Free The Fall of Berlin 1945 by Antony Beevor

Army approached.
    'The majority are women aged 18-35,' the report stated, 'and clad in torn clothes with numbers and a six-pointed star on the left sleeve and on the front of their clothes. Some of them wore clogs. Mugs and spoons were fastened to their belts. Their pockets contained food - small potatoes, swede, grains of wheat etc. A special commission of investigation formed by doctors and officers established that they were shot at close range and all the executed women were half-starved.' Significantly, they were not identified by the Soviet authorities as Jews, despite the mention of six-pointed stars sewn on their clothing, but as 'citizens of the USSR, France and Romania'. The Nazis killed around 1.5 million Soviet Jews simply because they were Jewish, but Stalin did not want anything to divert attention from the suffering of the Motherland.
    4
The Great Winter Offensive
    When German generals addressed their men in familiar tones they called them '' Kinder '' - children. This came from a Prussian sense of paternalism which extended to the whole state. 'The soldier is the child of the people,' said General von Blumentritt at the end of the war, but any idea of a family tie between military and civilian society was by then wishful thinking.
    Anger was rising at the futile sacrifices. People were now prepared to shelter deserters. A Polish farmer who had been in Berlin on 24 January witnessed women shouting at the officers and NCOs marching a column of German soldiers through the streets, 'Let our husbands come home! Make the Golden Pheasants [senior Nazis] fight instead!' General staff officers in their uniforms with thick red stripes down their trousers started to attract cries of'Vampire!' when spotted by civilians. But this did not mean that revolution was in the air, as in 1918, the year which so obsessed the Nazis. The Swedish military attache observed that there would be no revolt before the food ran out. This was acknowledged in a popular Berlin saying, 'The fighting will not stop until Goring fits into Goebbels's trousers.'
    Few had any illusions about what lay ahead. The Berlin health department ordered hospitals to provide another 10,000 bed spaces for civilians and another 10,000 for military use as 'catastrophe beds'. This decree was typical of Nazi bureaucracy: it made no allowance for the effects of bombing and the scarcity of resources and trained medical staff. It was one thing to provide bed spaces, but doctors and nurses were already desperately overstretched, and they simply did not have the personnel to move patients down into cellars during the nightly air raids. Meanwhile, hospital administrators were having to waste time negotiating with different Nazi Party departments to allow their staff to be excused call-up for the Volkssturm militia.
    The Volkssturm itself had been born the previous autumn out of Nazi ideology and petty power struggles. Hitler's suspicions that the army's leadership was both treacherous and defeatist made him determined that control of this mass militia should be kept out of its hands. Himmler, head of the Waffen SS and commander-in-chief of the Replacement Army since the July plot, was an obvious candidate, but the ambitious Martin Bormann was determined that the Volkssturm should be organized locally by the Nazi Party Gauleiters who came under him. Since almost all German males between seventeen and forty-five had already been called up, the Volkssturm was an amalgam of teenagers and the elderly. Goebbels, now also Reich Defence Commissar for Berlin, whipped up a propaganda campaign with slogans such as 'The Führer's call is our sacred order!' and 'Believe! Fight! Win!' Cinemas showed newsreels of marching men, elderly and young shoulder to shoulder, Volkssturm detachments receiving panzerfaust rocket-propelled grenades, then swearing the oath of allegiance to the Führer in massed ranks. The camera lingered on the faces of those listening to Goebbels's speech.
    There were