Jan Schmidt and Agneta Leave the Berlin Position

Jan Schmidt and Agneta Müller leave the Berlin position on 30 April 1945, as the Soviet advance turns their bunker into a place of dwindling choices. Their departure is not simply a bid to survive the fall of Berlin: it breaks the bond among Jan, Agneta, and Adrián Gallardo, and ends with Gallardo taking Alfonso Navarro’s identity. The scene makes the difference between choosing life and being able to leave visible—and gives Gallardo’s later violence a motive more complicated than revenge or fear.

The Position and the Closing Clock

At the Adlon, Robert Collard and his companions learn that Soviet forces are already fighting inside Berlin. Their days become a countdown, reaching its crisis on the morning of 30 April, when Collard gathers his few belongings and says he has no wish to die at twenty-six. Though he expects little chance of surviving, he decides to desert because he wants to live. He tells the others they may kill him if they choose; confident that Alfonso Navarro will not, he offers Schmitt and Gallardo the opportunity before leaving them with a wish for good luck.

Collard’s departure makes explicit what the position has been suppressing: staying to defend the Reich is a choice, not an unavoidable fate. Neither Schmitt nor Gallardo answers him, and Agneta, who understands French, remains still. Yet the group’s silence does not mean their decisions are settled. Later that day, as the danger closes in, Jan and Agneta will make their own choice to go.

Agneta’s Wish and the Departure

Agneta had earlier said she wanted to approach the Reich Chancellery, where Hitler was in his bunker, so she could see the entrance and the place from which he emerged. She described the visit as a way to say goodbye. Five days after that conversation, at dusk on 30 April, she left the Wilhelmstrasse shelter with Jan. The contrast is stark: her wish had been to look toward the bunker and take leave of the world gathered around it; the actual departure takes her away from the position with a companion who can leave alongside her.

At midday, Agneta feigns pain in her leg, and Jan draws on his brief experience as a medic—work he had done for less than two weeks—to remain and care for her. He sends Gallardo to the hotel alone. The small deception divides the three before Jan has spoken plainly: Agneta and Jan can arrange to leave together, while Gallardo is removed from their immediate company.

After the meal, Jan takes Gallardo aside, outside the shelter, and tells him that he loves him but is going with Agneta, who wants to return home. He invites Gallardo to come too. Jan acknowledges that they had arrived intending to die and defend the Reich to the end, but insists that everything has changed. He says Agneta’s arrival changed the situation, and recognizes that Gallardo saw her first and loves her too. Still, he says, she is free to choose. The admission is both an offer and a farewell: Jan does not pretend that their earlier commitment has vanished, but he no longer treats it as binding enough to outweigh the possibility of life with Agneta.

Friendship, Violence, and Separation

Gallardo stops Jan before he can retreat. He tells him that he loves him too, calling him a bastard but also the best friend he has ever had. The confession is sincere, but it does not settle the triangle or prevent the blow that follows. The narration sharply distinguishes Gallardo from the figure who strikes Jan: it is the Tiger of Treviño, the forceful boxing identity associated with him, who knocks Jan to the ground with a right hand. Gallardo’s tenderness in speech and the fighter’s sudden violence occupy the same moment, rather than canceling each other out.

Agneta runs to Jan and pounds his chest with her small fists. Gallardo removes her without hurting her; as she bends over Schmitt to revive him, Gallardo walks away. He wanders for hours, becoming lost. When he returns to the shelter, only Navarro remains to call him a fool. Gallardo does not care. His withdrawal leaves Jan and Agneta’s departure unresolved from his point of view: he has separated himself from them, but the scene does not establish what becomes of Jan after Agneta tries to revive him.

Berlin’s Fall and Gallardo’s Next Choice

The departure takes place on 30 April, but Gallardo remains in the shelter as the defense continues. On 1 May, the Soviet forces fail to celebrate the conquest of Berlin; the defenders prolong their desperate resistance for another twenty-four hours. Only on 2 May, when a tank’s gun points directly at him, does Gallardo emerge from the Wilhelmstrasse position with his arms raised. He surrenders carrying the documents of Alfonso Navarro López, while leaving Navarro’s body behind, unseen by the occupying forces.

The action thus opens onto a further, decisive change: the man leaving the position under Navarro’s papers is Gallardo, not Navarro. His escape and assumed identity are bound to the same immediate endgame as Jan and Agneta’s departure, but they do not amount to a shared escape. Jan leaves with Agneta; Gallardo is still there when Berlin falls, and makes it out under another man’s name.

Love, Choice, and the Identity Gallardo Takes

Navarro believes Agneta chose Jan because he was German, invoking the supposed seriousness with which Germans take the doctrine of racial superiority. Gallardo knows that explanation is wrong. In his understanding, Agneta chose Jan for love, not for race, skin, or surname; what Gallardo lacks is the love that would have made him a genuine rival on equal terms. This recognition complicates the scene’s apparent contest between the two men. Jan does not win because of racial identity, and Gallardo’s loss is not proof of the racial hierarchy Navarro imagines.

The narration also refuses to reduce Gallardo’s later killing of Navarro to resentment at having lost Agneta, guilt, or fear. At the moment he fires, Gallardo is not thinking of Bilbao, the terror that kept him from becoming Spain’s champion in 1941, or Christmas Eve 1942. The motive the narrative identifies is love, an overwhelming attachment that fills his inner life. The departure therefore marks not the end of Gallardo’s ties to Jan and Agneta, but the point at which love, separation, survival, and the taking of Navarro’s identity become entangled. Jan chooses to leave with Agneta; Gallardo stays behind, then survives Berlin under another man’s papers, carrying a loss that the narrative presents as inseparable from his capacity for violence.