The Soviet Capture of Berlin Between 16 April and 2 May 1945 That Ended Nazi Germany

By April 1945 the Third Reich controlled little beyond Berlin, a corridor west to the Elbe, and pockets in Norway, Bohemia, and the Italian Alps. The Soviet 1st Belorussian Front under Marshal Georgy Zhukov and the 1st Ukrainian Front under Marshal Ivan Konev were positioned along the Oder River approximately 70 km east of Berlin. Stalin had encouraged a rivalry between Zhukov and Konev for the prestige of capturing the German capital — in the context of Soviet post-war positioning.

16 April 1945

The Berlin Strategic Offensive Operation opened at approximately 04:00 on 16 April 1945 with one of the largest artillery barrages of the war — approximately 1.8 million Soviet shells fired across the first 30 minutes against the German Seelow Heights position. Zhukov’s force comprised approximately 1.0 million men, 1,300 tanks, and 13,800 artillery pieces. Konev’s force was comparable. Total Soviet force was approximately 2.5 million troops.

The German defence — the depleted 9th Army under General Theodor Busse — held the Seelow Heights for four days. The Heights fell on 19 April 1945. Soviet columns broke through and encircled Berlin by 25 April 1945.

The battle in Berlin

The Berlin Volkssturm militia — composed of teenage Hitler Youth and elderly men — supplemented the depleted regular army defenders. House-to-house fighting through the central districts began on 20 April 1945 — Hitler’s 56th birthday.

The Soviet advance prioritized the Reichstag as a symbolic objective. The Reichstag building was captured on 30 April 1945 after Soviet casualties. Soviet sergeants Mikhail Yegorov and Meliton Kantaria raised the Victory Banner over the Reichstag at approximately 22:40 on 30 April 1945. The famous Yevgeny Khaldei photograph of the flag-raising was staged on 2 May 1945.

The Führerbunker

Hitler had been in the Führerbunker beneath the Reich Chancellery garden since 16 January 1945. By 22 April 1945 he had publicly recognised that the war was lost and that he would remain in Berlin. He married Eva Braun in a brief ceremony in the bunker at approximately 00:00 on 29 April 1945. He dictated his political testament at approximately 04:00 on 29 April 1945 designating Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz as the new Reich President.

At approximately 15:30 on 30 April 1945 Hitler and Eva Braun retired to his study. Hitler shot himself in the right temple with his Walther PPK. Braun took cyanide. The bodies were carried to the Reich Chancellery garden, doused with approximately 200 litres of petrol, and burned. The cremation was incomplete; the remains were recovered by Soviet SMERSH counterintelligence on 4 May 1945. The Soviet identification process — using dental records confirmed by Hitler’s dental assistant Käthe Heusermann — established the identification on 11 May 1945 but was not made public for Cold War political reasons until the 1968 publication of Lev Bezymenski’s The Death of Adolf Hitler.

Joseph Goebbels and his wife Magda killed their six children with cyanide and shot themselves in the bunker garden on the evening of 1 May 1945.

2 May 1945

General Helmuth Weidling — appointed commander of the Berlin defensive zone on 23 April 1945 — surrendered the city to Soviet General Vasily Chuikov (the Stalingrad veteran) at approximately 06:00 on 2 May 1945. Approximately 130,000 German troops were captured in Berlin.

Casualties

The Berlin operation 16 April - 2 May 1945:

— Soviet military dead and wounded: approximately 360,000 (approximately 80,000 dead) — German military dead: approximately 100,000 — German civilians killed: approximately 22,000 (Berlin city total during the battle)

Approximately 2 million German civilians remained in Berlin during the battle. The post-conquest Soviet army committed mass rape across Berlin and the surrounding territories; the conventional academic estimate (Antony Beevor, Berlin 2002) is approximately 100,000 rapes within Berlin during the conquest period and the following weeks, and approximately 2 million across East Prussia, Pomerania, and Silesia.

What followed

Dönitz’s successor government at Flensburg negotiated the German military surrender. Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel signed the unconditional surrender at Berlin-Karlshorst at 00:16 on 9 May 1945. The earlier signing at Reims on 7 May 1945 is observed as VE Day in Western countries; the Berlin signing is observed in Russia and the former Soviet states as Victory Day on 9 May.

The Berlin city was divided into four occupation sectors on 4 July 1945. The Soviet sector became East Berlin; the American, British, and French sectors became West Berlin. The Berlin Wall divided the city from 13 August 1961 to 9 November 1989.