soldiers raised a flag over the building, later the subject of the most famous photograph of the European War.
Inside the building, the fighting continued for another two days as German defenders held the floors and the basement against Soviet infantry clearing room by room.
Among the defenders of the Reichtag in its final hours were soldiers from Nordland.
The accounts do not specify which nationalities by that stage of the battle the distinctions had ceased to be operationally meaningful.
But Danes and Norwegians and Swedes who had been driven back through the city from the Trepau and Noon positions were in the government district and some of them were in the Reichtag and some of them died there.
Berlin surrendered on May 2nd, 1945.
General Vidling broadcast the ceasefire order over the city’s radio.
The shooting stopped gradually as the order made its way through the rubble and the underground positions and the cellers and the remains of formations that had been out of communication with their headquarters for days.
Some units kept fighting for hours after the surrender because the order didn’t reach them.
Some fought because they had decided the surrender didn’t apply to them.
By the end of the day, the city was silent for the first time in 2 weeks.
The Red Army had suffered approximately 80,000 dead in the Berlin operation, a figure that reflects the cost of assaulting a city defended by men who had no other option.
The German garrison had lost most of its number to death or capture.
The foreign formations were almost entirely gone, killed in the fighting, captured in the collapse, or scattered in the breakout attempts that most did not survive.
What was left was what always remained at the end of battles of this kind.
The dead in the streets, uncollected for days in some areas because the fighting had made retrieval impossible.
The wounded in the cellers, some of whom died before they were found.
The prisoners being marched east toward processing camps and the uncertain outcomes that lay beyond them.
And scattered across a dozen countries in the months and years that followed, the survivors, the men who had reached the Ela or the British lines or the American sector, or who had simply hidden in the rubble long enough for the shooting to stop.
These men returned to countries that had no official language for what they had been or what they had done.
Norway prosecuted them.
France convicted them.
Latvia was no longer a country in any meaningful sense and would not be for 45 years.
Spain denied they had been there.
Sweden quietly watched as some of its citizens came home and said nothing.
The history of who defended Berlin has been shaped by what the postwar world found convenient to remember.
German veterans could be acknowledged in time as soldiers who had fought in a bad cause but had fought as soldiers nonetheless.
The foreign formations presented a different problem.
They were traitors and collaborators from the perspective of their own countries and the simplest approach was silence.
The French Veterans Associations that formed in the decades after the war met in small rooms in provincial towns, not commemorating victory or even honorable defeat, but simply the fact of having been there, of having made a specific choice and lived with its consequences.
The Scandinavian veterans lived quiet lives in Sweden and the United States and other countries they could reach, not advertising what they had done, aware that the public language available for what they had been part of was inadequate to describe it without caricature in either direction, Eric Valin, the Swede who had escaped Berlin in Italian clothes and crossed the Elbert on a ferry, wrote his account in Swedish and had it published in Buenosire shortly after the war, where the distance from Europe made publication possible.
It is a book without apology and without self-dramatization, describing what it was like to be a foreign soldier in a German division in the final months of the Eastern Front.
He was not a monster.
He was not a hero.
He was a man who made a set of choices that led him to a war.
He survived when most of those around him did not, and who wrote down what he saw as clearly as he could.
The book is called Twilight of the Gods.
The title is accurate.
This was the end of something.
Not the beginning of a new order, not the defense of a civilization, but the final hours of a specific world that had organized itself around ideas that were already failing when these men committed to them and that were finished by the time they died for them in the streets of a burning city.
The last verified foreign soldier to die in Berlin in the service of the Raffan SS was Eugene Volo on the morning of May 2nd, 1945, a few hours before the ceasefire.
He crossed the tear garden in the darkness with a group trying to break out, reached the Shallotenberg road and was shot by a Soviet sniper.
He had been awarded the Knight’s Cross 3 days earlier.
He was 21 years old, a plumber from Paris.
He died in the last hours of the battle he had arrived at voluntarily that his country had condemned him for that his government would execute 12 of his comrades for participating in.
He was the last.
after him.
Silence.
The specific silence that settles on battles that history has not yet decided how to hold.
