The encirclement of Berlin

On Tuesday 24 April 1945, in the south-eastern suburbs of Berlin, around Bohnsdorf and Schönefeld airfield, units of two Soviet fronts met: General Vasily Chuikov’s 8th Guards Army and the 1st Guards Tank Army of Marshal Georgy Zhukov’s 1st Belorussian Front, and the 3rd Guards Tank Army of Marshal Ivan Konev’s 1st Ukrainian Front. The link-up had a double significance. It cut off from Berlin the German 9th Army, which had been fighting east of the city for a week, and it closed the southern part of the ring around the capital of the Reich. The next day, 25 April, Konev’s tanks met Zhukov’s infantry at Ketzin, west of Berlin. The city was surrounded.

War chronologies record these events twice: under 24 April, that the troops of the 1st Belorussian and 1st Ukrainian Fronts link up, forming an “initial encirclement” of Berlin, and under 27 April, that the encirclement of the German forces in Berlin is “completed”. The first date is accurate. The second needs explaining: the ring around the city itself had already closed on 25 April, and 27 April was rather the day on which the defenders were pushed back into the centre, losing their airfields and their last links with the outside. In the course of those four days Berlin turned from a besieged city into a pocket.

The ring from the east and south

Five days after the start of the Berlin offensive, Zhukov’s troops reached the outskirts of the capital, and on 21 April the storming of Berlin began. Zhukov attacked from the north and east; Konev, who after breaking through the front on the Neisse had swung two tank armies northwards, approached from the south. On 22 April General Pavel Rybalko’s 3rd Guards Tank Army reached the Teltow Canal, which in this sector formed the southern boundary of the city. Konev brought up breakthrough artillery to force the canal; on the morning of 24 April, after a heavy bombardment, Rybalko’s tank crews and infantry crossed to the north bank and entered the districts of Zehlendorf, Steglitz and Lichterfelde.

At the same time Zhukov’s troops were coming up from the east. The 8th Guards Army and General Mikhail Katukov’s 1st Guards Tank Army crossed the Spree and the Dahme near Köpenick on 22–23 April and turned west. On 24 April their spearheads reached Bohnsdorf and Schönefeld, where they ran into Konev’s soldiers. At the same time, to the east of this point, both marshals now had a huge German grouping behind them: General Theodor Busse’s 9th Army and part of the 4th Panzer Army, pushed back into the forests and marshes of the Spreewald between Fürstenwalde, Lübben and the lakes near Teupitz. In those days the combined-arms armies of both fronts closed the outer ring around them.

The meeting at Schönefeld did not mean friendship between the commanders. Once inside the city, Chuikov’s and Rybalko’s armies began to run into each other; Stalin shifted the boundary line so that it was Zhukov’s troops who would take the centre, with the Reichstag and the Reich Chancellery, and Konev had to turn back some of his forces. The rivalry between the two marshals, which had driven the pace of the operation from the start, lasted to the very last day.

Ketzin: the ring closes

The force that reached furthest west was General Dmitry Lelyushenko’s 4th Guards Tank Army. Its corps swung around Berlin to the south-west, took Beelitz and approached Potsdam. At midday on 25 April, according to Soviet studies, the 6th Guards Mechanised Corps met units of the 47th Army of Zhukov’s front, which had been bypassing the city to the north via Nauen, at Ketzin on the Havel. Berlin and its western suburbs – Spandau, Gatow and Potsdam – were encircled. That same day, more than a hundred kilometres to the south-west, soldiers of the 1st Ukrainian Front met the Americans on the Elbe at Torgau, and the 2nd Belorussian Front broke through the defences on the lower Oder. Germany had been cut in two, and its capital severed from the rest of the country.

Weidling in command

The encirclement found Berlin’s defences in confusion. On 22 April, the day of Hitler’s breakdown in the bunker, the commandant of the Berlin Defence Area, General Hellmuth Reymann, was dismissed and sent to Potsdam; for a day his duties were carried out by Colonel Ernst Kaether. The same day a rumour reached the Reich Chancellery that the commander of LVI Panzer Corps, General Helmuth Weidling, had moved his command post west of the city, and Hitler ordered him to be arrested and shot. On 23 April Weidling reported to the bunker in person to clear up the misunderstanding – and came out of it as commandant of the defence of Berlin. His corps, withdrawn to the eastern and south-eastern suburbs, became the core of the garrison.

Weidling took over a defence that could no longer be organised. He divided the city into sectors and assigned the corps’ divisions as a backbone for the Volkssturm and Hitler Youth battalions, while command of the central sector “Z”, with the government quarter, went to SS-Brigadeführer Wilhelm Mohnke. Meanwhile Hitler, who on 23 April had broken with Göring, was directing from the bunker armies that no longer existed and ordering them to fight their way through to the capital.

26–27 April: the pocket tightens

Once the ring had closed, the Soviet armies attacked concentrically towards the city centre. On 25 April their spearheads crossed the S-Bahn circle line, on which the inner ring of defence rested, at several points. On 26 April Chuikov’s and Katukov’s troops attacked Tempelhof airfield, defended by the remnants of the Müncheberg Panzer Division, and had taken it by the following day. In the west, Soviet troops approached Gatow airfield; the last aircraft could land only on a makeshift strip along the east–west axis in the Tiergarten. On 27 April Konev’s and Zhukov’s troops took Potsdam, while in the south-east two bled-white divisions – Müncheberg and the SS Nordland – were falling back towards the centre before five Soviet armies.

This is the situation that war chronologies refer to when they speak, under 27 April, of the encirclement being completed. According to historical studies, the defenders then held a strip a dozen or so kilometres long from east to west and only a few kilometres wide. Supply from the air had practically ceased, the hospitals and shelters were overflowing, and there was enough ammunition for only a few days’ fighting.

Wenck and Halbe

Hitler’s hopes now centred on General Walther Wenck’s 12th Army, which stood on the Elbe facing the Americans. On 22–23 April it was ordered to turn east and fight its way through to Berlin. Wenck, a young and clear-headed general, did not believe the capital could be saved. His XX Corps moved off on 24 April, drove into the flank of Lelyushenko’s army and on 28 April reached Beelitz, where thousands of wounded were evacuated from the military hospitals, and on 29 April Ferch on the Schwielowsee. There it linked up with Reymann’s group withdrawing from Potsdam. It went no further. Instead of breaking through to Berlin, it opened a corridor through which the remnants of the 9th Army and refugees could escape westwards.

The plans in the bunker and the plans in the field had parted company entirely. Hitler ordered Busse to strike west, link up with Wenck and then, together with him, turn north and break the ring around Berlin. Busse and Wenck, communicating by radio, had a different aim: to lead as many men as possible out of the pocket and into American, not Soviet, captivity. This quiet gap between orders and their execution foreshadowed what was to happen across the whole of Germany in the days that followed.

The 9th Army, encircled on 24 April, tried from the night of 25/26 April to break out westwards through the forests around Halbe. The Battle of Halbe, which lasted until 1 May, was one of the bloodiest episodes of the end of the war. Thousands of civilians went with the soldiers. According to various estimates, some 25,000–30,000 people reached Wenck’s lines. The rest were killed or taken prisoner. More than 20,000 of the dead are buried in the forest cemetery at Halbe, and Soviet losses in the fighting against the pocket also ran into thousands.

A population trapped

According to various estimates, between 2 million and nearly 3 million civilians were trapped in the encirclement along with the garrison. They had nowhere to flee. They spent most of the days in cellars and shelters, emerging only for water and food; thousands crowded into the Underground tunnels and the flak towers. There was no electricity, gas or medicine. In the districts occupied by the Red Army, looting and killing were accompanied by mass sexual violence against women. Its scale cannot be established precisely; on the basis of figures from Berlin hospitals, historians estimate the number of women raped in Berlin at about 95,000–130,000. Some Soviet soldiers and officers helped the population and shared their food, and the commandant’s offices soon began to organise the distribution of bread – but the experience of those weeks weighed on the memory of the city’s inhabitants for a long time.

Civilians also died at the hands of their own authorities. Summary courts and SS units hanged people accused of desertion or of hanging out a white flag, and the command issued orders to blow up bridges and destroy installations on which the inhabitants’ survival depended. Hitler and Goebbels had decided that the capital would share the fate of the regime.

What came of it

The encirclement decided the outcome of the battle. Cut off, Berlin could count neither on the 9th Army, nor on Wenck, nor on Steiner’s group, and its defenders were now fighting only for time. On 30 April, with Soviet soldiers a few hundred metres from the Reich Chancellery, Adolf Hitler committed suicide. That same day the assault on the Reichstag began, and the Polish 1st Tadeusz Kościuszko Infantry Division also joined the fighting in the city centre. During the night of 1/2 May some of the defenders tried to break out of the city to the west; most were killed or captured. On the morning of 2 May, at Chuikov’s headquarters, Weidling signed the order to cease resistance.

The closing of the ring also meant that Berlin would be taken by the Red Army alone – as followed from the decision taken by Eisenhower at the end of March to abandon the drive on the Reich capital. The Western Allies entered their sectors of the city only at the beginning of July 1945. The Halbe pocket and the ruins of Berlin showed how high a price both armies and civilians paid in the last weeks of the war – for Hitler’s decision to fight to the end when the outcome of the war had long been decided.