In Europe

wandering aimlessly. The intoxication of those moments can still be felt in the entries in his diary. ‘Pounding, daylight, concussions. I couldn't think, I wasn't even afraid, I felt only a great tension, I believe I thought that was the end.’
    He wound up on the Brühlsche Terrasse, the ‘Balcony of Europe’, a high spot along the Elbe in the centre of town. ‘Around me, as far as I could see, there was nothing but a sea of flames. On this side of the Elbe the extremely clear torch of the buildings on Pirnaischer Platz, across the Elbe, glowing white and clear as day, the roof of the ministry of finance.’
    When it finally grew light, he took his bag and stumbled down along the lower wall of the Terrasse. Suddenly he heard someone call his name: in a row of exhausted survivors he found Eva, sitting unharmed on their suitcase, still wearing her fur coat. ‘We hugged, we didn't care at all that we had lost all we owned, and that's still the way we feel about it.’
    Today, local historians – who are often best informed about such matters – estimate the number of people killed in the bombardment of Dresden at 25–30,000. In the old market square in the centre of town, a funeral pyre was built that burned for five whole weeks. The cremation was supervised by SS Sturmbahnführer Karl Streibel, who had gained his experience burning bodies at the Treblinka death camp.

Chapter FORTY-SEVEN
Berlin
    ON HITLER'S FIFTY-SIXTH BIRTHDAY IT WAS, AS THE PEOPLE OF BERLIN had been wont to say in better days,
Führerwetter
. Friday, 20 April, 1945 was a glorious, sunny spring day. ‘Yes, the war rolls on towards Berlin,’ a woman in her early thirties wrote in her diary. ‘What sounded yesterday like drumming in the distance has today become a constant pounding. You breathe in the noise of the cannons. The ear grows deaf, now you hear only the reports from the heaviest-calibre guns. It's no longer possible to tell where the sound is coming from. We live inside a ring of gun barrels that is drawing tighter by the hour.’
    It was 4 p.m. when she wrote that. The Berlin radio had stopped broadcasting four days earlier. People were starving in the city. The anonymous writer called herself ‘a pale blonde, always dressed in the same salvaged winter coat, employed at a publishing house’, she was seriously engaged to a man by the name of Gerd who was fighting at the front, she never wanted to reveal her name, but her diary was finally published. We shall hear more from her.
    It was at almost that same moment that the last images of Adolf Hitler made their way onto film: he walks stiffly along a row of Hitler Youth scouts being decorated for their suicide attacks on Soviet tanks, he caresses the cheek of the youngest of them, and tries to hide the tremor in his hand. That evening he went to bed early, while the rest of his entourage left for the chancellery. More than half a century later, Hitler's junior secretary, Traudl Junge, described that bizarre birthday party to Gitta Sereny: the dining room was deserted, there was only the huge table set for a party, everyone drank champagne, Hitler's personal physician Morell, Bormann, Ribbentrop, Speer and Goebbels danced with the secretaries to the same scratchy tear-jerker,‘Blutrote Rosen erzählen dir vom Glück’. There was a lot of hysterical laughter. ‘It was horrible; I'd soon had enough of it and went to bed.’
    The mood in the city, in the words of Norwegian journalist Jacob Kronika, was that of a gigantic passenger liner about to sink. Berlin was caught up in a feverish ‘hunt for pleasure’. In the cellars and bunkers, in the dark bushes of the Tiergarten, between the shelves of the audio archives of the Grossdeutsche Rundfunk, everywhere it was a ‘sexual wilderness’. The girls and the soldiers all said the same: ‘We want everything now: the
Knochenmann
, the Grim Reaper may come for us tonight.’
    Late that evening in her bomb shelter, our anonymous diarist noted: ‘No electricity. The oil lamp flickers from the rafters above me. Outside a dark roar, growing louder.’ A few minutes later the cellar walls shook from the explosions.
    That same weekend, Russian war correspondent Vassily Grossman entered Brandenburg with the advancing Red Army: ‘Everything is covered with flowers, tulips, lilacs, apple trees, plum trees.’ He passed a column of freed prisoners of war on their way home, carrying improvised national flags, pushing carts, prams and