Battle Of Berlin: The Final Collapse Of Hitler’s Defenses

In May 1945, the last battle of World War II was drawing to a terrifying conclusion. This, the most titanic of all conflicts, was certainly not about to end with a whimper. Although all hope of victory was long gone, the bitter fighting in the battle for Berlin would witness the frantic death throes of a desperate regime. These were the last acts of the greatest war in the history of mankind. This was Hitler's long-promised Gotterdammerung, the twilight of the gods. Those gods would witness the agony of a city sacrificed to make a dramatic exit for one man. Hitler was determined that if the war was going to be lost by Germany, that by virtue of having not proven their right to success, the German people should be dragged down with him in flames. So Hitler was determined that the war should be fought right to the bitter end. And if that meant the destruction of Berlin, if it meant the destruction of the German people, as well as himself, then so be it. Although they faced a number of insurmountable difficulties in supply and materials, the German forces fighting to defend Berlin prepared to do their duty with great courage and thoroughness. The east side of Berlin was strongly fortified by the German forces, In the city itself, every street was to be turned into a strong point. Hitler had hoped to turn Berlin into a fortress. Ringed around the city were three structures which harked back to the medieval castles of old. These were the flak towers, three huge concrete castles, with walls so thick that not even the heaviest artillery shells could penetrate. The first was located just off the Brunnenstrasse in the north of the city, and was known as the Humboldthain Tower. The second was just to the east of the city centre on Landsberger Allee, and the third was in the southwest of the city at the Berlin Zoo. Their real purpose was to serve as anti-aircraft gun platforms to protect the city against the frequent Allied bombing raids. Each of the enormous gun towers had a satellite tower a short distance away for the artillery observers to control the anti-aircraft fire. Now, with the Soviet forces beginning to encroach on Berlin itself, they were to become a vital part of the defence ring hastily thrown up around the city. These defences were designed to protect the heart of the Nazi regime, located in a bunker close to the Chancellery building on Wilhelmstrasse. Nearby were the city landmarks at the Brandenburg Gate on the Unter den Linden, and the Reichstag on Konigsplatz. All of these sites were to see savage fighting in the coming battle. These makeshift defences would take an enormous toll of casualties from the Soviet forces. It would cost the Red Army 333,000 casualties before they finally clawed their way into the Reichstag. In late 1944, with the tide of World War II running inexorably against Germany, Hitler's thousand-year Reich had already been brought to its knees, and it seemed there was a very real prospect of an end to the conflict before the end of the year. Germany in late 1944 had not the slightest prospect of victory. The very best the Germans could have achieved by December 1944 was to stave off an inevitable defeat by a few more months. The last hope that Hitler has is that the Americans and British coming from the west will reach the river Elbe, and when they meet up with the Russians, will get into some fight with the Russians, and the Americans and British will join with the Germans, and they will all jointly come together and drive the Judeo-Bolshevik menace back into Asia. From the skies over Germany, the Third Reich was experiencing destruction from the air on a scale never before experienced by any nation at war. Hundreds of thousands of German civilians had perished in a series of raids which devastated German cities. On land too, the noose around Germany was tightening. In the west, the Allies had at last established the long-awaited Second Front. But it was in the east, in the cauldron of the Russian Front, that the events of World War II would be decided. By October 1944, the German Army Group besieging Leningrad had been driven back, and was now trapped in the Kurland bridgehead. Following the success of Operation Begration, the great offensive against Army Group Centre, Russian armies were already on the border of Poland. In the southern sector, an unremitting pattern of defeat and retreat had seen the German forces driven back from Kharkov to the Balkans. 1944 had been a year of absolute catastrophe for the German armies in the east. Starting at the very beginning of the year, the Soviets embarked on a series of 10 interlinked operational offensives that together drove the Germans back from outside the gates of Leningrad, right inside the Soviet Union, all the way back to within a few hundred miles of Berlin. The situation in 1944 in the east looked catastrophic and was catastrophic. They had lost Army Group Centre. Army Group North was breaking up very rapidly. Army Group South was desperately trying to hold onto the remnants of Soviet territory in the Ukraine. So the German army was on the run. Faced with disaster on this scale, the logical scenario would have been a German capitulation. In fact, the surviving German armies continued to offer dogged resistance to the very last days of the war. By and large, whenever the Soviets attacked, the Germans were able to give them a good thrashing on the tactical level. But the problem is, one, there are a lot more Soviet soldiers and Stalin is not even close to running out of people. And two, in order to achieve these wonderful tactical victories, the Germans are continually pulling back towards Germany. Discover the past with exclusive military history documentaries and ad-free podcasts presented by world-renowned historians, all on History Hit. Watch them on your smart TV or on the go with your mobile device. Download the app now to watch everything, from the gripping story of the Band of Brothers to Operation Barbarossa and D-Day. Immerse yourself in the dramatic stories of this remarkable era by signing up via the link in the description. The effect of the military defeats of 1944 on Hitler were catastrophic. He began to hide himself away in his headquarters, unable to face the hollowness of his earlier boasts. Hitler found the psychological blows too great to rationalize. In January and February 1945, Hitler entirely discounted the fact that the Red Army itself was about to launch a major offensive into Germany. He dismissed this as fantasy and babbling and ridiculous. Hitler was, I think, absolutely exhausted. He was also a very ill man. In fact, some people would argue that, mentally, he had been ill perhaps ever since he came to power, if not before. I think, however, having said this, that it's clear that Hitler's behavior during that last month of the war was an extreme mixture. On occasions, he would rant and rave and blame his inferiors and the German people generally for the disaster which seemed to have befallen Nazi Germany. But on other occasions, he seems to have behaved in a very rational, calm, calculated fashion. Ranged against the crumbling German armies was the immense strength of the Red Army and the revitalized Russian Air Force. From the Soviet point of view, this was meant to be the mother of all battles, and it really was. I mean, it was meant to be a stage, if you like, or a staging of a massive sense of Soviet military superiority and indeed the intention of not only the Red Army but the Soviet government and the Russian people and others actually to enter Berlin and make it their own. By now, the German army was massively outnumbered and the best estimates are that they possessed one tank for every 16 which the Russians could put into battle. It's been estimated that against the one million men Hitler could deploy, some five million Russians could be deployed for the Battle of Berlin. While the Western Allies concentrated on the strategic bombing campaign against German cities, the huge Russian bomber force was deployed against military targets. By late 1944, wave after wave of fighter bombers flying overhead made it very difficult for German forces to move off the ground. We know something of the number of sorties that the Germans and the Russians were able to put up over Berlin during the Battle for Berlin. It was 12,000 per day for the Russians. It was 1,000 per day for the Germans. So in terms of actual fighting machines in the air over Berlin, it was a ratio of 12 to 1. The final assault on Germany itself began at the southern end of the front on 12 January 1945, when the massed tanks and infantry of the 1st Ukrainian Front under Marshal Konev moved against the German lines. The advance of the 1st Ukrainian Front swept through Poland and saw the Russian armies on the border with Czechoslovakia by the end of March. To their north, the 1st Belorussian Front under Zhukov swept aside the newly formed German Army Group A, and by the end of March, Zhukov's troops were positioned at Kustrin, only 50 miles from Hitler's capital. Further north still, the last remnants of Army Group Centre were trapped in a huge pocket centred around Konigsberg by the combined forces of the 2nd and 3rd Belorussian Fronts, advancing from north of Warsaw and Lithuania. The ragbag of forces fighting under SS Commander Himmler, known as Army Group Vistula, were also thrown back by the advancing Red Army. The enormous sacrifices which were made by men fighting in what were obviously lost causes, was justified by both the men and their commanders on the grounds that the continued resistance against the Soviet thrusts had allowed thousands of refugees to escape from the terror of the Red Army advance. Looked at from the point of view of a German citizen, or even a German soldier in Berlin, in, let us say, March, April 1945, when they had seen the scope and scale and size of the Soviet advance through East Prussia, and they had seen what happened to German territories, then I think there was considerable understanding that it was absolutely essential, as far as possible, wherever possible, to hold off the Soviet advance. That was their motivation. As they advanced into Germany, the Red Army had the opportunity to demonstrate that the forces of barbarism could be replaced by humanity. They chose instead to behave in a manner which aped the vile excesses of the regime against which they fought. From June 1941, when Operation Barbarossa began, the invasion of the Soviet Union, the Germans had treated both captured Red Army personnel and the civilian population of the occupied Soviet Union with a mixture of enormous brutality, deliberate brutality, and neglect. By 1945 and the Battle for Berlin, it's reckoned that well over 20 million Soviet citizens had died, maybe even more than that. Hardly surprisingly, therefore, the Red Army that was accelerating its drive into the heart of Germany was absolutely determined to repay the Germans for the terror and the suffering on a massive and deliberate scale that the Germans had inflicted upon the Soviet people. In the face of Red Army retribution, the will to resist remained, and in many cases, German resistance actually began to increase. There were even successful counterattacks, which revealed to the Germans the level of their resistance and the level of horrors which awaited them. This footage, taken at a town recaptured from the Russians, shows evidence of atrocities committed while the town was briefly in Russian hands. All that remained for the ordinary German citizen was to wait for the Red Army to regroup and gather its huge strength for the final assault on Berlin. The grim joke began to do the rounds of the war-torn streets of Berlin. Enjoy the war while you can, because the peace will be terrible. Faced with a doomsday scenario, organised German resistance continued, and the final Soviet drive for Berlin could not begin in earnest until April 16th, 1945. To the north-east of the city, Marshal Zhukov, with the 1st Belorussian Front, is going to attack directly out of the Kurshtyn bridgehead, just across the Oder, and then drive across the Zelo Heights and drive into Berlin from the north. And the 1st Belorussian Army has actually been given the honour of capturing Berlin by Stalin. Now, to the south-east, on the confluence, or at the confluence of the Oder and the Neisse, there was Marshal Konev's 1st Ukrainian Front. His job is to actually cross the Oder-Neisse line, to then advance due west, and then swing north, take Zilsen, which is the German military headquarters, but not to enter the city, not to actually engage in a battle for the city. The Red Army's offensive that led to the fall of Berlin was really made up of three separate phases. In the first, which lasted between the 16th and 18th of April, the Soviets fought a bitter breakthrough battle in order to penetrate the main belt of German defences on the rivers Oder and Neisse. After that, however, having broken through, the next or second phase of the operation really consists of deep, armour-spearheaded drives to encircle Berlin, which happens by the 25th of April. And after that, the third phase really involves the physical destruction of the remaining German forces within the city of Berlin itself. Even if they'd wanted to, the Berliners simply could not hoist the white flag and surrender. People forget it was Hitler who was in control in Berlin, and he gave the orders for the defence, and he demanded this, and he demanded that. So the question of the relevance of the defence of Berlin has really got to be decided in those terms. And it was ultimately a battle which was fought virtually to the last bullet and almost to the last gasp. The German forces, which were still in the field, were determined to fight to the very last. So the closing battles of the war were as hotly contested as anything which had gone before. 55 years on from the events of the battle, Herr Olek recalls the fighting on the outskirts of Berlin. ...shooting at people in order to preserve themselves. That is a process which they consciously do not experience, which they experience only afterwards. And when the comrades fall next to them, and they are 17 years old, and are directly confronted with this war event, directly confronted, then that changes the mentality. There were still substantial Wehrmacht elements who fought to the bitter end, but they were now augmented by the men of the Volkssturm battalions. The Volkssturm was the absolute dregs of the German recruiting pool. And what they're doing to create the Volkssturm is the Nazi party is getting pensioners, many of whom had First World War service, and not putting uniforms on them. You put a white armband on, they give him an old rifle and a few rounds, and they say, the Russians are coming, point your rifle that way and start shooting. It's a home guard, a dad's army. And the idea is that these Volkssturm soldiers will actually be used when the enemies, when the Western Allies or the Russians reach their own villages or their own cities, that they will fight in their own localities, places they know well and places that they care about. Now, what actually happens is that the Volkssturm are used as replacements for regular divisions. And so that by April 1945, a large part, for example, of Heinrich's army group Vistula is in fact composed of Volkssturm. Before they were swept aside, the men of the Volkssturm had become highly proficient in the use of the Panzerfaust, which was an anti-tank weapon of deadly effectiveness at short range. One additional obstacle, which the Russians had to overcome, were the wrecks of their own tanks, which frequently formed a convenient barricade across many of the streets where they'd come to grief against these handheld rockets, which made the humble infantryman the equal of the mighty T-34 tank. The German tank formations had been largely destroyed, but in the rubble-strewn streets of the German towns and cities, tank-hunting teams could get to close quarters. And the Panzerfausts claimed hundreds of Russian tanks, which were destroyed at close range by desperate men fighting in their own city. There were other occasions where the Volkssturm proved less than resolute, as Herr Olek recalls. Hitler had by now become mesmerized by the arrows on the situation map in the bunker. Reduced to clutching at straws, he began to believe, once again, that the flags on the map represented Hitler, as things get worse, is ordering army groups to do things that the army groups can't do because it's no longer really an army group. The army group consists, you know, of six-boy scouts and a Swiss army knife instead of thousands and thousands of Aryan soldiers with their bond hair streaming in the breeze as they advance into Russia. And so Hitler starts to issue orders that have no relationship to reality. In particular, Hitler began to believe that Steiner's 11th Army could somehow link up with the surviving German forces north of Berlin and strike a decisive blow against the Russians. In reality, the grand-sounding title of army was illusory. The ragbag of forces at Steiner's disposal could only be described as an army in the deranged mind of Adolf Hitler. In fact, the depleted forces available to the German commanders still fighting on the outskirts of the city had no real prospect of halting the Soviet advance, nevermind any question of reversing the tide. The battered German defenders had managed to mount a spirited defense on the silo heights to the east of Berlin. But the Soviet juggernaut, in the form of devastating massed artillery attacks, made the position untenable. The Seelau Heights mark the western limit of the valley or floodplain of the River Oder. On the Seelau Heights itself, the Germans had perhaps some of their best military units, specifically the 56th Panzer Corps, which by German standards in 1945 wasn't a badly equipped unit. This was because the main road from Küstrin via Seelau to Berlin ran through this area. So the Germans were keen to try to deny the Soviets the best possible access for moving towards Berlin quickly. So not surprisingly, the fighting on the Seelau Heights, which is a fairly low escarpment, is extremely bitter. What happened is that at four o'clock in the morning on the 16th of April, 1945, Zhukov's attack went in. 10,000 guns opened up. It was the most concentrated artillery barrage in history. And then the Soviets attacked. Their shock formations went in first. The Soviets believed that nothing would actually have survived the immense artillery barrage. Very quickly, things started going wrong. Tanks bogged down. Troops began floundering around in the mud. And then suddenly, a devastating fire opened up from the heights. And it was a massacre. We're talking about, by midday on the 16th of April, we're talking about 30,000 Soviet casualties piled up in the area between these low sandy ridges and the Oder River. The Soviets do manage to fight their way up the Seelau Heights, but they take a lot of losses. It takes a lot of time. And the Soviets end up blaming this on tough German defenders. The reality is that the Seelau Heights were hard to take because the Soviets hadn't done their ground analysis in advance. With the last natural obstacle against a Russian advance neutralized, the Soviets could now advance on the city itself. Despite the best efforts of hard-pressed men like Herr Ohlik, the noose was tightening. Against this gloomy scenario, Hitler hung on to the hope of relief by General Henrizzi. But Henrizzi was no fool. He knew a lost cause when he saw one. As the commander of Army Group Weichsel, Colonel General Gertrard Henrizzi had the responsibility essentially for the defense of Berlin. However, Henrizzi was absolutely determined that if he could possibly help doing so, he would not fight a battle within Berlin itself. Now, Henrizzi had a weak command, but he was very good at his job. The biggest problem he had was he was one of the only senior German officers operating in the Berlin area who actually knew, actually understood, and believed how badly off the Germans were. And he tried very hard to tempt the Soviets not to drive into Berlin, but to go around Berlin in the hopes that when the inevitable defeat came, the city of Berlin and its population might not be as badly damaged as they would be if the Soviets actually fought their way into the center. In order to prevent needless bloodshed in final, pointless gestures, Henrizzi moved his army away from the beleaguered city, leaving Hitler to fume in his lair. Matters took a further turn for the worse when Steiner's 11th Army was brushed aside to allow the Russians to complete the encirclement of Berlin. By April the 22nd, Russian troops were fighting on the streets of the German capital. Both sides knew the insanity was surely about to end. But in the unconquered portions of the city, the street warfare raged on as bitterly as ever. Any prospect of a wholesale evacuation for the Führer and his entourage had now disappeared. And a radio broadcast on April the 22nd announced that the Führer would stay in his capital to the very last. The cumulative effect of years of Allied bombing and the devastation caused by the heavy Russian artillery barrage had created a wilderness of rubble full of ready-made strong points, which naturally favored the defender. The street fighting in Berlin is not to be compared with the Battle of Stalingrad. Stalingrad is a real battle. The battle for Berlin is actually conducted at a much smaller scale. By saying that, I'm not saying that it was not bloody. It was exceptionally bloody. But the Germans simply had not faced the fact that they were going to have to fight in Berlin until very, very late in the day. And as a result, the Battle of Berlin was over in a matter of a week. Similarities between Berlin and Stalingrad are that there is a lot of artillery preparation of the battlefield before people go through. And as a result, there is a lot of rubble to fight in, and that makes defense easier. But the Soviets are getting used to fighting through rubble. They fought through rubble at Stalingrad. Chuikov, who was the Soviet commander at Stalingrad, is a Soviet commander in Berlin as well. He knows how to fight through rubble, so it's not a big obstacle to the Soviets as they attack. In addition, in many places, the Soviets were able to infiltrate not just above ground, but also underground, because there was an underground railway system in Berlin. And the Soviet troops are sometimes able to go through these or through the sewers in order to go around, or more literally, underneath centers of German resistance and to emerge further in the city. In other words, bypassing these centers of resistance and going for the main target, which is the Reichstag, right in the heart of the Zitterdau, the final defensive zone within Berlin. The final Russian assault on Berlin began on April the 26th. It was preceded by very heavy air attacks and, as always, a thunderous artillery barrage. It was now that the battles for the Flak Towers began. Among the last defenders was Herr Olek, who had retreated with the survivors of his unit to the Humboldthain Flak Tower, housing 30,000 terrified civilians in addition to the military garrison. He always said, clack, clack. It was as if they were knocking on a door. The Red Army had noticed that it was not to be done. So they fired 15-centimeter howitzers And they had direct fire on the tower. That brought about such small concrete holes. Then there was another night attack with tanks. They always hoped, they knew that we were stacked in trenches around this tower in trenches. They attacked and we sought protection and lay down on the fallen comrades and defended this attack. And then the next morning we were allowed to see the Soviet corpses hanging over the tomb walls. While Herr Olek and his colleagues were fighting their desperate battles, Hitler remained in his bunker. On the night of April the 28th, with the Russian forces grinding ever closer to his headquarters, Hitler married his mistress, Eva Braun. After the wedding meal, he retired to write his last will and testament. He defiantly reaffirmed his belief in Lebensraum and indulged in one last vitriolic attack on the Jewish race. On April the 28th, his morale plunges because news comes from Italy that Mussolini and his mistress, Clara Petacci, had been arrested. And then even worse news comes, that they had been strung up, upside down, murdered in a Milan square. On the afternoon of April the 30th, having made his farewells, he poisoned his wife and his dog and then shot himself. Hitler was really worried that if he was captured by the Soviets or, indeed, by his own people, they would hang him up for the meat hook. And Hitler was very concerned that he not be captured alive or dead by the Soviets. So is Hitler remotely interested in going out and standing beside his people and dying beside them like a German? Not at all. Hitler does not think along those lines. And Hitler, therefore, does not share his people's risks. He sits in a hardened bunker and he preserves his own life until he's sure that it's all up. And then he ends his own life after arranging that his body will be destroyed so that it's not hung up on a meat hook like Benito Mussolini's. When we heard that the Führer and Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler had fallen on the front line for the fatherland, we said, thank God, the war is over. That was our impulse. We did not regret that he was no longer alive. We did not know if he had taken his life, but I could not imagine that he had fought. But we were actually relieved. We had known for weeks that the war was no longer to be saved. And then you'd rather get out of there alive than to die in the end. On the same evening that Hitler committed suicide, the last battle was raging for the Reichstag. The indomitable defenders had bricked up the windows and doors and now made a desperate last stand, which had to be overcome room by room. With the Germans inside still resisting, Sergeants Yagurov and Kantaria planted the victory banner of the Soviet flag on the Reichstag at 22.50 hours. It symbolized the triumph of the Soviet Union over Nazi Germany, but it still remained a symbolic act. Despite all the enormous difficulties under which they now labored, the logistical services of the German armed forces continued to produce minor miracles of supply, which allowed some fairly formidable formations to enter the final battle for Berlin. Among them was the 503rd Heavy Tank Battalion, equipped with the mighty King Tiger tank. These impressive machines fought alongside the 11th SS Division Nordland, and even more remarkably, alongside a battalion of French volunteers, which had formed a part of the Charlemagne Division. On April the 25th, there were still 300 men available for combat in the French Volunteer Battalion. Together, these two formations played a key role in the defense of the government buildings in the center of Berlin. In many respects, the Frenchmen had nothing to lose, and there was even less at stake for their German masters. Non-German units made up a tiny minority of the defenders of Berlin. There were perhaps three or four thousand of them, mainly Norwegians, Danes, a few hundred Latvians, and a few hundred Frenchmen. These were almost entirely members of the Waffen-SS. However, although they only made up perhaps three or four percent of Berlin's defending strength, they had a disproportionate role in the defense of that city. Because they tended to be in elite, regular units, they were well-equipped, and they were ideologically committed. So they fight extremely hard during the battle for Berlin. Not least because, of course, they're well aware that should they be captured, their fate is likely to be much the same as that that they will meet if they go down fighting in armed combat. These are people who believe that if they surrender, they'll be repatriated to their homelands and tried as war criminals. So these guys have got to fight on to the bitter end. It is ironic, then, that Berlin, the old Prussian capital, the capital of the German Thousand-Year Reich, is in the end defended most effectively by non-Germans. The SS, in particular, knew that they could expect no mercy from the Red Army, which had long since adopted the practice of shooting SS prisoners out of hand. Perhaps it was this knowledge which kept many formations at their post during the dark days of the battles for Berlin. But as late as April the 26th, the commander of the 503rd Heavy Tank Battalion was able to report that he still had six tanks ready for active service in the defense of the routes leading to the center of Berlin. Even more remarkable, they also had stocks of fuel and a plentiful supply of ammunition, including the bulky 88-millimeter ammunition for the massive high-velocity guns which were carried in the turrets of these formidable machines. Backed up by the Panzerfausts of the French and Norwegian volunteers, this small battle group claimed dozens of Russian tanks during the bitter street fighting which marked the very last days of the Third Reich. Incredibly, even the backup and repair services of the remaining German tank battalions continued to function. And by May the 1st, the number of tanks available to the 503rd Heavy Tank Battalion had actually increased. And there were now 11 tanks ready for action in the bitter street battles which continued as the diehards fought to maintain their shrinking perimeter. In his memoirs, Marshal Konev admitted that the Soviet Army had lost 800 tanks in the fighting for Berlin. In many respects, this last nut was the toughest that the Red Army had to crack. The Russians had announced that they would capture Berlin on May the 1st, but the beleaguered defenders took perverse pride in the fact that by the morning of May the 2nd, there was still fierce resistance in some sectors of the city. Although the official surrender took place on the afternoon of May the 2nd, a number of German units nonetheless attempted to break out of the Soviet sector and make their way towards the Western Allies, with the result that Berlin was not finally pacified until May the 3rd. After the surrender, the city authorities estimated that there were something like 90,000 instances of rape which occurred in the last few days before the surrender of the city. For the ordinary citizens of Berlin, there could be no prospect of relief. Although military discipline would soon be restored, it was obvious that one barbarous and inhumane regime had been swapped for another. As the Red Army approaches Berlin, an order comes out to stop raping and murdering and looting because the Soviets have decided that they want to occupy this part of Germany after the war, and they don't want the Germans in Eastern Germany to have a big hate on for the Soviets. But you can't just switch off that level of hatred and aggression. As East Germans, three generations of Berliners would pay a heavy price for loyalty to the man who did not possess the personal courage to face the music.