On 20 April 1945 Adolf Hitler turned 56. Leading figures of the regime came to the Reich Chancellery and its underground bunker to congratulate him, and most of them left Berlin the same night. That morning, long-range guns of Zhukov’s 3rd Shock Army had begun firing into the city. Within five days Soviet tank armies had passed north and south of Berlin and met west of it, and the capital was cut off.

20 April

Hitler had lived since mid-January in the Führerbunker, beneath the garden of the old Reich Chancellery on Wilhelmstrasse. His last appearance in front of a camera had come on 20 March, when he decorated boys of the Hitler Youth in the Chancellery garden. On 20 April Hermann Göring, Heinrich Himmler, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Albert Speer, Karl Dönitz and others came to the bunker. Göring left for Bavaria that night, Himmler for the north, and Dönitz for Plön in Holstein, where he would set up a northern command.

North of Berlin, the 2nd Guards Tank Army and the 3rd and 5th Shock Armies had broken through the last German positions east of the city and were swinging north around it. On 21 April they reached the outer suburbs; on 22 April Soviet and Polish troops reached Oranienburg and the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, from which the SS had driven most of the prisoners north on a death march two days before. Rokossovsky’s 2nd Belorussian Front opened its own attack across the lower Oder south of Stettin on 20 April, pinning down the 3rd Panzer Army so that it could not help Berlin.

Konev at Zossen

South of the city, Konev’s tanks moved even faster. On 20 April the 4th Guards Tank Army took Jüterbog, with its airfields and supply depots. On 21 April Rybalko’s 3rd Guards Tank Army overran the bunkers at Zossen-Wünsdorf, about 20 miles south of Berlin, which had housed the headquarters of the German army high command (OKH); the staff had left hours earlier. The next day Rybalko’s tanks reached the Teltow canal on the southern edge of the city.

Konev’s rapid advance alarmed Zhukov, whose own armies were still fighting their way through the eastern suburbs. On 23 April Stalin drew a new boundary between the two fronts that ran through the centre of Berlin by way of the Anhalter railway station and left the Reichstag and the Chancellery on Zhukov’s side. The government quarter, and the symbolic prizes of the battle, went to Zhukov.

Hitler decides to stay

At the afternoon conference in the bunker on 22 April, Hitler was told that an attack he had ordered by an improvised force under SS General Felix Steiner, north of the city, had not taken place. Witnesses described an outburst in which he declared that the war was lost, accused the army of betraying him, and said that he would remain in Berlin and die there. He refused to leave for the south. Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel and Colonel General Alfred Jodl, the senior officers of the armed forces high command (OKW), left the city to run what remained of the war from outside.

The next day Göring, at Obersalzberg, sent a telegram asking whether, given that Hitler had chosen to stay in a besieged Berlin, he should take over the leadership of the Reich under a 1941 decree, and setting a deadline for a reply. Hitler, prompted by his secretary Martin Bormann, treated it as treason, stripped Göring of his offices and ordered his arrest. Also on 23 April General Helmuth Weidling, whose LVI Panzer Corps had been driven back into the city from Seelow, was summoned to the bunker on a report that he had moved his headquarters west without orders. He left as commander of the Berlin defence area.

Weidling took over a city divided into eight defence sectors, labelled A to H, around a central sector, Z, containing the government quarter. He had perhaps 45,000 soldiers of the army and Waffen-SS, many from his own battered corps, along with police, tens of thousands of Volkssturm militiamen and Hitler Youth, and little ammunition or fuel. How the fighting went inside the city is the subject of Chapter 5.

The ring closes

On 24 April troops of Chuikov’s 8th Guards Army, coming from the east, made contact near Schönefeld, southeast of the city, with troops of Konev’s front, sealing off the 9th Army to the south of the capital. On 25 April Zhukov’s 47th Army, coming around from the north, met Lelyushenko’s 4th Guards Tank Army near Ketzin, west of Berlin on the Havel. The city was completely surrounded.

The same day, about 75 miles to the south, Soviet and American troops met on the Elbe at Strehla and Torgau. Germany was cut in two. That meeting is the subject of Chapter 4.

Halbe

The encirclement trapped Busse’s 9th Army, perhaps 80,000 men by a common estimate, along with large numbers of civilian refugees, in the woods and lakes southeast of Berlin around the villages of Halbe and Märkisch Buchholz. Busse was ordered to break through to Berlin. Instead, he tried to break out to the west, to join Wenck’s 12th Army and reach the Elbe and the Americans.

From 24 April to 1 May the 9th Army fought its way west through the forests, through Soviet blocking positions and under constant air and artillery attack. The fighting around Halbe was some of the most savage of the war. Most estimates put German military deaths in the pocket at about 30,000, with several thousand civilians killed alongside them, and Soviet losses at about 20,000. Perhaps 25,000 German soldiers and several thousand civilians got through to Wenck’s lines near Beelitz.

The dead were buried where they fell. After the war a forest cemetery (Waldfriedhof Halbe) was established on the edge of the village, and remains from the surrounding woods were gathered there. It is one of the largest war cemeteries in Germany and holds the graves of more than 20,000 people, including soldiers, civilians, and victims of the Soviet internment camp that operated nearby at Ketschendorf after the war.

Wenck's army

General Walther Wenck, aged 44, commanded the 12th Army, a new formation assembled in April from officer cadets, training units and Reich Labour Service men and placed on the Elbe to face the Americans. On 22 April Keitel ordered him to turn around and attack east to relieve Berlin. Wenck did turn east, but his aim was less to reach the bunker than to open a way out for the 9th Army and for civilians.

His XX Corps attacked on 24 April and by 28–29 April had reached Ferch, on the Schwielowsee near Potsdam, about 20 miles from the city centre. There it stopped. Wenck’s message to the high command that the attack on Berlin could go no further reached the bunker on the night of 29–30 April. The 12th Army held its corridor long enough for survivors of the 9th Army and the garrison of Potsdam to reach it, then fell back to the Elbe. Between 4 and 7 May its soldiers and many thousands of civilians crossed the river at Tangermünde and nearby, over a damaged bridge and in boats, into American captivity.

Gallery · 5 photographs · select to enlarge

The last days outside the ring

Sources and further reading

More from The Lake Norman Brief