Berlin Red by Sam Eastland Read Free Book Online

remains of a Polish cavalry lance from the obliterated Pomorske Cavalry Brigade, he had felt the same trembling of the earth beneath his feet. It was the sound of Thor, launching its 4,700-pound shells at the Polish capital. He had been told that a single shell from that gun could destroy an entire city block.
    At last Misch understood what had hounded him from his sleep. Russian long-range artillery had come within range of Berlin. In the days and weeks ahead, what little had remained undamaged by the Anglo-American bombers would be pounded into dust by Stalin’s guns.
    One hour later, his chin dotted with scabs of bloody tissue paper from a hasty shaving job with a worn-out razor, Misch passed through the security checkpoint at the Old Reichschancellery. He side-stepped the boiler-suited workmen who were making their way across the marble floors, sweeping away fragments of glass from panes broken out of the tall Chancellery windows. The sound of it was almost musical, like that of a wind chime stirring in the breeze.
    In January of that year, the German High Command had begun the process of relocating from the Chancellery buildings into the safer, bomb-proof complex below, which was known to all who worked there as the Führerbunker. Hitler himself had relinquished his lavish suite, with its views of the Chancellery Garden, for a cramped and stuffy quarters below ground. Since then, with the exception of short strolls amongst the rubble in the company of his German shepherd, Blondi, Hitler had seldom ventured out into the city. Now he could often be found, at any time of day or night, wandering its narrow corridors on errands known only to himself.
    It used to be that Misch would hurry through the halls of this great building on his way to work, barely stopping to notice the beautiful furnishings or the lifesize portraits of statesmen like Bismarck and Friedrich the Great, glowering down from their frames.
    But today he did not hurry.
    Suddenly, there seemed to be no point.
    All a person could do now was to wait for the end of what was to have been the Thousand-Year Reich, whose obliteration after less than a decade of existence would soon play out in the streets of this doomed city.
    Misch did not expect to survive the coming battle. These days, in his plodding commute from the flat to his work and home again, the smallest things, even the sound of broken glass as it was swept across a floor, took on a kind of sacredness.
    After the checkpoint, Misch descended a staircase broken up into four separate columns, each consisting of eleven steps. As he made his way underground, the air became thicker and more humid. To Misch, it smelled like a men’s locker room. In places, the cement ceiling was fuzzed with a curious white crystalline substance where water had leaked through.
    Few people outside the Chancellery building even knew of the existence of this underground warren of rooms and narrow passageways, with its battleship-grey walls of re-barred concrete six feet thick and floors lined with burgundy-red carpeting.
    In a little alcove 55 feet below ground level, Misch took his seat at a radio transmitter. For the next eight hours, with the exception of one forty-five-minute break, this would be Misch’s domain. All radio traffic in and out of this underground complex passed through this single transmitter and it was Misch’s task to transfer incoming and outgoing calls to their proper recipients. For the most part, it was mind-numbing work, with long stretches in which the radio fell silent. During these periods, he would sometimes put a call through to his wife, who had gone with their infant son to live with her parents south of the city, where they would be safer from the bombing raids. The strength of the radio antenna also allowed him to listen in to the various German Army broadcast stations, known as Senders, which had once been scattered over the vast areas of conquered territory, from Arctic Norway to the Libyan