The storming of Berlin

On Saturday 21 April 1945 the war reached the streets of Berlin. From the morning, shells from Soviet long-range artillery were falling on the northern and eastern districts, and by evening the spearheads of the 3rd and 5th Shock Armies and the 2nd Guards Tank Army of Marshal Georgy Zhukov’s 1st Belorussian Front stood on the city limits – in Weißensee, Marzahn and Hohenschönhausen. From the south came the tank armies of Marshal Ivan Konev’s 1st Ukrainian Front, which that day took Zossen, the seat of the Army High Command. Five days after the start of the Berlin offensive, the battle for the city itself was beginning – the last great battle of the war in Europe.

War chronologies sum up this moment in two sentences. Under 19 April one can read that the Soviet march on Berlin continues and “soon reaches the suburbs”; under 21 April, that the forces of Zhukov (1st Belorussian Front), Konstantin Rokossovsky (2nd Belorussian Front) and Konev (1st Ukrainian Front) begin their assault on the German forces “in and around the city”. The picture needs some refinement. On 19 April Zhukov had only just broken through the third line of defence east of the Seelow Heights, and his troops were coming out into open country; they reached the suburbs during the night of 20/21 April and on 21–22 April. Rokossovsky, for his part, fought neither in Berlin nor near it: on 20 April his front forced the lower Oder between Szczecin and Schwedt, more than a hundred kilometres to the north, and tied down the German 3rd Panzer Army there so that it could not come to the capital’s aid. Only Zhukov’s and Konev’s troops entered the city itself.

From the Oder to the suburbs

The Berlin offensive began on 16 April. Zhukov’s attack from the Küstrin bridgehead – the same one created when his troops crossed the Oder at Kienitz in January – stalled on the Seelow Heights, where General Theodor Busse’s 9th Army held out for three days. Zhukov, pressed by Stalin and aware that Konev might beat him to it, threw both his tank armies into the battle before the infantry had opened a way for them, and paid for it with heavy losses. Only on 19 April did the German front crack. The remnants of General Helmuth Weidling’s LVI Panzer Corps fell back on Berlin, and the northern wing of the 9th Army was cut off from its main body.

Konev had an easier start. On 16 April his troops forced the Lusatian Neisse under cover of a smokescreen, broke through the defences of the 4th Panzer Army within two days and reached the Spree. During the night of 17/18 April Stalin agreed that Konev should swing his two tank armies – General Pavel Rybalko’s 3rd Guards and General Dmitry Lelyushenko’s 4th Guards – northwards towards Berlin. Bypassing centres of resistance, the armoured columns covered more than a hundred kilometres in three days. On 20 April, Hitler’s last birthday, Rybalko was outside Zossen, and Lelyushenko was advancing to the west of him towards Potsdam.

Stalin drew a boundary line between the two fronts which ended at Lübben, a few dozen kilometres short of Berlin. He did not say who was to take the city. This race between the two marshals determined the pace and character of the battle: both drove their troops forward regardless of cost, and once inside the city their armies very nearly collided.

The first shells and the first streets

No single moment can be identified as the start of the assault. According to Soviet accounts, the long-range artillery of the 79th Rifle Corps of the 3rd Shock Army fired its first salvoes at Berlin on the afternoon of 20 April. From the morning of 21 April the shelling extended to the city centre: shells fell around the Brandenburg Gate, the Reichstag and the Reich Chancellery. Witnesses in the Führerbunker remembered Hitler, woken by the noise, asking incredulously where the Russian guns were firing from and how close the enemy already was. From then on the artillery fire and air attacks did not let up until the fighting ended.

On land, Zhukov got furthest. On 20 April his troops took Bernau, and during the night and on 21 April General Vasily Kuznetsov’s 3rd Shock Army and General Semyon Bogdanov’s 2nd Guards Tank Army crossed the city boundary from the north-east. In the east, General Nikolai Berzarin’s 5th Shock Army entered Marzahn on 21–22 April and pushed towards Karlshorst – Berzarin soon became the first Soviet commandant of Berlin. From the south-east, General Vasily Chuikov’s 8th Guards Army (PL) and General Mikhail Katukov’s 1st Guards Tank Army were approaching Köpenick, going on to cross the Spree and the Dahme on 22–23 April. The fighting in the first belt of suburbs was for individual housing estates, railway stations and bridges.

Konev’s armoured thrust was just as important. On 21 April Rybalko’s tanks drove into Zossen, where the headquarters of the Army High Command (OKH) was housed in underground bunkers. General Hans Krebs’s staff had managed to leave the day before, but the abandoned communications centres and maps showed how fast the Wehrmacht’s command was collapsing. The next day the 3rd Guards Tank Army reached the Teltow Canal on the southern edge of the city.

A fortress without a garrison

The plan for defending the capital came late. From 6 March the commandant of the Berlin Defence Area was General Hellmuth Reymann, and the basic order for preparing the city’s defence was dated 9 March. It provided for three rings: an outer belt of obstacles a few dozen kilometres from the centre, an outer defence line based on lakes, rivers and canals, and an inner ring along the S-Bahn circle line. The city was divided into eight sectors lettered A to H; in the middle lay sector “Z” – the “Citadel”, with the government quarter. The defence was to be anchored on three reinforced-concrete anti-aircraft towers – the Flaktürme in the Tiergarten, Friedrichshain and Humboldthain – whose guns could also fire at ground targets.

On paper the system looked formidable; in reality there was a shortage of men, weapons and ammunition. Reymann reckoned that he needed at least 200,000 trained soldiers to defend such an area. He had a fraction of that number. Estimates of Berlin’s defenders at the moment of encirclement range from about 60,000 to more than 100,000 men, of whom regular troops were a minority. The rest were police, rear-echelon troops and anti-aircraft crews, and above all the Volkssturm – a levy of men aged 16 to 60 called up by Hitler’s decree in the autumn of 1944. Volkssturm battalions often had one rifle for several men, weapons of many different types and almost no training; their main anti-tank weapon was the Panzerfaust. Alongside them stood boys from the Hitler Youth, mobilised by the organisation’s leader, Artur Axmann. Teenage volunteers with Panzerfausts later defended the bridges over the Havel and the streets of the city centre; many of them were killed in their first engagement.

Political responsibility for the city’s defence lay with Joseph Goebbels, Gauleiter of Berlin and Reich Defence Commissioner for the capital. His quarrels with Reymann – among other things over whether to blow up the bridges on which supplies for the inhabitants depended – weakened preparations that were chaotic enough already. On 22 April Reymann was dismissed and sent to Potsdam.

Weidling’s corps

The only cohesive fighting force that could still make a stand in Berlin was Weidling’s LVI Panzer Corps, battered on the Seelow Heights but still capable of fighting. It comprised, among others, the 9th Parachute Division, the 20th Panzergrenadier Division, the Müncheberg Panzer Division, the 11th SS Panzergrenadier Division Nordland with volunteers from the Scandinavian countries, and the 18th Panzergrenadier Division – in all, by various estimates, between ten and several tens of thousands of men and a few dozen tanks. On 20–21 April the corps fell back through Strausberg and Erkner to the eastern suburbs of Berlin, losing contact both with 9th Army headquarters and with the commander of Army Group Vistula, General Gotthard Heinrici. Heinrici wanted the corps to cover the city from outside and not let itself be shut in. Hitler thought the opposite: Berlin was to be defended to the end, and within a few days Weidling and his divisions had become the core of the capital’s garrison.

A city in the cellars

According to various estimates, between 2.5 and about 3 million people were in Berlin at the time – mostly women, children and the elderly, together with hundreds of thousands of forced labourers and refugees from the east. The authorities ordered no evacuation; leaving the city without permission was forbidden. From 21 April life moved into cellars, shelters and Underground stations. The waterworks and power stations were failing; people queued at street pumps and at shops handing out the last rations, and shells fell on these queues too. Summary courts and SS patrols toured the streets, hanging soldiers and civilians accused of desertion or defeatism from lamp posts. From propaganda and from refugees, the inhabitants already knew of reports of violence by Soviet soldiers in the Reich’s eastern provinces; fear of what would follow once their districts were occupied stayed with them throughout the fighting and – as the following weeks showed – was not unfounded.

On the flanks: Rokossovsky and the Polish Army

Rokossovsky’s 2nd Belorussian Front began its part of the operation on 20 April by forcing the two arms of the Oder between Szczecin and Schwedt. It fought General Hasso von Manteuffel’s 3rd Panzer Army, which as a result could not shift forces southwards. Rokossovsky broke through only on 25 April and then pushed west, towards Mecklenburg and the Baltic – not towards Berlin. To say that three fronts stormed Berlin is therefore a simplification: Rokossovsky’s front covered the assault from the north.

Poles also fought in the operation. General Stanisław Popławski’s Polish 1st Army, part of Zhukov’s front, attacked on his right wing, north of the city, towards Oranienburg and the Elbe; its 1st Tadeusz Kościuszko Infantry Division later joined the fighting in Berlin itself. General Karol Świerczewski’s Polish 2nd Army fought as part of Konev’s front in the direction of Bautzen and Dresden, where from 21 April it beat off a heavy German counter-attack.

What came of it

On 21 April Hitler still believed that the city could be relieved from the troops attacking from the east; that day he ordered a counter-attack from the north by the group under General Felix Steiner, which did not have the strength for it. A day later, when it turned out that the attack had not even started, came Hitler’s famous outburst in the bunker and his decision to remain in Berlin to the end. Meanwhile, on 24 April, Zhukov’s and Konev’s troops met south-east of the city, cutting off the 9th Army, and on 25 April they closed the ring around Berlin from the west. That same day the Americans and the Russians met on the Elbe.

The fighting for the city went on for another ten days. It was waged district by district, with heavy artillery firing over open sights, flamethrowers, and assault groups breaking through the walls of tenement blocks. On 30 April Hitler committed suicide while soldiers of the 3rd Shock Army were storming the Reichstag. On 2 May Weidling surrendered to Chuikov. According to Russian statistical compilations, the whole Berlin offensive cost the three Soviet fronts more than 78,000 killed and missing and more than 270,000 wounded and sick; Polish losses are not included in these figures. German losses and the number of civilian victims of the fighting in Berlin remain the subject of divergent estimates. The assault that began on 21 April ended the war in Europe – a week after the fall of Berlin, Germany signed its unconditional surrender.