Siege of Berlin
The end of the war in Europe
Executive director, Institute for the Study of War and Democracy and Samuel Zemurray Stone Senior Historian, The National WWII Museum
In retrospect, the dawning of the year 1945 saw Hitler’s Third Reich tottering and ready to fall. The Allies had full spectrum dominance in the air, on land and at sea, while the Wehrmacht was reduced to drafting old men and boys — grandfathers and grandsons together — to fill out the ranks.
But that’s the funny thing about retrospect: how clear everything is. Germany tottering? Maybe! But as anyone who has ever swung an axe on a big tree can tell you, you just have to keep hacking away. Predicting the exact number of strokes you’ll need to finish the job isn’t a precise science. And even the strongest lumberjack finds out that it almost always takes longer than he thought it would.
This is a good way to think about the situation the Allies faced in 1945. All the signs indicated that they were still a long way from victory. American forces had seized the German city of Aachen in autumn 1944, but Aachen is nearly 400 miles from Berlin as the crow flies. Soviet armies, too, had their work cut out for them. From their perch across the Vistula River in front of Warsaw, they stood 350 miles from the German capital. Certainly, the Germans had suffered a mauling in five long years of war, but Adolf Hitler still had millions of men in the field, with sophisticated weapons and a great deal of will. Nothing, it seemed, was going to be easy.
And that renders what happened in the next four months all the more remarkable — a sustained series of Allied blows that chopped down the German army and killed it.
Speeding, grinding toward Berlin
The first big blow landed in the east, as the Red Army launched a great offensive across the Vistula. The attack opened on Jan. 12, shredding German defenses along the river, taking Warsaw and driving rapidly to the west. As the Red Army sped across the flat plains of Western Poland toward Germany, thousands and then millions of German refugees took to the road, piling all their possessions on carts, wagons, wheelbarrows. They were fleeing as fast as their feet could carry them, anything to stay ahead of the onrushing Red Army. It was winter, of course — biting winds and blizzards — and conditions on the trek were horrible. Often Soviet tank columns ranging ahead of the rest of the Red Army caught these miserable refugees, and then the slaughter was ghastly. This was not only a military defeat for the German army, in other words; Germany itself was falling apart.
The Soviet drive did not stop until it had reached Küstrin on the Oder River, just 50 miles from Berlin. Here the Red Army paused to rest, regroup and refit, but mainly to catch its breath after one of the most successful winter offensives in history. From their start line outside of Warsaw, Soviet forces had driven forward some 300 miles in a month.
The Soviets may have been rolling, but the Western Allies were still in first gear, still shaking off the effects of the last great German offensive of the war in the Ardennes back in December 1944. For the Anglo-American armies, January and February were a slow grind, featuring costly battles in the cities and towns of the Rhineland (German territories on the west bank of the Rhine River). Moreover, once they cleared the west bank, there was still the big problem of crossing the river itself. One of Europe’s great waterways, the Rhine wasn’t something you hopped across on the fly. You had to prepare for days, perhaps weeks: bombardments, smoke screens, assault craft to cross the river. It promised to be a pain.
Or did it? As elements of Gen. John W. Leonard’s U.S. 9th Armored Division approached the river on March 7, they saw to their astonishment that the 1,000-foot-long Ludendorff Railroad Bridge at the town of Remagen was still standing. Hardly pausing for breath, they rushed the bridge. The Germans set off explosives, and indeed eyewitnesses could clearly see the bridge lift off its foundations before settling back down again, still intact. Just that quickly, a terrain barrier that might have held up the Allies for weeks had fallen. Gen. Courtney Hodges (U.S. 1st Army) wasn’t the cheerleading type, but he couldn’t contain himself: “Brad,” he bellowed over the phone to his commanding officer, “we’ve got a bridge!” Gen. Omar Bradley, commanding the U.S. 12th Army Group, responded with one of the most memorable lines of the war: “Hot dog, Courtney — this will bust him wide open!”
And it did. By the end of March, huge Allied forces were driving over the Rhine, heading east. In concert with an attack across the Rhine by Genn. Bernard Law Montgomery, including a gigantic airdrop behind German lines, the Allies encircled an entire German army group in the Ruhr valley — Germany’s industrial heartland. Nearly 400,000 German troops eventually surrendered, so many that the U.S. Army had a hard time processing them all. The battle of the “Ruhr Pocket” was nothing less than the greatest U.S. military victory of all time.
Chaos in the city
And now, for the final blow of the axe, we turn once again to the Red Army. On April 16, 1945, the Soviets launched the last great battle of World War II in Europe: the drive on Berlin. Once again, Soviet mechanized forces slashed through the threadbare German defenses in front of them along the Oder River. Few German units by this point of the war were up to full strength, guns often had only a few dozen rounds, and reserves were non-existent. A certain fatalism had taken root in the German ranks. As one colonel muttered to his officers: “If a few soldiers start to run away, then you must shoot them. If you see many soldiers taking off... then you’d better shoot yourself.”
While there would be some hard fighting here and there, the Soviets soon broke into the clear. Two army groups (“fronts,” the Soviets called them), the 1st Byelorussian under Marshal G. K. Zhukov and the 1st Ukrainian under Marshal I.S. Konev, converged on the city and within a week had encircled it.
The final battle was at hand, unprecedented in its ferocity, but foreordained in its outcome. The Soviets held all the advantages: numbers, weaponry, air support. While the German defenders had a city with all its concrete buildings, hideaways and ambush points, their manpower was an arbitrary collection of old men who had last seen action in World War I, boys who were barely shaving, grizzled non-coms fighting their 50th battle and a large contingent of non-German fighters: idealists enlisted in Hitler’s anti-Soviet crusade, Scandinavians from the Nordland Division of the Waffen-SS, a battalion of right-wing Frenchmen from the Charlemagne Division, Latvian infantry. Their commander, Gen. Helmuth Weidling, later recalled being appointed to lead the defense of the city and remembered thinking, “I wish I’d been shot.”
By the end of the day on April 28, the two Soviet spearheads in central Berlin were less than one mile apart. It would take them four full days of fierce fighting to cross that final mile. The assault on the Reichstag building was the signature moment of the battle — think of a battle raging for the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C.
The final five days have fixed the battle of Berlin in our historical memory. Stark images come to mind: the murderous building-by-building fight, with no quarter granted by either side; the bodies of German deserters hanging from lampposts, executed by their own officers; SS squads prowling the streets, shooting anyone unlucky enough to be caught flying a white flag; the desperate slogans chalked on the walls of a dying city (“Berlin bleibt deutsch!,” Berlin stays German!) and of course millions of terrified civilians huddling in air raid shelters, underground stations or flak towers, awaiting their fate.
By the end of the day on April 28, the two Soviet spearheads in central Berlin were less than one mile apart. It would take them four full days of fierce fighting to cross that final mile. The assault on the Reichstag building was the signature moment of the battle — think of a battle raging for the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. The commander of the Soviet 150th Rifle Division, Gen. V.M. Shatilov, wheeled up 90 guns on a 400-meter front and started blasting away at his target. With progress measured in yards, his men fought their way into the Reichstag, defended by a menagerie of sailors, SS and Hitler Youth. The Soviets would need another full day, May 1, to smash resistance in the basement, secure the prize and plant the red hammer and sickle flag on the Reichstag dome.
Hitler’s last days
It is fitting at this point to call to mind the man who had started it all: Adolf Hitler. He has spent his last days in an underground bunker in Berlin, ranting and raving, issuing nonsensical orders, imposing death sentences on the disloyal. But he had long ago lost control. He spent most of his last days pushing around non-existent divisions on his situation maps, and his communications with the outside world were so sporadic that his staff had to resort to bizarre improvisations to gain even basic intelligence on the fighting, dialing random phone numbers near the front to see whether a German or Russian voice picked up. Hitler was a passive observer in Berlin, in other words, and no wonder. He had long ago decided to kill himself when the end was near, and he did just that on April 30, with Soviet infantry above him, barely a mile away.
The Allies had won the war in Europe. The big lumberjack had toppled the tree — probably faster than he expected. That was the good news. The bad? Tens of millions of men, women and children had to die in Hitler’s senseless war.