In all the talk that went on in the last months of the Second World War about strategy and objectives and partitioning Europe, one vital point was overlooked by everyone. It was that the only military objective whose capture or elimination could actually bring the war to an end lay in the person of one man - Adolf Hider. It was Rider’s will alone which kept the German people on their dreadful path to destrucdon. He had made his intendon clear to his generals on the eve of the Ardennes offensive in December 1944: ‘We must allow no moment to pass without showing the enemy that, whatever he does, he can never reckon on a capitulation. Never! Never!’ Indeed he had already said it coundess times - in Mein Kampf and in his endless table talk years before. ‘We shall not capitulate - no, never. We may be destroyed, but if we are, we shall drag a world with us - a world in flames.’
The battle for Berlin turned this reckless prophecy into the reality of Gdtterddmmerung. Albert Speer, technocrat, and Minister of Armaments and War Production, described the helplessness to which Hitler’s miscalculations had reduced the once mighty Reich: ‘Howling and exploding bombs, clouds illuminated in red and yellow hues, droning motors and no defence anywhere - I was stunned.’
Before 1945, when it was hard to see how it could be done, both the Russians and the Western Allies had repeatedly named Berlin as their goal. But such definitions made little sense unless it was possible
To make a proper plan to capture the city. This was not feasible until the beginning of 1945. Once the Wehrmacht had at last recognized that there was nothing left but a strategy of defense, in the East on the Vistula and in the West on the Rhine, once Germany itself was on the point of being invaded, that is in January 1945, the battle for Berlin - then only a few hundred miles away from each main enemy army - was on.
Planning the final battle of the war began in the Soviet High Command in October 1944. It was intended to advance from the Vistula to Berlin and beyond in six weeks. The offensive was to start on 20 January 1945. Later the date was brought forward to 12 January. Three army groups or ‘fronts’ were to attack - 1st and 2nd Belorussian commanded respectively by Marshals Georgi K. Zhukov and Konstantin Rokossovski, and 1st Ukrainian under Marshal Ivan S. Koniev - 2.5 million men against fewer than a milhon Germans. The Russians’ material superiority was even greater. When the attack started it had immediate and startling success. The Eastern Front collapsed, as Colonel General Heinz Guderian, Chief of the German General Staff, had forecast, like a house of cards. By early February the Red Army had reached the River Oder opposite Berlin. They were only 40 miles from the city. Here they paused.
Why did Stalin not push on after his first brilliant success? Was it simply that with Berlin virtually in the bag he wanted to get his hands on as much of SE Europe as he could? Still more interesting is the question he put to his generals: ‘Who is to capture Berlin, we or the Allies?’ - and this at a time when it had already been agreed with the Americans that they would halt their armies well to the west of the city.
Zhukov maintained that because of so many casualties to men and equipment suffered during the January battles, difficulties of supply and air support, as well as the German counter-attack capabihty, further advance was impossible. Colonel General VasiU I. Chuikov, on the other hand, commanding 8th Guards Army under Zhukov, claimed that the war could have been ended in February. He also recorded that when on 4 February the advance on Berlin was being discussed, Stalin telephoned Zhukov and told him to halt the advance on the city and attack the German forces in Pomerania instead.
The result was that the final thrust on Berlin did not start until 16 April. Broadly, Zhukov was to take the city while Koniev would cut off the German Army Group Vistula from Berlin and
Secure Zhukov’s southern hank. Zhukov had no illusions about the problems facing him:
The unusual and highly complex offensive against Berlin required the most careful preparation at all front and army levels. Troops of the 1st Belorussian front were expected to break through a deeply echeloned defense zone extending from the Oder River all the way to heavily fortified Berlin. Never before in the experience of warfare had we been called upon to capture the city as large and as heavily fortified as Berlin.
Its total area was almost 350 square miles. Its subway and other widespread underground engineering networks provided ample possibilities for troop movements. The city itself and its suburbs had been carefully prepared for defense. Every street, every square, every alley, building, canal and bridge represented an element in the city’s defense system.
Yet four days after the attack started, his artillery opened up on Berlin and on 21 April the leading troops of three armies, 3rd Shock, 2nd Guards Tank and 47th broke into the outskirts of the city. The last phase of the battle had begtm. Eleven days later on 2 May, General Helmuth Weidling, Berlin Commandant, surrendered. It was all over. The battle between 16 April and the German capitulation had cost the Red Army a terrible 300,000 casualties.
‘How pitiful is their Berlin!’ announced Marshal Zhukov after his troops had captured it. It was the Red Army and Allied bombing which had made it so. Yet the courage and perseverance of the Berliners themselves should not be forgotten. The long road to Berlin had cost the Russians 20 million men since that day almost four years earlier when the two great armies had clashed head on. And all of it had been brought about by the man who at the height of the fighting for Berlin conducted, or thought he conducted, the battle which he claimed would cause the Russians to suffer their bloodiest defeat.
That it was the Russians and not the Americans who reached Berlin first was because of decisions and actions taken during the first two weeks of April 1945. Lieutenant General William H. Simpson’s US Ninth Army crossed the Elbe astride Magdeburg on 12 April, and reached Tangemunde - only 50 miles from Berlin. The Russians’
Next offensive was not planned to start for another four days, 16 April, and they were at this time 40 miles from Berlin on the Oder. The day before, Simpson asked General Omar N. Bradley to let his troops expand the Elbe bridgehead and push on in force for Berlin. That he would have got there seems more or less certain for he had suffered very few casualties and opposite him were only scattered, ill-equipped and untrained formations of General Walther Wenck’s Twelfth Army which had no air support at all. Wenck conunented: ‘If the Americans launch a major attack they’ll crack our positions with ease. After all what’s to stop them? There’s nothing between here and Berlin.’ But Eisenhower vetoed the idea.
On the same day Stalin sent a message to the American Ambassador in Moscow to the effect that the Red Army was about to renew the offensive. The main thrust would be on Dresden with a subsidiary one on Berlin. This information was hardly accurate. The main Russian forces were directed at and astride the German capital. Could the Wehrmacht withstand the forthcoming Russian steamroller? Colonel General Gotthard Heinrici in conunand of Army Group Vistula (still called this although it had long since left the Vistula far away) had two armies - General Theodor Busse’s Ninth Army, direcdy in the path between the Red Army and Berlin, and General Hasso von Manteuffel’s Third Panzer Army which was on the Oder 30 miles NE of the city and was deployed as far north as Stettin. He would be attacked by three Russian Fronts - Rokossovski’s aimed at Stettin, Zhukov’s at Berlin and Koniev’s at Dresden.
It took the Red Army only ten days from 16 April to surround Berlin. But it was by no means a walkover for them. The battle for the Seelow Heights, a critical position, was hard and costly. Despite all their superiority in artillery, the Russian troops came under heavy AT and machine-gun fire which took such a toll of the advancing troops that they were stopped. This caused Stalin to order Koniev to direct his armored forces on Berlin so that on 17 April two Soviet fronts were making for the city. This was too much for Busse’s Ninth Army, and by 20 April the Germans defending the approaches to Berlin were overrun. One Russian witness, Konstantin Simonov, saw the remnants of a German battle group:
In front of us lay Berlin, and to our right a forest clearing, now a chaos of jumbled tanks, cars, armored cars, trucks.
Special vehicles and ambulances. They had uprooted hundreds of trees, probably in an attempt to turn round and escape. In this black, charred confusion of steel, timber, guns, cases and papers, a bloody mess of mutilated corpses lay strewn along the clearing as far as the eye could see. . . Then I noticed a host of wounded men lying on greatcoats and blankets or leaning against tree trunks; some of them bandaged and others covered in blood, with no one to tend to them.
Before the Russian attack on the Oder position started, Heinrici had explained to Speer that there would be no proper battle for Berlin because the two wings of Army Group Vistiila would simply withdraw respectively north and south of the city. But when it was clear to him that Zhukov had broken through, Heinrici did make an attempt to organize the Volkssturm (home guard) battalions to establish some defenses to the east of the city. But Volkssturm battalions without transport and with inadequate supplies of ammunition could never stop the Red Army.
On 20 April Soviet artillery began to shell Berlin. Next day 2nd Guards Tank, 3rd Shock and 47th Armies - all Zhukov’s formations - reached the outskirts of the city. At the same time Koniev was moving forward with 3rd Guards Tank Army. Then with two huge pincer movements, the Russians encircled the German Ninth Army to the SE of Berlin and Berlin itself, while their spearheads pushed on to the Elbe. By 25 April the Russians had surrounded Berlin and contacted US forces at Torgau. Now there was only one thing left to do - take Berlin and finish the war in Europe.
Col. Gen. Chuikov has left his recollections of it all:
A battery of heavy howitzers was stationed on an open grassy space beside a wood. Dark, ragged clouds were sailing across the sky. The earth seemed to doze, shivering a little from time to time from shellfire in the distance. The gun crews had already run out the howitzers, and were awaiting the command to fire. The muzzles were trained on Berlin. . . on the fortifications of Fascist Berlin - ‘Fire!’ The heavy shells flew up, cleaving the air with a whistling sound. The path had been opened. In the morning I went up to my observation post. It was in a large five-storeyed building near the Johannisthal aerodrome. From a corner room here.
Where there was a jagged hole in the wall, one got a view of the southern and south-eastern parts of Berlin. Roofs, roofs without end, with here and there a break in them - the work of landmines. In the distance factory chimneys and church spires stood out. The parks and squares, in which the young leaves were already out seemed like little outbreaks of green flame. Mist lay along the streets, mingled with dust raised by the previous night’s artillery fire. In places the mist was overlaid by fat trails of black smoke, like mourning streamers. And somewhere in the center of the city ragged yellow plumes rose skywards as bombs exploded. The heavy bombers had already started their preliminary ‘working-over’ of the targets for the forthcoming attack. . . Suddenly the earth shuddered and rocked under my feet. Thousands of guns announced the beginning of the storming operation.
The ‘Fascist beast’ himself had made much of making Festung Berlin an impregnable fortress. It was a myth. In March 1945 a ‘Basic Order for the Preparations to Defend the Capital’ had been signed and issued, but little had been done to turn Berlin into a proper defensive position. The city was defended more by words than deeds. The battle for Berlin would decide the war. Hitler claimed. So it did, but not in the way he meant. The Basic Order envisaged an outer perimeter about 20 miles out, another one 10 miles out, a third following the S-Bahn (the railway serving the suburbs), and a final citadel around the government buildings.
A plan was all it was without troops and weapons, ammunition and supplies or a proper command system to control everything. The battle for the city itself never really developed. It was simply a gigantic mopping-up operation. The Red Army isolated Berlin with overwhelming numbers. Then it slowly crushed the city’s life. It was impossible to fight a full-scale battle there with nearly two million inhabitants, mostly old men or women and children living in shelters. Allied bombing had forced them below ground. In any event the military organization defending the city was a lame skeleton. So-called Panzer divisions had a mere dozen or so tanks Md armored vehicles. After engaging the advancing Russians, they inevitably retreated, leaving the dead and wounded lying in the streets. The fighting itself was done in the midst of civilians who had themselves either been killed by rockets and shells, were
Cowering in cellars or desperately trying to find further cellars behind the retreating soldiers in order not to fall into Soviet hands. The streets were littered with bodies. Yet in some extraordinary way the spirit of the Berliners survived. They scrawled defiant messages on walls, proclaiming ultimate victory in spite of retreat. It was not the Gdtterddmmerung that Hitler had foreseen. But it had its moments of glory.
Up to 22 April Hitler was still nominally in charge of operations. One day earlier he directed his last battle. How did he conduct himself? First, he gave exact instructions to General Karl Roller, a Luftwaffe officer and Goering’s Chief of Staff. When Goering had left the Bunker, Roller stayed. Like so many others he was unable to stand up to Hitler. Earnest and fussy, he would accept the Fiihrer’s raving invective and threats with misgiving but without dissent. Instead he would wring his hands and examine his conscience. On this occasion, as so often before. Hitler’s orders were given in the greatest detail. He selected precisely which troops were to be brought back into reserve from the northern part of the city in order to launch a counter-attack on the Russians in the southern suburbs. He laid down exactly which ground units of the Luftwaffe were to be employed and in what way. The attack would be an all-out and final attempt to turn the tide. Every man, every gun and every tank would be committed, the Luftwaffe would put every available plane into the skies. All would be staked on a final desperate blow. An SS general, Obergruppenfuehrer (Lieutenant General) Felix Steiner, would command the operation.
The tactical plan for Steiner’s attack was that it would be launched from the Eberswalde into the gap between von Manteuffel’s Third Panzer Army and Busse’s Ninth Army, so smashing the spearhead of Zhukov’s drive on the city. But Army Group Steiner was a figment of Hitler’s imagination. It had nothing like the strength required to mount an attack of the sort envisaged. Nonetheless Hitler told Steiner on the telephone to withdraw every man available between Berlin and the Baltic up to Stettin and Hamburg. The order was absurd. Steiner had no communication with any of these troops. Even had he the means of giving orders, there was no transport to move them. Yet when Steiner protested. Hitler broke in with an assurance that the Russians would suffer their bloodiest defeat before the gates of Berlin.
The shortage of troops was made up for by an abundance of
Threats. Commanding officers who did not thrust home would not live to tell the tale. Steiner’s written instructions contained a specific promise that he was answerable with his life for the execution of his orders. The fate of the Reich capital depends on the success of your mission.’ Roller too was assured that his own head would guarantee both the vigilance of the effort to be made and the success that would result. All was in vain. Hitler’s granite willpower was powerless now. Skeleton German battalions could never hold back the fully manned and equipped Russian divisions. The attack never came off. It did not even cross the start-line. German withdrawal in the north simply allowed Russian tanks to stampede through to the center of Berlin. The Steiner attack had made a desperate military position still more hopeless.
Weidling, on the other hand, who became Commandant of Berlin on 25 April, knew the city was almost surrounded. That evening on reporting in the Bunker to the Ftihrer and his entourage, he showed them from a sketch map that the ring around the city would soon be finally closed. In fact the ring was already closed. After explaining the dispositions of enemy and German forces, Weidling gave his view that despite the defenders’ efforts, the Russians were slowly and surely advancing to the center of Berlin. The encirclement involved eight Soviet armies. On the same day, 25 April, Hitler ordered the Wehrmacht to re-establish contact with Berlin by attacking from the NW, SE and south - so bringing the battle of Berlin to ‘a victorious conclusion’. The only troops Weidling had, would ever have, were some Volkssturm battalions, Luftwaffe ground personnel and Hitler Youth units, and the remainder of his own 56 Panzer Corps. These he organized into defense sectors.
Despite all these difficulties Weidling made a plan which he put to the Fiihrer on 26 April for effecting Hitler’s escape from the city. Hitler rejected it. He was not prepared to be caught wandering about somewhere in the woods: ‘I stay here to die at the head of my men. But you must continue to defend the city.’ While inspecting defenses that day Weidling saw little to comfort him:
The Potsdamer Platz and the Leipziger Strasse were under strong artillery fire. The dust from the rubble hung in the air like a thick fog. . . shells burst all round us. We were covered with bits of broken stones. . . The roads were riddled with shell craters and piles of brick rubble. Streets and squares
Lay deserted. Dodging Russian mortars we made our way to the underground station by jumps. The roomy imdergroimd station was crowded with terrified civilians. It was a shattering sight. . . Colonel Barenfanger, who commanded in this sector, pressed me for more men and more ammunition. I could promise him neither. Most of his men were Volkssturm troopers who had been sent into the exceptionally severe fighting with captured arms... No anununition for these guns could be found in the whole of Berlin.
Exactly how Berlin would finally fall remained to be seen. Lieutenant Colonel Pavel Troyanovski, a ‘Red Star’ correspondent, was there on the same day as Steiner’s abortive attack:
It seemed as though we were confronted not by a town, but by a nightmare of fire and steel. Every house appeared to have been converted into a fortress. There were no squares or gardens, but only gun positions for artillery and mine throwers. . . Our guns sometimes fired a thousand shells on to one small square, a group of houses or even a tiny garden. Then the German firing points would be silenced, and the infantry would go into the attack. . . From house to house and street to street, from one district to another, mowing their way through gunfire and hot steel, went our infantrymen, artillery, sappers and tanks ... On 25 April the German capital was completely encircled and cut off from the rest of the country. At the height of the street fighting Berlin was without water, without light, without landing fields, without radio stations. The city ceased to resemble Berlin.
On 23 April Stalin laid down the boundary between Zhukov and Koniev. The Reichstag (Parliament Building), where the Soviet flag was to be raised, was given to Zhukov. His soldiers captured the Reichstag and ran up the Red flag at about 1430 on 30 April - an hour before Hitler committed suicide. But German resistance, recalled one German soldier, continued in the hands of an SS officer:
The close combat boys went into action. Their leader was SS-Obersturmfuhrer [First Lieutenant] Babick, battle commandant of the Reichstag, Babick now waged the kind of war he had
Always dreamed of. Our two battery commanders, Radloff and Richter, were reduced to taking orders from him. Babick’s command post was not in the Reichstag itself but in the cellar of the house on the comer of Dorotheenstrasse and the Hermann Goring Strasse, on the side nearer the Spree. There he mled from an air-raid shelter measuring some 250 sq ft. Against the wall stood an old sofa and in front of it a dining table on which a map of the center of Berlin was spread out. Sitting on the sofa was an elderly marine commander and next to him two petty officers. There were also a few SS men and, of course, SS-Obersturmftihrer Babick bending over his map. He played the great general and treated everyone present in the dim candle-lit room to great pearls of military wisdom. He kept talking of final victory, cursed all cowards and traitors and left no one in any doubt that he would sununarily shoot anyone who abandoned the Fiihrer.
Babick was tremendously proud of his successes. He was hoping for reinforcements. From somewhere or another, marines had come to Berlin on the night of 28 April, led by the very Lieutenant-Commander who was now hanging about the cellar with nothing to say for himself. Babick never moved from his map, plotting the areas from which he expected reinforcements and even the arrival of ‘Royal Tigers’ [heavy tanks]. Babick was still bubbling over with confidence. For one thing, he thought himself perfectly safe in his shelter. SS sentries were posted outside, others barred the corridor to the Reichstag, and Royal Tigers, our finest weapons, were apparently just around the comer. He had divided his men into groups of five to ten. One group was commanded by SS-Untersturmfuhrer [Second Lieutenant] Undermann; he was posted south of the Moltke Bridge in the Ministry of the Interior (the building the Russians called ‘Himmler’s House’) and the bridge itself lay in his line of fire.
Then an SS ensign, aged about 19, came to Babick with the report that Undermann and his men had come across some alcohol and that they had got roaring drunk. As a precaution he had brought Undermann along; he was wailing outside. Babick roared out the order: ‘Have him shot on the spot!’ The ensign clicked his heels and ran out. Seconds later we heard a burst of fire from a submachine-gun. The boy reappeared and reported:
‘Orders carried out.’ Babick put him in charge of Undermann’s unit. Our ranks in the Reichstag got thinner and thinner. Part of our battery gradually dispersed, and by the night of 30 April, no more than 40 to 50 people, soldiers and civilians, were left in the cellar. This remnant was now busy looking for the safest possible hiding-places. There we intended to sit tight until the Russians came. But they kept us waiting for another 24 hours. At dawn on 1 May, we heard over our portable radio that the Fiihrer had ‘fallen in the battle for the Reich Capital,’ his wife at his side. Goebbels and his family had gone the same way. We were our own masters, at long last.
The only thing still to be done was to negotiate with the Russians in order to surrender what was left of the city. By this time all that was left in German hands were the Government buildings, part of the adjoining Tiergarten and the area between the Zoo and the Havel river. Hitler had forbidden Weidling to capitulate but he had authorized a break-out. After Hitler’s death Martin Bormann, the Deputy Fiihrer, had sent a telegram to Admiral Karl Donitz in Plon, appointing him as Hitler’s successor. Donitz, not reahzing that Hitler was dead, replied: ‘My Fiihrer! My loyalty to you will be unconditional. I shall do everything possible to relieve you in Berlin. If fate nevertheless compels me to rule the Reich as your appointed successor, I shall continue this war to an end, worthy of the unique, heroic struggle of the German people.’ But Goebbels and Bormann were trying above all to put an end to the pointless bloodshed. They therefore made contact with the Russians who agreed to receive a German representative.
This was Lieutenant General Hans Krebs, Chief of the General Staff since Guderian’s dismissal on 28 March, who spoke Russian and had been in Moscow as Military Attache. He met Gen. Chuikov, Commander of the 8th Guards Tank Army, at Schulenburgring near Tempelhof Airport, at 0400 on the morning of 1 May. He had been authorized to negotiate only a truce or armistice, but the Russians, despite suspicions that the Western Allies were contemplating a separate peace with the German armies in the West, refused to consider anything except unconditional surrender. When Krebs referred to 1 May as a day which their two nations shared as a holiday, Chuikov drily observed that it might be a fine day in Moscow, but he could not say the same for Berlin. Thus Krebs
Failed and he committed suicide after returning to the Bunker. Next Weidling tried to negotiate. On the following morning he crossed the line dividing the two armies and surrendered the Berlin garrison with its 70,000 troops. The battle for Berlin was over. The question now was how would the Russians behave?
Rape, looting, burning and murder became commonplace. Hitler’s very last War Directive of 15 April had made it clear what fate threatened a defeated Germany: ‘Wliile the old men and children will be murdered, the women and girls will be reduced to barrack-room whores.’ Even at the end Hitler’s reliance on propaganda and foresight did not desert him. But better things were on the way for Berlin. The Red Army positioned more disciplined regiments there: American troops reached the city on 1 July; the British arrived next day.
World History
