Eisenhower gives up Berlin

On 27 March 1945, three days after the crossing of the Rhine at Wesel, General Dwight Eisenhower met journalists in Paris. Asked who would reach Berlin first, he replied – according to press reports – that it would probably be the Russians, since they were much closer to it. That same day Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery informed him that he intended to lead the British Second Army and the US Ninth Army across the North German Plain to the Elbe and from there – as he put it – “via the autobahn to Berlin, I hope”. The reply the Supreme Commander sent the next day dashed those hopes.

The decision was thus taken in the last days of March, and formally on 28 March. The statement found in war chronologies that the Western Allies “slowed their advance and let the Red Army take Berlin” needs correcting, however: their offensive did not slow down at all. In those same days the American armies were closing the ring around the Ruhr, and a few days later they drove at full speed towards the Elbe. What Eisenhower changed was not the pace but the direction of the main thrust.

A capital in someone else’s zone

The dispute over Berlin had been going on since the autumn of 1944. The British, and Montgomery in particular, wanted a single powerful thrust in the north – through the Ruhr to Berlin. Eisenhower preferred an advance on a broad front; a compromise on the matter was reached at the Malta Conference at the turn of January and February 1945. At that point, however, the crossing of the Rhine still lay ahead of the Allies.

March brought the breakthrough sooner than anyone had expected. On 7 March the Americans of the First Army captured the undamaged bridge at Remagen and established the first bridgehead on the right bank of the Rhine. Later in the month General George Patton’s Third Army took the left bank in the Palatinate, captured Mainz and on the night of 22–23 March crossed the river at Oppenheim. A day later Montgomery’s great operation on the lower Rhine began, supported by the Varsity airborne landing. The German front in the West, weakened by the losses suffered in the Ardennes and in the battles on the Rhine, began to disintegrate, and for the first time the Allied armies could wage a war of manoeuvre deep inside the Reich.

More important than the disputes over strategy were the political arrangements. The European Advisory Commission in London had drawn up the occupation zones in Germany as early as September 1944, and the leaders of the Big Three had confirmed them at Yalta in February 1945. Berlin lay deep inside the future Soviet zone, some 160 kilometres from its western boundary, and was to come under the joint administration of the four powers regardless of who captured it.

Geography mattered too. At the end of March the Red Army stood on the Oder, in the bridgeheads at Kienitz and Küstrin, about 70 kilometres from Berlin. Montgomery’s forces, which had only just crossed the Rhine at Wesel and Rees, were more than 450 kilometres from the Reich’s capital. The Germans were manning the Oder front with the best forces they had left – since 20 March it had been commanded by General Gotthard Heinrici, who had replaced Himmler at the head of Army Group Vistula.

The message to Stalin

On 28 March Eisenhower took three decisions at once. He wrote to Montgomery that once the Ruhr had been encircled, General William Simpson’s Ninth Army would revert to the command of General Omar Bradley, and that the 21st Army Group was to cover Bradley’s northern flank and advance on Hamburg and Lübeck to cut off Denmark. From now on the main thrust was to be made by Bradley’s 12th Army Group – into the centre of Germany, along the Erfurt–Leipzig–Dresden axis, to meet the Red Army. A second advance, in the south, was to go through Regensburg towards Linz.

The third decision was a message designated SCAF 252, sent directly to Joseph Stalin through the US military mission in Moscow. In it Eisenhower set out his plan and asked to be informed of Soviet intentions so that the two fronts could coordinate their operations and avoid clashes when they met. He did not mention Berlin as an objective at all. The message was handed to Stalin on the evening of 31 March by Ambassador Averell Harriman and his British counterpart, Archibald Clark Kerr, together with the head of the mission, General John Deane.

Direct contact between the Supreme Commander and Moscow was not entirely new in this war. In January 1945 Eisenhower’s deputy, Air Chief Marshal Arthur Tedder, had talked with Stalin in the Kremlin about coordinating operations after the Ardennes offensive, and the Combined Chiefs of Staff had agreed to contacts with the Soviet command on purely military matters. Eisenhower considered the plan for further operations to be just such a matter. He did not, however, inform Montgomery, the British Chiefs of Staff or the Prime Minister of the message in advance.

In Eisenhower’s view several considerations favoured this decision. First, his task was to destroy the German armed forces, not to capture cities; the most important objectives lay in the Ruhr and in central Germany. Second, Berlin was going to be in the Soviet zone anyway, and a race for it might cost many lives for no political gain. Bradley – as he wrote in his memoirs – estimated that taking the city would cost some 100,000 killed and wounded, “a pretty stiff price to pay for a prestige objective”. Third, SHAEF intelligence warned that the Nazis might withdraw to a supposed “Alpine Redoubt” in Bavaria and Austria and prolong the war from there; it is now known that this was largely a product of propaganda and Allied fears. Finally, cutting Germany in two in the Leipzig area would split the remaining forces of the Wehrmacht into two parts.

Storm in London

The British learned of the message belatedly and received it with indignation. The Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Alan Brooke, and the British Chiefs of Staff protested to the Combined Chiefs of Staff on 29 March: they considered that Eisenhower had exceeded his authority by communicating directly with Stalin on matters of strategy, and that he had changed the agreed plan, depriving Montgomery of the main role. According to Brooke’s diary, the British found the tone of the message incomprehensible and humiliating.

Winston Churchill put the case more broadly. In messages to Eisenhower and President Roosevelt of 31 March and 1 April he argued that Berlin retained great political and psychological significance: its fall would signal defeat to the Germans, while its capture by the Russians would strengthen their conviction that it was they who had won the war. He urged that the Western Allies should “shake hands with the Russians as far to the east as possible”.

The Americans stood solidly behind Eisenhower. The Army Chief of Staff, General George Marshall, replied that operational decisions belonged to the Supreme Commander and that contact with Stalin was military coordination, not politics. Eisenhower wrote to Montgomery on 31 March that, as far as he was concerned, Berlin had become “nothing but a geographical location”. At the beginning of April Churchill regarded the matter as closed, although in his history of the war he held to the view that the West had then lost an important political card.

The answer from the Kremlin

Stalin replied on 1 April. He agreed that Berlin had “lost its former strategic importance” and said that the Red Army would send only secondary forces against it, delivering its main blow in the second half of May towards Dresden, to meet the Allies. This was deliberate disinformation. That same day Stalin received Marshals Georgy Zhukov and Ivan Konev in the Kremlin. According to Konev’s memoirs, the head of the General Staff’s Operations Directorate, Sergei Shtemenko, read out a report on an alleged Anglo-American plan to strike at Berlin, and Stalin asked: “So who is going to take Berlin – we or the Allies?” Both marshals assured him that it would be the Red Army.

Over the following days the Stavka issued the directives for the Berlin offensive. It began on 16 April – not in May, as Stalin had assured Eisenhower – with the forces of three fronts, including Zhukov’s 1st Belorussian Front and Konev’s 1st Ukrainian Front, with the participation of the Polish 1st Army. Stalin played on the rivalry between his marshals, drawing the boundary line between their fronts only as far as the town of Lübben, so that Konev could swing on Berlin from the south.

The march to the Elbe

Eisenhower’s decision did not halt the Western armies. On 1 April the US Ninth and First Armies linked up at Lippstadt, trapping Field Marshal Walter Model’s Army Group B in the Ruhr; by 18 April more than 300,000 soldiers had been taken prisoner in the pocket. At the same time American armoured divisions were racing east. On 11 April the spearheads of the Ninth Army reached the Elbe near Magdeburg, about 120 kilometres from Berlin, and seized bridgeheads on its east bank.

Simpson was convinced that he could reach Berlin. On 15 April Eisenhower finally refused: the Ninth Army was to halt on the Elbe. On 25 April patrols of the US 69th Infantry Division met Red Army soldiers at Torgau – the link-up on the Elbe cut the Reich in two, just as the plan of 28 March had intended. By then the troops of Zhukov and Konev were already storming Berlin.

Significance

The dispute over giving up Berlin is one of the most famous controversies of the end of the war. Critics – led by Churchill and the British military, and after the war some American historians as well – held that the West had of its own free will handed Stalin the symbol of victory and a trump card in negotiations over the future of Central Europe. Eisenhower’s defenders point out that the occupation zones had been fixed earlier, that the Americans would in any case have had to withdraw from the territory they had taken to the agreed lines – which they did in July 1945, at the same time entering the western sectors of Berlin – and that the battle for the city was extremely bloody. According to Russian statistical data, some 80,000 Soviet and Polish soldiers were killed or went missing in the Berlin offensive, and German losses, civilians included, were considerably higher.

The decision of late March 1945 also showed how much the balance within the coalition had changed: strategy in the West was decided by the Americans, who provided the great majority of the troops, and British protests could no longer change much. For Stalin it was an opportunity to take Berlin on his own and to his own timetable. The last days of March closed with one more gesture by Eisenhower – an appeal to German soldiers calling on them to give up a hopeless fight.