The surrender of Berlin

At around 6 a.m. on 2 May 1945 General der Artillerie Helmuth Weidling, commander of the defence of Berlin, crossed the front line with his staff and gave himself up to the Soviets. A few hours later, at the headquarters of General Vasily Chuikov, commander of the 8th Guards Army, he signed an order instructing the capital’s garrison to cease resistance immediately. By evening the fighting in the city had died away. The Battle of Berlin, begun a fortnight earlier on the Oder, was over.

The surrender was preceded by a failed attempt at negotiation. The day before, on 1 May, the Chief of the Army General Staff, General Hans Krebs, spent nearly ten hours talking with Chuikov in an effort to obtain a ceasefire. The talks collapsed because the Soviet side demanded unconditional surrender and Krebs did not have the consent of Joseph Goebbels – the new Reich Chancellor under Hitler’s testament – for such a step. Only Goebbels’s death on the evening of 1 May opened the way for Weidling to surrender the city.

A city in a vice

Since 25 April Berlin had been encircled by the troops of Marshal Georgy Zhukov’s 1st Belorussian Front and Marshal Ivan Konev’s 1st Ukrainian Front. In the last days of April the defenders – the remnants of several Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS divisions, police, Volkssturm and Hitler Youth, several tens of thousands of men in all – were squeezed into a narrow strip running from Alexanderplatz to Charlottenburg and Spandau. The centre, with the Reich Chancellery and Hitler’s bunker, came within range of Soviet small arms. From 29 April fighting raged for the approaches to the Reichstag, and on 30 April the assault on the building began.

Weidling, commander of the LVI Panzer Corps, had been in charge of the defence of Berlin only since 23 April. The day before that, Hitler, convinced that the general had moved his command post westwards without authority, had ordered him to be shot; Weidling reported to the bunker himself to clear up the misunderstanding and came out of it with his appointment. On 30 April he reported to Hitler that the defenders would run out of ammunition that night at the latest. In the afternoon he was given permission to attempt a breakout from the city in small groups. A few hours later Hitler committed suicide.

Under Hitler’s testament, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, who was at Plön in Schleswig-Holstein, became Reich President and Supreme Commander, and Goebbels became Chancellor. Left in the bunker were Goebbels, the head of the Nazi Party Chancellery Martin Bormann, Generals Krebs and Wilhelm Burgdorf, and several hundred soldiers, officials and staff. Goebbels and Bormann decided to try talking to the Russians before passing anything on to Dönitz. They hoped that Moscow would agree to a ceasefire and recognise the new Reich government as a negotiating partner – if only in order to play it off against the Western Allies.

Krebs’s mission (1 May)

The choice fell on Hans Krebs. In the spring of 1941 the general had served as acting military attaché in Moscow, spoke Russian, and was remembered for the moment on 13 April 1941 when Joseph Stalin, seeing off the Japanese Foreign Minister Yōsuke Matsuoka at the railway station, embraced him and assured him that Germans and Russians would remain friends. Late in the evening of 30 April the German side arranged, through emissaries, to cross the front line.

Krebs, accompanied by the chief of staff of the LVI Corps, Colonel Theodor von Dufving, and an interpreter, reached Chuikov’s headquarters on the Schulenburgring in Tempelhof in the early hours of 1 May – at 3.50 a.m., according to Chuikov’s memoirs. He brought a letter signed by Goebbels and Bormann. It announced that Hitler had taken his own life on 30 April, set out the composition of the new government and proposed a ceasefire as a prelude to peace negotiations between Germany and the USSR. Krebs was the first to inform the Soviet side officially of Hitler’s death.

Chuikov immediately telephoned Zhukov, who sent his deputy, General of the Army Vasily Sokolovsky, to Tempelhof and informed Moscow. According to Zhukov’s memoirs, Stalin, woken from sleep, commented on Hitler’s death that the scoundrel had got what was coming to him, and ordered: no negotiations other than on unconditional surrender, neither with Krebs nor with any other Nazis. The same was repeated to Krebs. The general replied that he was not authorised to agree to unconditional surrender and that only the Dönitz government, with which the bunker had no contact, could accept it; he therefore asked for a ceasefire so that the new government could assemble and take a decision. The Russians saw this as playing for time and an attempt to split the coalition.

The talks, interrupted by telephone calls to Front headquarters, dragged on throughout the morning. Dufving returned to the German lines to run a telephone cable to the Reich Chancellery; through it Krebs spoke to Goebbels. At around 1 p.m. he left Chuikov’s headquarters with the Soviet demand for unconditional surrender – and without an agreement.

Goebbels’s “no” and the night of the breakout

In the bunker Goebbels rejected the Soviet terms. In his own appendix to Hitler’s testament he had declared that he would not leave Berlin, and he had no intention of signing an unconditional surrender. In the evening the German refusal reached Chuikov’s headquarters, and according to Soviet accounts the artillery resumed its massive bombardment of the government quarter at around 6.30 p.m. Shortly afterwards Goebbels and his wife Magda poisoned their six children and took their own lives in the Chancellery garden.

Weidling, who had spent the whole day waiting for the outcome of the talks, concluded that further resistance was pointless. Formally he was no longer bound by anyone’s orders: Hitler and Goebbels were dead, and there was no contact with Dönitz. First, however, in line with the permission given on 30 April, he allowed those units that wished to do so to attempt to break out of the city. At around 11 p.m. groups led by SS-Brigadeführer Wilhelm Mohnke set out from the Reich Chancellery – with them Bormann and the rest of the people from the bunker. Krebs and Burgdorf stayed behind and shot themselves during the night. Other columns, with soldiers, civilians and tanks, forced their way west across the bridges over the Havel near Spandau. Few reached the Elbe; most were killed or captured. The number of those who died that night remains unknown.

Earlier, the two strongpoints that were hardest to take had surrendered. On the afternoon of 1 May the garrison of the Spandau Citadel capitulated to the 47th Army, and the garrison of the concrete flak tower by the zoo agreed to lay down its arms at midnight, so that some of its men could first attempt a breakout.

Weidling at Chuikov’s headquarters (2 May)

At around 1 a.m. on 2 May the Soviet 79th Guards Rifle Division intercepted a radio message sent in Russian by the LVI Panzer Corps: the Germans were asking for a ceasefire and announcing that they would send emissaries with a white flag to the Potsdam Bridge over the Landwehr Canal. Dufving came and confirmed Weidling’s readiness to surrender. At around 6 a.m. Weidling himself, with a few staff officers, crossed the front line and gave himself up.

He was brought to Chuikov’s headquarters after 8 a.m. According to a record of the conversation cited in the literature, Chuikov asked whether he was facing the commander of the Berlin garrison, and Weidling, as if out of habit, replied that he was the commander of the LVI Panzer Corps. Sokolovsky was present at the conversation. At their dictation Weidling agreed to the unconditional surrender of the garrison and wrote out an order to his soldiers. In it he wrote that on 30 April the Führer had taken his own life and thereby abandoned those who had sworn an oath to him; that every hour of fighting prolonged the terrible suffering of Berlin’s civilian population and of the wounded; and that, in agreement with the high command of the Soviet forces, he called for an immediate end to the fighting.

The order was copied, and German officers accompanied by Soviet ones drove it round the city and read it out through loudspeakers mounted on vehicles. In parallel, during the night of 1–2 May, Hans Fritzsche, a senior official of the propaganda ministry, approached the Soviet side, offered surrender on behalf of the civil authorities and likewise recorded an appeal to the inhabitants and soldiers. It was accepted without any conditions.

Resistance did not end at once. Some units, especially of the SS, did not believe the order or did not know of it; in the Tiergarten, around the Zoo station and in individual buildings shooting went on for several more hours, and the Russians used their guns to demolish houses from which shots were fired. In the morning the garrison of the Reichstag cellars was disarmed; the Soviet banner had already been flying over the building for two days. At around 3 p.m. the fighting in the city centre stopped. Early that morning, in the Tiergarten, soldiers of the Polish 1st “Kościuszko” Infantry Division had planted the white-and-red flag on the Victory Column.

According to Soviet figures, more than 70,000 people were taken prisoner in Berlin on 2 May alone, and about 134,000 in all since 24 April. Historians note that these figures are inflated: the Russians detained everyone in uniform, including firemen, railwaymen, police officers and members of the Volkssturm. In the evening Moscow celebrated the capture of Berlin with an order of the day from Stalin and artillery salutes; the Medal “For the Capture of Berlin”, instituted later, was awarded to more than a million soldiers.

The inhabitants of a conquered city

When the shooting died down, civilians began to emerge from cellars and shelters. In April 1945 some 2.5–3 million people were still living in Berlin, most of them women, children and the elderly, together with hundreds of thousands of forced labourers and prisoners of war from all over Europe. For two weeks they had lived without electricity, gas or running water, under artillery fire. The number of civilians killed in the fighting in the city is not known; estimates usually range from about 10,000 to more than 20,000. Many Berliners, especially in the last days, took their own lives.

The city centre lay in ruins – the destruction wrought by Allied air raids had been completed by Soviet artillery, which in two weeks poured more explosives into the city than the bombers had done before. The water supply, sewers, public transport and hospitals were not functioning, or not fully; the bridges over the Spree and the canals had been blown up.

The capture of the city was accompanied by mass violence on the part of Red Army soldiers: looting, killings and, above all, rape. Historians, drawing on Berlin hospital records and birth statistics among other sources, usually estimate the number of women raped in Berlin at about 95,000–130,000; some studies give higher or lower figures, and for eastern Germany as a whole hundreds of thousands are spoken of, though such estimates are highly uncertain. Many victims died or took their own lives. Liberated female forced labourers from Poland and the USSR were also subjected to violence. One testimony to those weeks is the anonymous diary of a Berlin woman later published as A Woman in Berlin. The Soviet command began to curb these crimes only after several weeks.

At the same time the Soviet authorities set about getting the city running again. Since 24 April the commandant of Berlin had been General Nikolai Berzarin, commander of the 5th Shock Army. His orders dissolved the Nazi Party and its organisations and required weapons to be handed in, while also organising food distribution, the repair of the waterworks and power stations, and the reopening of bakeries. Army field kitchens fed hungry inhabitants. As early as 30 April a group of German Communists under Walter Ulbricht flew in from Moscow to Brandenburg and began forming new municipal authorities subordinate to the Russians. Berzarin was killed in a motorcycle accident in Berlin on 16 June 1945.

Misconceptions and clarifications

Contrary to common shorthand, Krebs did not negotiate the surrender of Berlin on 1 May. His mission, sent by Goebbels and Bormann, was meant to obtain a ceasefire and recognition of the new Reich government – and the talks failed not only because the general lacked full powers, but above all because Moscow would agree to nothing short of unconditional surrender, and Goebbels refused it. Weidling’s surrender of 2 May applied to the Berlin garrison, not to Germany as a whole; German forces outside the capital fought on.

What the surrender of Berlin brought

The fall of Berlin ended the Berlin operation – the last great battle of the war in Europe. According to figures based on Soviet archives, the three Soviet fronts lost more than 78,000 killed and missing and more than 270,000 wounded and sick between 16 April and 8 May; the two armies of the Polish Army that took part in the operation also suffered heavy losses. German losses, military and civilian, are much harder to establish.

The Dönitz government no longer had a capital, and its only real policy became delaying the surrender in the east so that as many soldiers and refugees as possible could get through to the West. Over the following days one German army and region after another capitulated, and on 7 and 8 May, at Reims and at Berlin-Karlshorst, Germany’s unconditional surrender was signed. The war in Europe ended six days after the surrender of the Berlin garrison.

Weidling went into Soviet captivity, from which he never returned. For two months Berlin remained solely in Soviet hands; only at the beginning of July 1945 did American and British troops, and later French ones, enter the sectors assigned to them. In the USSR the capture of the Reich capital became one of the pillars of the legend of victory; in Poland, a source of memory of Polish soldiers’ part in the last battle of the war; and for the Germans, the beginning of “zero hour”. The divided city was soon to become one of the main flashpoints of the Cold War.