Battle of Berlin

The Battle of Berlin, from 16 April to 2 May 1945, was the Soviet offensive that captured the capital of Nazi Germany in the final weeks of the Second World War in Europe. Three Soviet army groups, with Polish forces fighting alongside them, broke the last German lines on the Oder, surrounded the city and took it street by street. Adolf Hitler killed himself in his bunker on 30 April, and the garrison surrendered two days later.

The Red Army's winter offensive of January 1945 carried it from the Vistula to the Oder, about 60 kilometres east of Berlin, where it paused to regroup. The Western Allies did not try to race for the city: Dwight D. Eisenhower judged that it lay in the future Soviet zone and saw no reason to spend lives on it. Joseph Stalin, by contrast, wanted Berlin taken quickly and his armies as far west as possible. Under Marshals Georgy Zhukov, Ivan Konev and Konstantin Rokossovsky, the Soviets massed some 2.3 to 2.5 million troops, 6,250 tanks and 7,500 aircraft. The German commander on the Oder, General Gotthard Heinrici, fortified the Seelow Heights, a ridge overlooking the river on the main road to the capital.

The offensive opened on 16 April. At the Seelow Heights, Zhukov's front needed four days of costly frontal attacks to break through, losing around 30,000 dead against some 12,000 Germans. To the south, Konev's front attacked from the Neisse and swung towards the capital. By 19 April the German front east of Berlin had collapsed, and the German 9th Army was trapped in a pocket to the south-east, from which it tried to break out westwards in the Battle of Halbe.

On 20 April, Hitler's birthday, Soviet artillery began shelling the city centre and kept firing until the surrender. Two days later, at a stormy conference in his bunker, Hitler admitted the war was lost and said he would stay in Berlin until the end. On 25 April the two Soviet fronts met west of the city, completing the ring, and the same day Soviet and American troops linked up at Torgau on the Elbe. Relief attempts by General Walther Wenck's 12th Army stalled short of the city.

General Helmuth Weidling, appointed on 23 April to command the defence, had perhaps 45,000 soldiers from battered army and SS divisions, backed by police, Hitler Youth and about 40,000 older men of the Volkssturm militia. Soviet armies fought inward through the suburbs, the airport at Tempelhof and the Tiergarten park. On 29 April Hitler married Eva Braun and signed his last testament; the next afternoon the couple took their own lives. That evening Soviet troops forced their way into the Reichstag, which had stood in ruins since the fire of 1933, and fought room by room until it fell. The famous photograph of a flag raised on its roof was a re-enactment taken later. After Joseph Goebbels killed his children and himself on 1 May, Weidling surrendered the garrison on the morning of 2 May.

Soviet archival figures record 81,116 Soviet dead and about 280,000 wounded or sick for the whole operation. German military deaths are estimated at 92,000 to 100,000, the Soviets claimed nearly 480,000 prisoners, and about 125,000 civilians are thought to have died. In many districts Soviet soldiers committed mass rape, looting and killings, though the city commander, Nikolai Berzarin, introduced severe penalties, and Red Army kitchens also fed hungry residents. Over a million Berliners were homeless. Fighting went on west of the city as German units tried to reach the Americans and surrender to them, until the war in Europe ended on 8 May (9 May in Soviet reckoning).

Our 1938 map shows Germany at its pre-war extent, and the 1945 map shows Europe at the war's end, with the Soviet Union in control of eastern Germany and its capital.