The so-called “Battle of Berlin” was the
last major land battle in the European theater during World War II. It was also
more of a campaign to occupy central and eastern Germany than a fight over or
inside the poorly defended, sprawling, smoldering wreck of the German
metropolis. On one side was the assembled might of the Red Army, driving toward
ultimate victory against the once-feared but now only hated and despised
Wehrmacht. The defenders arrayed around the capital were made up of broken
Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS units. Inside the city Hitler and his commanders
assembled about 45,000 Wehrmacht and foreign Waffen SS: Baltic, French, Dutch
and other fascist volunteers, fanatics, and opportunists of the “New Order”
with no place left to run. They were joined in the frontline by raw boys from
the city’s Hitlerjugend, some as young as 12, each armed with a singleshot
anti-tank weapon. Another 40,000 Volkssturm were herded to the line, mainly old
men of the home guard who fought for the Kaiser in the last war, or invalided soldiers
dragged back into the new one for Hitler. Nazi Party officials and other
fanatics formed roving death squads to round up any suspected deserter. Any man
or boy caught in mufti or behind the lines who could not explain his presence
was treated without mercy and summarily hanged for treason: Berlin’s lampposts
were adorned with corpses. The approaching Soviet formations had massive
superiority in everything, in most cases by a ratio of 10:1 or greater: more
air power, artillery, and armor and better trained and more experienced troops.
As the marshals and generals of the Red
Army prepared to encircle Berlin, which they and their men called “berlog” or
“beast,” the field marshals and generals of the Wehrmacht sank into the worst
extremes and criminal excesses of the “catastrophic nationalism” that long
engulfed their Führer and themselves. No one in the High Command contradicted
Hitler’s final rants or sheer military fantasies about phantom relief armies
driving on the city, or his promises of war-winning Wunderwaffen soon-to-arrive
and change the course of the war in Germany’s favor. They knew all that to be
false, the ravings of a delusional madman who had conquered all of Europe then
lost it again inside six years. The men in feldgrau uniforms with red stripes
running down their trouser legs instead allowed the protracted and wanton total
destruction of Germany, the decimation of its citizens and their own men. Some
senior officers ran for cover in the end. Others made vulgar suicide plans; a
few carried these out. Most merely waited with fatalistic stoicism for the end
of their world and lives, superficially dutiful at their posts but as morally
insensible at the end of Hitler’s serial wars of genocidal aggression as they
were at the start.
The Red Army paid a bloody price for the
honor of delivering Hitler’s capital to Stalin, who ordered the attack
accelerated when he met with his Front commanders on April 3. The reason for the
shift in gear was almost certainly the Kremlin master’s concern over the rapid
progress being made by the Western Allies, as resistance collapsed into small
unit action and a few holdout pockets in western Germany. Two huge Fronts
launched the final attack on “berlog” on April 16. Konev’s 1st Ukrainian Front
attacked from the south out of Silesia with over half a million men. Zhukov’s
massive 1st Belorussian Front struck westward from the Neisse and Oder with
over 900,000 men and thousands of tanks and attack aircraft. Rokossovsky’s 2nd
Belorussian Front at 480,000 men attacked along the Baltic coast starting on
April 18. Rokossovsky tore across Brandenburg and smashed right through
immobile 3rd Panzerarmee, which was trying to flee west to surrender to the
Anglo-Americans but lacked transport even for that. The three Fronts that
closed the ring around Berlin brought to the fight over 6,200 tanks, 7,500
combat aircraft, and 41,000 artillery tubes. Together, they comprised 171
divisions and 21 more mobile corps. Attacking on all sides of the city
simultaneously, these vast armies overwhelmed and crushed the last defenders in
the outer ring around Berlin. Tactics were crude, frontal, and blunt,
especially in Zhukov’s opening assault on the Seelow Heights. Heavy Soviet
casualties resulted as the attack initially failed against a layered and
effective German defense. The main force defending the city was fragments of
Army Group Center—not the original force that invaded the Soviet Union in 1941,
but a renamed hodgepodge of units cobbled together and led in futile resistance
by a fanatic Nazi. General Ferdinand Schörner was one of Hitler’s’ vaunted “men
of will.” He tried to hold the line of the River Neisse, but failed against
unstoppable brute force and more skilled Soviet commanders and troops. German
9th Army also fought hard to pull itself westward from the Oder, inflicting
heavy casualties on Konev’s lead units. The two main Soviet thrusts, by Konev
and Zhukov, linked on April 24 just south of Berlin. Soviet troops entered the
outer suburbs two days later.
Army Group Vistula totally collapsed overnight
on April 28–29, and the fight for Berlin was effectively over. It had been
waged and won outside the city. A few more days of fighting remained as
hundreds of thousands of krasnoarmeets moved through broken urban neighborhoods
and the rubble of earlier Allied bombing to blast away the last resistance from
a few thousand fanatics. Through it all Hitler brooded in his “leader bunker”
beneath the rubble, under the Reich Chancellery. In the end even he stopped
ordering mirage armies to counterattack this street or district, or to break
out from some Baltic envelopment and fight through to Berlin. He instead
ordered total demolition of the city and of Germany, of all its infrastructure
and facilities, just as he had ordered Warsaw destroyed in 1944. The German
nation, Hitler pronounced without a shred of self-awareness or irony, had
proven “unworthy” of his greatness and failed the test of his social-Darwinist
view of war and history. At last, a Führer order was countermanded: his court
architect and minister for armaments and munitions, Albert Speer, finally
disobeyed the man he had followed for over a decade into utter moral and
physical ruin. Speer secretly called and circulated to stop the wanton
destruction of the means of survival for any German who lived past the end of
the war. Other top Nazis deserted their Führer in different ways, with several
seeking to contact the Western Allies in vain hopes of negotiating a truce.
Hitler condemned them all, married his mistress, then killed himself on April
30. That same day Soviet soldiers tore down the Swastika flag from the
Reichstag roof and raised their own in its place. Two days later the last
resistance inside Berlin ended. The tiny garrison that remained made an offer
of surrender. It was accepted, and a formal ceasefire went into effect at 3:00
P.M. Berlin time. The garrison survivors and hundreds of thousands more Germans
taken captive outside the city were marched to the east, most into years of
captivity and forced labor.
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