The Soviet assault on the Berlin
Government Quarter.
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 marshals and generals of the Red Army
prepared to encircle Berlin, which they and their men called “berlog” or
“beast,” 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.
The conquest of eastern Germany and the Battle of Berlin was
accompanied by mass rapes and murder of civilians and prisoners by Soviet
troops on a scale so vast that there is little doubt it hardened German
resistance, and therefore also cost many tens of thousands of krasnoarmeets
their lives. Taking Berlin by direct assault to meet Stalin’s advanced schedule
cost the Soviets 300,000 casualties, including 78,000 dead. Desperate Germans
with Panzerfäuste or Panzerschrecke knocked out over 2,000 Soviet tanks. More
than 900 VVS aircraft were also lost, principally to ground fire. Some killed
and wounded on the Russian side were soldiers from all-women Red Army
regiments. Yet, despite the presence of these female comrades-in-arms among
Soviet formations, as the men of the Red Army advanced toward and through
Berlin there was mass drunkenness, gang rape, and killing of civilians. More
forgivable mass looting was also carried out by Soviet officers, followed by
ordinary soldiers who scuttled among the scraps left them as trainloads of loot
pulled away to the east. Some historians argue that the biting memory of the
vicious behavior of many Red Army soldiers in East Prussia, Berlin, and other
German towns and cities was a contributing factor in cementing West German
public opinion within NATO after the war. The reverse is certainly true:
victory in the Great Fatherland War against Nazi Germany and memory of the
terrible crimes of the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS in the Soviet Union gave the
Soviet system a rare legitimacy and genuine popular support it had never previously
enjoyed.
No comments:
Post a Comment