The Battle of Berlin and the Last Days of the Führerbunker

Why did Berlin become the last battlefield in spring 1945?

On 12 January 1945 the Red Army opened the Vistula–Oder Offensive. Four fronts (a front was the Soviet equivalent of an army group) broke through on a broad sector and then advanced westward 30 to 40 kilometres a day, taking East Prussia, Danzig and Poznań; by February they had halted on a line along the Oder some 60 kilometres east of Berlin. From the Küstrin bridgehead the shortest distance to Berlin was 60 kilometres. In the west, meanwhile, Anglo-American forces crossed the Rhine and encircled the Ruhr, and by mid-April their spearheads had reached the Elbe. Germany had lost its raw-material regions and its industrial output was collapsing, yet Soviet military intelligence still counted 223 German divisions and brigades in mid-April. 1 2 3

Who would take Berlin was a military question and a question about the post-war order. At the Yalta Conference in February 1945 the three Allied leaders agreed to divide Germany into four occupation zones but settled nothing about occupying Berlin itself. The boundary of the Soviet zone agreed earlier ran 150 kilometres west of Berlin. Churchill floated the idea of beating the Red Army to the city, but Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander of the Western Allies, saw no reason to lose men attacking a city that would lie in the Soviet sphere after the war and stopped at the Elbe. The main Western contribution to the battle was the bombing of Berlin in 1945: RAF Mosquitos raided the city for 36 nights in a row, the last on the night of 20/21 April, just before Soviet troops entered it. 4 2 1

For Stalin, Berlin was a goal to be reached quickly. He did not trust the Western Allies to hand over territory they had occupied inside the agreed Soviet zone, and he reckoned the zone could not be secured quickly without Berlin. He also counted Hitler and the German nuclear programme among the prizes in the city (in fact most of the uranium and the scientists had already been moved to Haigerloch in the south-west). On 1 April Stalin summoned Zhukov of the 1st Belorussian Front and Konev of the 1st Ukrainian Front to Moscow and gave them two days to produce a plan. The main thrust, straight from Küstrin to Berlin, was Zhukov's, but Stalin left Konev the chance to enter Berlin from the south if he advanced quickly. On 3 April the attack was set for 16 April. In the north, on the lower Oder, stood Rokossovsky's 2nd Belorussian Front. 1 4

The three fronts gathered about 2.5 million men (including 78,556 soldiers of the Polish 1st Army), 6,250 tanks, 7,500 aircraft, 41,600 guns and mortars and 3,255 truck-mounted Katyusha rocket launchers. Facing them were Heinrici's Army Group Vistula (the 3rd Panzer Army and the 9th Army) and, to the south, the 4th Panzer Army of Army Group Centre. Waffen-SS and SS units were mixed in, and the Volkssturm, filled with boys of 14 to 16 and men up to 60, had been thrown in as a "last levy". Fuel and ammunition were short and the Soviet air force held the skies. Soviet propaganda changed course at this point as well: after the German invasion it had portrayed every German soldier as a Nazi, and Ilya Ehrenburg had preached hatred of all Germans, but just before the Berlin operation it returned to the language of class internationalism. 1 5 4

On the German side, the Basic Order for the Preparations for the Defence of the Reich Capital was issued on 9 March. This 33-page document, triggered by the code word Clausewitz, declared in its second point that "the Reich capital will be defended to the last man and to the last bullet." It divided Berlin into outer sectors A to H and the government district Z (the "Citadel"), drew four concentric rings from an outer exclusion zone to the inner ring railway, and placed civilians under martial law with offences carrying the death penalty. On 20 March command of Army Group Vistula passed from Himmler to Gotthard Heinrici, reckoned one of the best defensive tacticians in the German army. Heinrici correctly judged that the main Soviet thrust would cross the Oder and follow the east–west autobahn, and instead of defending the riverbank he had three belts of defences built on the Seelow Heights, 17 kilometres west of the river. Water released from a reservoir upstream turned the flood plain, already soaked by the spring thaw, into a swamp. 6 1

From the Seelow Heights to encirclement: how was Berlin's fate decided outside the city?

At dawn on 16 April the Red Army opened its offensive with the heaviest bombardment of the war; along the Oder front there was, by one count, a gun every five metres. When the assault began, the fire moved deeper into the defences, and in the breakthrough sectors 143 anti-aircraft searchlights were switched on to blind the defenders and light the way for the attackers. But Heinrici had pulled his forward positions opposite the main thrust back onto the heights beforehand, so much of the barrage fell on empty positions. When the infantry bogged down on the flood plain on the first day, an impatient Zhukov committed the two tank armies he had held east of the Oder, and the intermingling of units only added to the confusion. The 1st Belorussian Front broke through the last line on the Seelow Heights only on the fourth day, 19 April. 4 2 1

The Battle of the Seelow Heights was one of the last great set-piece assaults of the Second World War. Close to a million Soviet soldiers, the Polish 1st Army among them, with more than 20,000 tanks and guns attacked the "Gates of Berlin", held by about 100,000 German soldiers with 1,200 tanks and guns. Some 30,000 Soviet and 12,000 German soldiers are estimated to have been killed. Between 1 and 19 April the Soviets lost more than 2,807 tanks, at least 727 of them at Seelow. In the south things went differently. Konev's 1st Ukrainian Front broke quickly through the Neisse line, and when Rybalko's 3rd Guards Tank Army raced to Lübben in the rear of the 9th Army, Stalin allowed Konev on 17 April to attack Berlin from the south. So began the rivalry between the two marshals. 1 5 4

After 19 April the German eastern front around Seelow, north of Frankfurt an der Oder, and around Forst to the south had ceased to exist, and the two Soviet fronts trapped the German 9th Army in a huge pocket west of Frankfurt. On 20 April, Hitler's 56th birthday, the artillery of the 1st Belorussian Front shelled central Berlin for the first time, and the shelling did not stop until the city surrendered. The weight of shells Soviet artillery delivered on Berlin during the battle exceeded the total tonnage Western Allied bombers had dropped on it. The same day, in the north, Rokossovsky's 2nd Belorussian Front attacked Manteuffel's 3rd Panzer Army between Stettin and Schwedt. 1 7

On 24 April the leading elements of the two fronts met south-east of Berlin and completed the encirclement, and around noon on the 25th units of the 1st Ukrainian Front's 4th Guards Tank Army crossed the Havel and met units of the 1st Belorussian Front's 47th Army west of the city, closing the ring. The same day, 25 April, the 58th Guards Rifle Division of Zhadov's 5th Guards Army met the US First Army's 69th Infantry Division near Torgau on the Elbe. With this "Elbe Day" Germany was cut in two. By now the defence of the city could only delay its capture: the decisive stages of the battle had been fought outside Berlin, and the Germans had lost them there. 1 8 9

The encircled 9th Army tried to break out to the west. In the Battle of Halbe, from 24 April to 1 May, it fought through the forests and across three Soviet lines towards Wenck's 12th Army, with tens of thousands of refugees moving alongside. Nearly 30,000 Germans were buried after the battle in the cemetery at Halbe, and about 20,000 Soviet soldiers also died trying to stop the breakout. Civilian deaths may have reached 10,000, but nobody knows the true figure. The number of German soldiers who reached the 12th Army's lines alive is given as 25,000 or about 30,000, depending on the account. 10 1

What was the Führerbunker, and what did the leadership inside it believe?

The Führerbunker was an air-raid shelter under the garden of the old Reich Chancellery on Wilhelmstrasse in Berlin. It had two parts, the upper Vorbunker completed in 1936 and the Führerbunker proper, 2.5 metres lower, completed in 1944, joined by a stairway and a steel door. The Führerbunker lay about 8.5 metres underground under a concrete roof almost 3 metres thick. Along its corridor of some 30 small rooms were the generator room and telephone switchboard on one side and, on the other, Hitler's study and bedroom, Eva Braun's rooms and the conference room. Lying below the water table, it was damp, with pumps running continuously. Hitler moved in on 16 January 1945; in April Bormann, Goebbels and Braun joined him, while Magda Goebbels and her six children stayed in the Vorbunker. Two or three dozen staff were there too, among them the secretary Traudl Junge, the nurse Erna Flegel and Rochus Misch, bodyguard and switchboard operator. 11

When news arrived on 12 April that President Roosevelt had died, false hope spread briefly through the bunker that the Allies would fall out and Berlin would be saved at the last moment. Hitler's last trip to the surface came on his birthday, 20 April, when he pinned Iron Crosses on Hitler Youth boy soldiers in the ruined Chancellery garden; that afternoon the first Soviet shells fell on Berlin. On 21 April Hitler ordered the Waffen-SS general Felix Steiner to attack the flank of the Soviet salient from the north, and the 9th Army in the south-east to attack northward in a pincer. "Army Detachment Steiner" was a ragtag force that existed mostly on paper and was outnumbered ten to one. Steiner made clear he could not attack, and Heinrici warned that unless the 9th Army retreated west at once it would be encircled. 1 11 12

At the afternoon conference on 22 April, told that Steiner's attack had not taken place, Hitler fell into a tearful rage. He denounced his generals as traitors and incompetents, declared for the first time that the war was lost, and announced that he would stay in Berlin to the end and then kill himself. That day he asked the SS doctor Werner Haase about the most reliable method of suicide. To calm him, Jodl suggested that Walther Wenck's 12th Army, which faced the Americans, could be turned towards Berlin, since captured Allied documents suggested the Americans would not go beyond the Elbe. Hitler seized on the idea, and within hours Wenck was ordered to move north-east. From then on the bunker's hopes rested on relief armies that would never arrive. 3 1 11

Word that Hitler intended to kill himself stirred the would-be successors outside. Göring, head of the Luftwaffe, telegraphed asking whether he should take over the leadership of the Reich under the 1941 decree naming him successor. Bormann persuaded Hitler that this was an attempt to depose him, and Hitler stripped Göring of all his offices and ordered his arrest. Robert Ritter von Greim, summoned from Munich to replace him, was badly wounded by Soviet anti-aircraft fire over Berlin on 26 April, and the test pilot Hanna Reitsch, who was with him, flew the aircraft down onto an improvised strip in the Tiergarten near the Brandenburg Gate. Around the same time Hitler made Helmuth Weidling, commander of the LVI Panzer Corps, whom he had ordered shot only the day before over a misunderstood retreat order, commander of the Berlin Defence Area on 23 April. 3 7 11

Armaments Minister Albert Speer made his last visit to the bunker on 22 April, saw Hitler and left for Hamburg. He had opposed the "Nero Decree" of 19 March, in which Hitler ordered all infrastructure destroyed in retreat, persuading several commanders to ignore it, and at the end of March had been given authority over demolitions and halted the blowing up of industry; yet he had also put forward schemes to prolong the war. In his memoirs Speer wrote that on this last visit he confessed to Hitler that he had been disobeying the scorched-earth order; the historian Richard J. Evans calls that passage "pure invention". In Berlin itself, on Hitler's orders, 128 of 226 bridges were blown up, while some workers acted on their own to stop the SS destroying the Klingenberg power station and waterworks. On 25 April Goebbels wrote in his diary that a heroic death in Berlin would within five years make Hitler a legend and National Socialism a myth "consecrated by the ultimate sacrifice". 13 1 14

How was the street fighting fought: who defended Berlin, and where were its people?

Weidling had about 45,000 men in several badly depleted Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS divisions, supplemented by the Berlin police, conscripted Hitler Youth boys and the Volkssturm. The Volkssturm was a militia created in September 1944 by conscripting men aged 16 to 60 not already in the forces, and many of Berlin's 40,000 Volkssturm men were elderly First World War veterans. Weidling divided the outer city into eight sectors, A to H, but most of their commanders had no combat experience. Hitler made SS-Brigadeführer Wilhelm Mohnke commander of the government district Z, which held the Reich Chancellery and the Führerbunker; his core was some 2,000 men, built around the 800-strong guard battalion of the Leibstandarte division that guarded Hitler. No other reinforcements came: the only ones to reach Berlin, on 24 April, were 320 to 330 French SS volunteers under Gustav Krukenberg, attached to the Nordland Division, who fought to the end. 7 15 1

The civilians could not leave. When the battle began about 2.7 million people remained in Berlin, two-thirds of them women; the men were mostly children under 16 and old men over 60. There were also up to 300,000 foreign workers, most of them Ostarbeiter brought by force, who were forbidden even to enter shelters and cellars. From early March, on the orders of Goebbels, who was responsible for Berlin's defence, tens of thousands of civilians, mostly women, were sent to dig anti-tank ditches. Until the last days the SS and military police used drumhead courts and execution squads to shoot deserters and civilians who spoke critically, and Goebbels published Der Panzerbär, a paper for the defenders that demanded loyalty to the Führer and promised final victory. 4 8

The Soviets fought with the street-fighting methods they had refined in one "fortress city" after another since Stalingrad. Combat groups of about eighty men split into assault teams of six to eight, closely supported by field artillery. Instead of barricades at street corners, the Waffen-SS put snipers and machine guns on upper floors and roofs and men with Panzerfausts (single-shot, shoulder-fired anti-tank weapons) in cellar windows to ambush tanks, and the Hitler Youth and Volkssturm copied them. The Soviets moved their tanks to the sides of the streets to cover one another, fired 152 mm and 203 mm howitzers over open sights to demolish buildings, and blasted holes through walls to move from house to house and across the rooftops. Flamethrowers and grenades were effective, but because the population had not been evacuated, many non-combatants were killed. 7

On 23–24 April Chuikov's 8th Guards Army, Katukov's 1st Guards Tank Army and Berzarin's 5th Shock Army broke in from the south-east. The assault across the Teltow Canal on the morning of the 24th was preceded by 3,000 guns, about 650 per kilometre of front. On the 26th they fought the Müncheberg Panzer Division for Tempelhof airport. From the north and west Bogdanov's 2nd Guards Tank Army, Kuznetsov's 3rd Shock Army and Rybalko's 3rd Guards Tank Army closed in. The rivalry between the two fronts spilled into friendly fire: Antony Beevor argues that Chuikov, without telling Rybalko, pushed the left wing of his army across Rybalko's front and blocked his path to the Reichstag. On 27–28 April most of Konev's formations were sent south for the Prague offensive, leaving the honour of taking the centre to Zhukov. 7 4

By 28 April the Germans held a strip less than five kilometres wide from Alexanderplatz to Charlottenburg. To slow the Soviet advance the bulkheads under the Landwehr Canal were blown, flooding the U-Bahn tunnels, and accounts of the toll differ widely: contemporary testimony spoke of thousands drowned, while the tunnels pumped out in October 1945 yielded mostly people who had died of wounds rather than drowning, and another account puts the dead at one to two hundred. From 30 April the Polish 1st Infantry Division (the Kościuszko Division) supported Soviet tank units short of infantry, taking the barricades of Charlottenburg, the Technical University and the Tiergarten station; some of the brigades they joined had lost more than 90 per cent of their men. 7 1 4

How did the red flag on the Reichstag become the symbol of victory?

The Reichstag had stood unused and ruined since the fire of February 1933. To the Nazis it stood for the weakness of parliamentary democracy, and the Germans did not regard it as an especially vital position, though they garrisoned it heavily. To the Soviets it was the symbol of the Third Reich itself, and they wanted it taken before the May Day parade in Moscow. On the night of 28 April units of Kuznetsov's 3rd Shock Army crossed the damaged Moltke Bridge, and from the 29th, without artillery support, they fought through the Ministry of the Interior room by room with grenades and sub-machine guns. The attack on the morning of the 30th was held up by a flooded moat across the Königsplatz and by the 12.8 cm anti-aircraft guns on the Zoo flak tower two kilometres away. 1 7 16

At 18:00 on 30 April three regiments of the 150th Rifle Division forced the main doors under a heavy barrage. A garrison of about 1,000 sailors, SS men and Hitler Youth fired down from the upper floors, turning the main hall into a killing ground, and the fighting went on room by room through a building turned into a maze of rubble. Moscow announced that the red flag was raised over the Reichstag at 22:50 that night, but Beevor points out that this may have been an exaggeration by Soviet propaganda, which was fixated on capturing the Reichstag before 1 May; records of which group planted which flag, and when, conflict. The Germans in the basement held out until the night of 1 May; about 300 surrendered, 200 were dead and 500 lay wounded. The Soviets controlled the whole building on 2 May. 7 16 1

The photograph the world knows, two Soviet soldiers planting a flag on the roof of the Reichstag, was staged by the war photographer Yevgeny Khaldei on 2 May, the day after the building was taken. Khaldei climbed up with a large flag his uncle had sewn from three tablecloths and asked passing soldiers to help. The official story presented the picture as the Georgian Meliton Kantaria and the Russian Mikhail Yegorov raising the Victory Banner for the first time; by Khaldei's own account the soldier fixing the flag was 18-year-old Aleksei Kovalev. Staged or not, for Soviet people the image came to symbolise that the Battle of Berlin, and the Eastern Front as a whole, had ended in total Soviet victory. Poland keeps 2 May as its Flag Day, marking the day Polish soldiers hoisted their flag on the Berlin Victory Column. 16 1

How did Hitler and the people in the bunker spend the last three days?

By 27 April Berlin's communications with the outside were almost cut, and the bunker relied on telephone lines and public radio for news. On 28 April Hitler learned from a BBC report citing Reuters that Reichsführer-SS Himmler had offered surrender to the Western Allies through the Swedish diplomat Folke Bernadotte; Himmler had also offered to stop the murder of Hungarian Jews in exchange for a partial capitulation. Hitler considered this treason and ordered Himmler's arrest, and Hermann Fegelein, Himmler's SS liaison in the bunker and Eva Braun's brother-in-law, was condemned by an SS summary court for desertion and shot in the Chancellery garden. That night Greim and Reitsch flew out of Berlin in a trainer, ordered to have the Luftwaffe attack the Soviet troops who had reached the Potsdamer Platz, a block from the bunker, and to arrest the "traitor" Himmler. 3 14 7 11

After midnight on 29 April Hitler married Eva Braun in a small civil ceremony in the bunker's map room. He then took his secretary Traudl Junge to another room and dictated his private will and political testament, which Krebs, Burgdorf, Goebbels and Bormann witnessed and signed at about 04:00 (some accounts put the dictation before the wedding, but all agree on the time of signing). In the political testament Hitler blamed the war on "international Jewry and its helpers" and bound Germans to observe the racial laws and offer "merciless resistance" to "the world-poisoner of all peoples, international Jewry". Holocaust scholars read the document as evidence that to the end he claimed the destruction of the Jews as his own achievement. The testament expelled Göring and Himmler as traitors and named Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz Reich President and Supreme Commander of the Wehrmacht, and Goebbels Chancellor. 3 11 14

On the afternoon of the 29th Hitler learned that Mussolini had been executed by Italian partisans and his body hung by the heels in a Milan square. As his testament recorded, he did not want himself or his wife to be made a "spectacle". Coming to doubt the cyanide ampoules Himmler had supplied through the SS doctor Stumpfegger, he had Haase test one on his dog Blondi, which died at once. That night Krebs radioed Jodl asking where Wenck's spearheads were; the answer early on the 30th was that Wenck was bogged down south of the Schwielowsee and could not continue the attack on Berlin, and that the bulk of the 9th Army was surrounded. On the night of 28 April Wenck had already reported to Keitel that he had been forced back along the whole front, and Keitel had allowed him to break off the relief attempt. 3 11 7

On the morning of 30 April the Soviets were less than 500 metres from the bunker. Mohnke reported that the government district could not hold for two days, and Weidling said the garrison would run out of ammunition that night and again asked permission to break out; it came at about 13:00. After lunch Hitler and Braun took leave of Bormann, Goebbels and the secretaries, and at about 14:30 they went into his study, with his adjutant Otto Günsche guarding the door. When the valet Heinz Linge and Bormann went in, the two were sitting dead on the sofa. According to Günsche, Hitler had shot himself in the right temple with his own pistol and Braun had taken cyanide; it was around 15:30. As Hitler had instructed, the bodies were wrapped in blankets, carried out through the emergency exit to the garden, doused with petrol and burned. After a cremation that went on under Soviet shellfire until about 18:30, the remains were covered in a shallow bomb crater. 3 11 17

Goebbels, Chancellor under the testament, and Bormann informed Dönitz of Hitler's death. At about 04:00 on 1 May the army chief of staff Hans Krebs went to Chuikov, commander of the 8th Guards Army, told him that Hitler was dead and proposed a ceasefire and "peace negotiations". Stalin, informed thirteen hours after the event, demanded unconditional surrender, which Krebs had no authority to give. When the new German government rejected unconditional surrender at 18:00, the Soviets resumed the assault with full force. That late afternoon Magda and Joseph Goebbels killed their six children: the SS dentist Helmut Kunz stated that he only gave them morphine injections and that Magda and Stumpfegger administered the cyanide. At about 20:30 the couple went up to the garden and killed themselves; witnesses differ on whether they shot themselves or bit on cyanide and were then given a coup de grâce. 3 11 7 8 18

At about 23:00 on 1 May, on Weidling's orders, the survivors tried to break out to the north-west. The first group, led by Mohnke, included Junge and the other secretaries, the dietician Constanze Manziarly and the doctor Ernst-Günther Schenck. The three secretaries reached the Elbe, but the rest were caught by Soviet troops the next day in a cellar off the Schönhauser Allee and interrogated by SMERSH, the Soviet counter-intelligence service. Bormann crossed the Spree but died that day: the Hitler Youth leader Artur Axmann testified that he saw Bormann's body near the Weidendammer Bridge, while another account says he took poison when Soviet soldiers stopped him near the Lehrter Bahnhof; remains found in 1972 were identified by DNA in 1998. Krebs and Burgdorf, who stayed in the bunker, killed themselves early on 2 May; some accounts say by shooting themselves in the head, while Misch, who found the bodies unmarked, and Red Army post-mortem reports say by poison. 19 11 14 20

From Berlin's surrender on 2 May to 8 May: how did the war end?

At 01:00 on 2 May the Soviets picked up a radio message from the LVI Panzer Corps asking for a ceasefire. That morning they took the Reich Chancellery, and Weidling surrendered with his staff at 06:00. Brought before Chuikov at 08:23, he ordered the Berlin garrison to surrender to the Soviets and, under the direction of Chuikov and Sokolovsky, deputy commander of the 1st Belorussian Front, put the surrender order in writing; it was relayed to German units in the centre by loudspeaker and radio. The 350-strong garrison of the Zoo flak tower walked out, and buildings where some SS men still refused to surrender were reduced to rubble. At 09:00 the bunker's electrician Johannes Hentschel, who had stayed to keep power and water running to the field hospital above, surrendered to the Soviet troops coming in. 1 11 2 7

Outside the city the fighting went on. Wenck's 12th Army, having taken in the 9th Army survivors and refugees from the Halbe pocket, fell back west to the Elbe; the historian Antony Beevor holds that Wenck's eastward attack had from the start been meant to open an escape route towards the Americans for Berlin's people and garrison. On the afternoon of 7 May Wenck crossed the Elbe under small-arms fire and surrendered to the US Ninth Army. In the north, Manteuffel's 3rd Panzer Army and Tippelskirch's 21st Army surrendered to the Americans on 2–3 May. On the night of 1 May Hamburg radio announced, falsely, that Hitler had died a hero defending the capital, and introduced his successor Dönitz. Dönitz chose to surrender piecemeal to the British and Americans while pulling eastern units westward; this let about 1.8 million German soldiers avoid Soviet captivity, but in the east blood was shed until 8 May. 1 21 3

The Dönitz government at Flensburg neither repudiated Nazism, nor banned the party, nor detained its leaders, so neither the Soviets nor the Americans recognised it as able to represent the German state. On 4 May German forces in north-west Germany, the Netherlands and Denmark surrendered to the British on Lüneburg Heath, and on 5 May those in Bavaria to the Americans. Aware that the Soviets would suspect the West of seeking a separate peace, Eisenhower refused further partial surrenders and demanded simultaneous unconditional surrender to all the Allies. At 02:41 on 7 May Jodl signed the instrument of surrender at Allied headquarters in Reims. The Soviet representative, General Susloparov, signed too, but without confirmed authority from Moscow. 22

The Soviets did not accept the Reims document. The stated reasons were that its text differed from the agreed one and that Susloparov had lacked authority; the substantive reason was that the surrender should be a single historic event fully reflecting the Soviet people's leading contribution, held not on liberated territory that had suffered German aggression but in Berlin, where the aggression had begun. The Reims text also did not explicitly require German troops to lay down their arms and give themselves up. Eisenhower agreed at once. On 8 May, at the Soviet military headquarters in Berlin-Karlshorst with Zhukov presiding, Keitel signed together with representatives of the three services, Tedder signed for the Western Allies, and French and American representatives signed as witnesses. The physical signing took place close to 01:00 on 9 May but was back-dated to the 8th, and the official Soviet statement gave 22:43 on 8 May. The surrender took effect at 23:01 Central European Time on 8 May, already 9 May in Moscow, which is why the Soviet Union and Russia mark 9 May as Victory Day. 22 1

What did the battle cost, and what did Berliners go through right after the conquest?

Casualty figures differ widely between studies and are all estimates. By Grigori Krivosheyev's count from declassified Soviet records, the Berlin operation (16 April to 2 May), including Seelow and Halbe, cost the Red Army 81,116 dead and missing and 280,251 wounded or sick, more than 350,000 in all, as well as about 1,997 tanks and self-propelled guns. John Erickson puts the casualties of the three fronts up to 8 May at 304,877. German research puts German military dead at 92,000 to 100,000, while Soviet command reports claimed some 400,000 killed and 380,000 to 480,000 captured, figures criticised as inflated. Some 125,000 civilians are estimated to have died in the operation as a whole, though the true number cannot be known, and building work still turns up unknown mass graves. 1 2 8 4

The Soviet military authorities began restoring essential services before the fighting in the centre was over. On 27 April Zhukov put Berzarin in charge of organising German civil administration in the captured districts, and local Germans were appointed to head each block and organise the clearing-up. On Berzarin's orders Red Army soup kitchens opened, and many German soldiers and civilians were grateful for the food; rations were set by category with ration cards, and medicines were supplied to hospitals and pharmacies. Hunger persisted all the same: in June the average Berliner received only 64 per cent of a daily ration of 1,240 calories, and over a million people were homeless. After the capitulation the Soviets went from house to house arresting anyone in uniform, firemen and railwaymen included. 1 7 8

In the same weeks Soviet soldiers raped German women on a mass scale, a fact established by records and testimony. The estimate of at least 100,000 women raped in Berlin alone rests on the surge in abortions in the following months and on hospital reports, and some 10,000 are thought to have died as a result; Cornelius Ryan, drawing on doctors' estimates, wrote of 20,000 to 100,000. For Germany as a whole the estimates range from hundreds of thousands to as many as two million. There are no reliable statistics, so every figure is an estimate. Other Allied armies also committed rape (there is research on American soldiers too), and most scholars conclude that the majority were committed by Soviet occupation troops. On 2 May 1945 the military prosecutor of the 1st Belorussian Front, Yachenin, reported that pointless shootings and looting had fallen sharply but violence against women continued. Berzarin introduced penalties for looting and rape up to the death penalty. 23 4 8 1

Researchers explain the causes on several levels. Norman Naimark points to hate propaganda, personal experience of suffering at home and heavy drinking, and writes that after mid-1945 soldiers caught were punished, from arrest to execution, yet the rapes went on until the winter of 1947–48, when the Soviet Military Administration confined troops to their posts and camps. Beevor stresses not only revenge but a sense of entitlement to every kind of spoil, women included, noting that Soviet troops also raped Soviet and Polish women freed from camps and forced labour. The historian Oleg Budnitskii says that millions of soldiers from a closed country were enraged by the wealth they saw in Germany: "they could not understand why being so rich, Germans came to Russia." The desire for revenge for German massacres and destruction on Soviet soil, the brutalisation of war and harsh treatment by their own command are also cited. Solzhenitsyn, who witnessed such crimes in East Prussia, wrote: "You know very well that we've come to Germany to take our revenge." 23 1 4

The memory of these crimes became political too. At first Soviet and East German propaganda attributed most of the rapes to Germans disguised as Soviet soldiers, and the Russian general Makhmut Gareev called Beevor's work "worse than Joseph Goebbels's propaganda"; in 2015 Beevor's books were banned in some Russian schools. In reply the Russian professor Oleg Rzheshevsky stated that 4,148 Red Army officers and "a significant number" of soldiers were convicted of crimes against German civilians. Nazi propaganda, for its part, had spread racial stereotypes of Soviet troops as "Asiatic hordes" for more than a decade, and on 16 April Hitler drove his soldiers on with the claim that the "Jewish-Bolshevik mortal enemy" would degrade German women and march the men to Siberia. Most victims stayed silent for a long time. When Marta Hillers's diary A Woman in Berlin appeared in 1954, German society turned away from it; it became widely read only when it was reissued after its author's death in 2001. 23 14 8

What does the film Downfall show, and what does it leave out or change?

Downfall (Der Untergang) is a 2004 German film written and produced by Bernd Eichinger and directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel, with Bruno Ganz as Hitler, Alexandra Maria Lara as Junge, and Corinna Harfouch and Ulrich Matthes as the Goebbels couple. The screenplay rests on the historian Joachim Fest's Inside Hitler's Bunker (Der Untergang, 2002) and Junge's memoir Until the Final Hour (Bis zur letzten Stunde, 2002), with Speer's Inside the Third Reich and the recollections of Gerhard Boldt, Schenck and Siegfried Knappe as further references. It was the first German film to confront Hitler directly since The Last Ten Days (1955), and it was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. It opens with Junge being chosen as a secretary at the Wolf's Lair in November 1942 and closes with real interview footage from the documentary Blind Spot: Hitler's Secretary, in which the elderly Junge says her youthful ignorance was no excuse for "not recognizing this monster in time". 24 20

The main outline of the plot broadly matches the facts set out above: the birthday and the first shelling on 20 April, the rage after the report that Steiner had not attacked, Göring's telegram and arrest order, Himmler's negotiations and Fegelein's execution, the wedding and testament, the poison test on Blondi, the Krebs–Chuikov talks, the deaths of the Goebbels children and Weidling's surrender. Weidling's reversal of fortune, sentenced to death one day and made commander of Berlin the next, also follows the record. Hitler's tirade against his generals is attested by eyewitnesses, and the scene later became the source of countless parody videos with new subtitles. The bunker nurse Erna Flegel said the film got some minor details wrong but was generally accurate; Misch said it was factually accurate but "Americanized", insisting that the bunker was mostly quiet and people spoke softly. 24 20

Some changes are clear. The film's Hitler Youth boy Peter Kranz is not a real person but is based on Alfred Zech, a 12-year-old who saved German soldiers in his home village. In the film Junge escapes Berlin on a bicycle with Peter; the real Junge left the bunker with Mohnke's group on 1 May, reached the Elbe, failed to get through to the Western Allies and went back to Berlin, where Soviet officials arrested and interrogated her on 9 June. In prison, hearing from her Soviet guards what the German army had done to their families, she came to realise that most of what she thought she knew about the war in the east was what the propaganda ministry had told her. The scenes of Krebs and Burgdorf shooting themselves and of Magda Goebbels apparently shot conflict with testimony that they took poison, and the film's text of Göring's telegram is almost entirely unlike the real one. Misch said that keeping the children in the bunker and killing them was Magda's decision, not a joint one. 24 20 19

What was left out, and how people were drawn, caused greater controversy. Eichinger chose not to include the Holocaust, saying it was not the topic of the film and that the misery of the camps could not be shown on screen. The author Giles MacDonogh criticised the sympathetic portrayals of the SS officers Mohnke and Schenck: Mohnke was accused of the 1940 Wormhoudt massacre of British prisoners of war, and Schenck had set up the herbal plantation at Dachau, while a nutritional supplement he was involved with was tested on 370 prisoners at Mauthausen-Gusen, some of whom died of hunger oedema. Hirschbiegel replied that the allegations were unproven. Wolfgang Schroeter criticised the film for spreading the Speer myth by leaving out his part in Nazi crimes; indeed the film's scene of Speer's "confession" follows the passage of his memoirs that Evans calls invention. The Red Army's rapes are alluded to rather than shown explicitly. 24 20 25 13 23

Before and after its release, Germany debated the question posed by Bild: "Are we allowed to show the monster as a human being?" The Hitler biographer Ian Kershaw called the film "a marvellous historical drama" for showing a Hitler who could be kind to his secretaries and in the next breath coldly decide the deaths of millions, and wrote that he could hardly imagine anyone but the neo-Nazi fringe finding this Hitler sympathetic. The historian Hermann Graml likewise found its portrayal of Hitler's will to destroy and denial of reality correct. The historian Michael Wildt, by contrast, accused the film of staging itself as a historical source through an untenable promise of "authenticity", and Hans Mommsen and Hannes Heer joined the criticism. Wim Wenders observed that a film that revels in showing violence turns away from exactly two deaths, Hitler's and Goebbels's, paying them an honour they did not deserve. For a newcomer it is worth remembering that the film is the last ten days seen through the eyes of the people in the bunker; the city's civilians, the Soviet soldiers and the full scale of the regime's crimes lie outside the frame. 24 20

How are the Battle of Berlin and Hitler's death remembered and judged?

For the Soviet Union the taking of Berlin was the final chapter of the Great Patriotic War: that the war ended in the capital of the country that had invaded Soviet soil was itself the meaning of victory. 402 soldiers who fought in and around Berlin received the highest Soviet distinction, Hero of the Soviet Union, and Zhukov and Konev received their third and second such awards. Some 1.1 million who took part in the capture of Berlin between 22 April and 2 May received the Medal "For the Capture of Berlin". The photograph of the flag on the Reichstag became the emblem of that memory. Poland, too, commemorates its army's part in the battle. 1 16

There are critical assessments too. German-language accounts point out that Hitler, in a war Germany had long since lost, ordered resistance to the last man and sacrificed thousands of boys and old men in the Volkssturm, and also that Stalin sacrificed many soldiers by demanding the city be taken as soon as possible, to beat the Americans and score a propaganda victory. Zhukov's hasty commitment of tanks at Seelow and the two marshals' rivalry over the centre are cited as having raised that cost, though it is also noted that their simultaneous drive hastened the fall of Berlin. The historian Johannes Hürter observes that while the military course of the battle has been studied in detail, analysis of the fate of the civilians in that inferno is still lacking. 4

Much of the doubt about Hitler's death was created by the Soviets themselves. SMERSH recovered the dental remains of Hitler and Braun from the garden in early May, and by the 11th Käthe Heusermann, assistant to Hitler's dentist, and the dental technician Fritz Echtmann had identified them. Yet the Soviets restricted information and put out contradictory stories: on 5 June they said the body had been examined and he had died of cyanide, on 9 June that they had not identified the body and he had probably escaped, and in July Stalin said he was living "in Spain or Argentina". Historians regard this as a deliberate disinformation campaign. Hugh Trevor-Roper's investigation for British intelligence was published in 1947 as The Last Days of Hitler, and a West German court, after questioning 42 witnesses separately, issued a death certificate in 1956, finding that there could "no longer be the slightest doubt" that on 30 April 1945 Hitler had shot himself in the right temple. 3

Later scientific checks point to the same conclusion. In 1972 forensic odontologists used material the Soviets had published to confirm the dental remains, and in 2017 the French forensic pathologist Philippe Charlier found the teeth and jawbone fragment in the Russian archives to be in "perfect agreement" with X-rays of Hitler taken in 1944. A skull fragment once claimed to be Hitler's proved in 2009 to be a woman's, but that reflects a Soviet misattribution, not evidence of survival; in 2025 blood from the study sofa was confirmed as Hitler's by comparison with a relative's DNA. The FBI and CIA investigated sightings until the mid-1950s without finding any credible. Stories that Hitler survived and fled have no basis and are conspiracy theories. In 1970, with the approval of KGB chairman Yuri Andropov, the remains of the Goebbels family and others buried at Magdeburg were exhumed, burned and scattered in a river, for fear the site would become a neo-Nazi shrine. 3 11

The outcome of the battle shaped post-war Europe. The Allies divided Germany into four occupation zones, and in the Berlin Declaration of 5 June the four powers assumed supreme authority over Germany. The Soviet zone later became East Germany, and the division of Germany fed into the Cold War between the blocs led by the United States and the Soviet Union, made visible from 1961 to 1989 by the Berlin Wall. The site of the Führerbunker, after the Soviets levelled the Chancellery buildings, lay neglected for decades, and most of the remaining underground structure was destroyed when housing was built there in the late 1980s. Only in 2006 was a single information board put up, designed as a plain historical record rather than a memorial; Rochus Misch, one of the last people in the bunker, attended its unveiling. 22 3 19 11