Battle of Berlin (1945): The Fall of the Third Reich's Capital

The Battle of Berlin was the final major offensive of the Second World War in Europe, fought between the Soviet Red Army and the remnants of the German armed forces from 16 April to 2 May 1945. It ended with the capture of the Nazi capital, the suicide of Adolf Hitler and, within days, the unconditional surrender of Germany.

It was also one of the largest and most destructive battles of the war. Millions of soldiers took part, the city was reduced to ruins, and its civilians endured bombardment, hunger and widespread violence at the hands of the victors.

Background

By early 1945 Germany was losing on every front. The Soviet Vistula–Oder offensive of January and February 1945 had carried the Red Army across Poland to the Oder River, around 70 km east of Berlin. In the west, British, American and Canadian forces crossed the Rhine in March and pushed deep into Germany.

At the Yalta Conference the Allies had already agreed that Berlin would lie inside the Soviet zone of occupation and be governed jointly. In late March, General Dwight D. Eisenhower informed Stalin directly that the Western Allies would concentrate on other objectives rather than race for the capital.

Stalin nevertheless feared that the Western powers might try to reach Berlin first. He ordered his two leading commanders, Marshal Georgy Zhukov of the 1st Belorussian Front and Marshal Ivan Konev of the 1st Ukrainian Front, to prepare an offensive as quickly as possible, deliberately encouraging rivalry between them.

Hitler had returned to Berlin from his western headquarters in January 1945 and directed the war from the Reich Chancellery and its underground bunker. He refused to leave the capital, and the city was declared a fortress to be defended to the last. Its defences, however, had been prepared late and were incomplete, consisting largely of trenches, roadblocks and anti-tank ditches dug by civilians and forced labourers.

The forces

The Soviet Berlin Strategic Offensive Operation brought together about 2.5 million troops, more than 6,000 tanks and self-propelled guns, roughly 7,500 aircraft and over 40,000 guns and mortars. Polish forces of the 1st and 2nd Polish Armies fought alongside the Red Army. Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky’s 2nd Belorussian Front attacked further north.

Germany’s defence of the Oder was entrusted to Army Group Vistula under General Gotthard Heinrici, a skilled defensive commander. His forces were badly under-strength, short of fuel and ammunition, and filled out with inexperienced recruits. Inside Berlin, the garrison included regular troops, Waffen-SS units, police and thousands of poorly armed Volkssturm militia and Hitler Youth boys.

The Seelow Heights and the encirclement

The offensive opened before dawn on 16 April 1945 with a massive artillery barrage. Zhukov attacked straight towards Berlin across the Oder, aiming at the Seelow Heights, a ridge overlooking the river marshes. Heinrici had pulled his troops back from the front line just before the bombardment, and the attackers met fierce resistance. Searchlights meant to dazzle the defenders instead silhouetted Soviet troops and blinded their own men in the smoke.

It took Zhukov three days and very heavy losses to break through. Konev, attacking further south across the Neisse, made faster progress, and Stalin allowed him to turn his tank armies north towards Berlin. On 20 April, Hitler’s 56th birthday, Soviet long-range artillery began shelling the city.

By 25 April the two Soviet fronts had completed the encirclement of Berlin. On the same day, Soviet and American troops met on the Elbe River at Torgau, cutting Germany in two. A German attempt to break the ring by General Walther Wenck’s 12th Army got no closer than the area around Potsdam, while the German 9th Army was largely destroyed in the Halbe pocket south-east of the city.

Street fighting and the Reichstag

Inside Berlin, the defence was commanded from 23 April by General Helmuth Weidling. Soviet assault groups fought their way through the suburbs street by street, using tanks, flamethrowers and artillery firing at point-blank range. German defenders used anti-tank weapons called Panzerfausts to ambush tanks in narrow streets.

Hitler remained in the Führerbunker beneath the Reich Chancellery, issuing orders to armies that no longer existed. On 29 April he married Eva Braun and dictated his political testament, naming Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz as his successor as head of state. On 30 April, with Soviet troops a few hundred metres away, he and Braun killed themselves. The circumstances are covered in Death of Hitler.

For the Soviet leadership, the main symbolic target was the Reichstag, the old parliament building. Soldiers of the 3rd Shock Army stormed it on 30 April after crossing the Spree at the Moltke Bridge. Fighting continued inside the building, room by room, until 2 May. Soviet records credit the sergeants Mikhail Yegorov and Meliton Kantaria with raising the official victory banner on the roof.

Surrender

After Hitler’s death, General Hans Krebs tried to negotiate terms with the Soviet commander General Vasily Chuikov on 1 May, but the Soviets demanded unconditional surrender. Krebs and Joseph Goebbels, who had stayed in the bunker, killed themselves.

Early on 2 May 1945 Weidling surrendered to Chuikov and ordered the garrison to stop fighting. Some groups tried to break out westward, and isolated resistance continued briefly, but Berlin was in Soviet hands. On the same day, soldiers of the Polish 1st Infantry Division, who had fought through the Tiergarten park, raised the Polish flag on the Victory Column.

Throughout the battle, most Berliners had lived in cellars and air-raid shelters with little food or water. Huge concrete flak towers, such as the one at the Zoo, sheltered thousands of civilians alongside their anti-aircraft guns. On 2 May part of the north–south S-Bahn railway tunnel, used as a shelter and field hospital, was flooded when its roof was blown up; the number of victims has never been established.

Germany’s unconditional surrender followed on 7 and 8 May, marked in the West as VE Day.

Key people

Georgy Zhukov, the Soviet Union’s most prominent commander, led the main assault and later accepted the German surrender in Berlin. Ivan Konev, his rival, drove into the city from the south.

Gotthard Heinrici conducted a skilful but hopeless defence of the Oder line and was dismissed in the final days for disobeying orders. Helmuth Weidling commanded the city’s defence and surrendered it; he died in Soviet captivity in 1955.

Vasily Chuikov, the defender of Stalingrad, led the 8th Guards Army into central Berlin and received the city’s surrender, a symbolic link with the Battle of Stalingrad.

Casualties and consequences

Figures for the battle vary, especially for German losses, which were never fully recorded.

The fall of the city was accompanied by looting and by mass rape of women by Soviet soldiers. Estimates for Berlin alone range from about 95,000 to 130,000 victims, though precise numbers can never be known. Many women died, including by suicide.

Berlin was left largely in ruins, without water, power or transport. The first Soviet commandant of the city, General Nikolai Berzarin, organised food rations and the restoration of basic services before he was killed in a motorcycle accident in June 1945. Much of the rubble was cleared by hand, often by women known as Trümmerfrauen, or rubble women.

Politically, the Soviet authorities moved quickly. A group of German communists who had spent the war in Moscow, led by Walter Ulbricht, arrived on 30 April to begin building a new administration under Soviet control, months before the Western Allies arrived. In July 1945 British, American and later French forces took over their sectors of the city as agreed. The division of Berlin became a central issue of the Cold War, leading to the Berlin Airlift of 1948–1949 and the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961.

The Reichstag photograph

On 2 May the Soviet photographer Yevgeny Khaldei photographed soldiers raising a Soviet flag on the roof of the Reichstag. The picture was a re-enactment of the earlier flag raisings, taken after the building had been secured. Before publication it was edited, including the removal of a second wristwatch from one soldier’s wrist, which could have suggested looting, and smoke was later added to darken the sky.

Despite this, the photograph became the defining Soviet image of victory, much as Joe Rosenthal’s picture from the Battle of Iwo Jima did in the United States.

Timeline

• 1945, 16 April: The Soviet offensive opens on the Oder and Neisse rivers.
• 1945, 19 April: Zhukov’s forces break through at the Seelow Heights.
• 1945, 20 April: Soviet artillery begins shelling Berlin.
• 1945, 25 April: Berlin is encircled; Soviet and US troops meet at Torgau.
• 1945, 30 April: Hitler kills himself; Soviet troops storm the Reichstag.
• 1945, 1 May: Surrender talks fail; Goebbels kills himself.
• 1945, 2 May: General Weidling surrenders the Berlin garrison.

Why it matters

The Battle of Berlin destroyed the last centre of Nazi power and brought the war in Europe to an end. It confirmed the Soviet Union as the dominant military power in Central Europe and left the German capital divided, setting the stage for more than four decades of Cold War confrontation in the heart of Europe.