The Oder valley west of Küstrin is a flat stretch of meadows, drainage ditches and small villages, about ten miles wide. On its western edge the land rises abruptly into a ridge, the Seelow Heights, 30 to 50 metres above the valley floor. In April 1945 the ridge was the last natural obstacle between the Red Army and Berlin, 50 miles to the west. The battle for it lasted from 16 to 19 April and was one of the costliest Soviet attacks of the war.

The ground and the defence

Heinrici expected the attack and knew roughly where it would fall. His great fear was the Soviet artillery, which in the summer of 1944 had smashed whole German divisions in their forward positions before the infantry attacked. His answer was a technique he had used before: on the eve of the attack he pulled most of the troops out of the forward line on the valley floor and back to a second line on the heights, leaving the first salvoes to fall on positions that were largely empty.

Behind the ridge, the 9th Army had built three defensive belts. The army had about 14 divisions, many of them understrength, along with several hundred tanks and assault guns and every anti-aircraft gun that could be brought to the front and used against ground targets. Many of its soldiers had little training; others were veterans of the retreat across Poland. The LVI Panzer Corps of General Helmuth Weidling, which would later defend Berlin itself, held the sector directly in front of Seelow.

The barrage and the searchlights

Zhukov had concentrated an extraordinary weight of artillery in the Küstrin bridgehead and along the river: in the main breakthrough sectors, guns and mortars stood at densities of more than 250 per kilometre of front. The barrage began at 0300 Berlin time on 16 April, 0500 in Moscow, and lasted about half an hour. It was followed by an attack in darkness by infantry and tanks, lit by searchlights that Zhukov had gathered for the purpose; the usual figure is 143.

The searchlights did not work as intended. The smoke and dust thrown up by the barrage reflected the light back, and many Soviet soldiers later described being blinded or silhouetted rather than helped. More important, the barrage had fallen mostly on the empty forward line. When the infantry reached the foot of the ridge, the German second line on the heights was largely intact, and its guns fired down on troops crowded in the wet valley.

The Haupt canal, a drainage channel at the foot of the ridge, was a serious obstacle to tanks; the ground on either side was soft after the spring thaw. The Soviet assault divisions of the 8th Guards Army attacked along the Küstrin–Seelow road and the railway, and against the villages strung along the foot of the heights.

Tanks in the mud

By early afternoon on 16 April it was clear the attack was not going to plan. Zhukov, under pressure from Stalin to produce quick results, ordered his two tank armies, the 1st Guards Tank Army of Colonel General Mikhail Katukov and the 2nd Guards Tank Army of Colonel General Semyon Bogdanov, into the battle before the infantry had broken through. The result was congestion. Hundreds of tanks, guns and lorries jammed the few roads across the valley, under fire from the heights, and the infantry and armour of different armies became intermingled.

Stalin was unimpressed. When Zhukov reported that evening that the heights had not been taken, Stalin told him that he would allow Konev to turn his tank armies north toward Berlin. The pressure on Zhukov was intense, and it shaped the way he drove his commanders for the rest of the operation.

Gallery · 5 photographs · select to enlarge

The Oder front in April 1945

Konev on the Neisse

To the south, Konev’s 1st Ukrainian Front had a much easier start. His attack across the Neisse began at 0615 on 16 April, after a barrage of about two and a half hours, under a smokescreen laid along about 240 miles of front so that the Germans could not tell where the real crossings were. Assault battalions crossed in boats and on improvised bridges near Forst and Muskau, and by the end of the first day engineers had bridges up for tanks.

Konev’s tank armies, the 3rd Guards Tank Army under Colonel General Pavel Rybalko and the 4th Guards Tank Army under Colonel General Dmitry Lelyushenko, reached the Spree near Spremberg on 17–18 April and crossed it. Once through, they were in open country with little in front of them. On the night of 17 April Stalin approved Konev’s request to send them north toward the southern suburbs of Berlin. The race between the two marshals had become a real one. Chapter 3 follows Konev’s tanks to Zossen and the ring around the city.

Taking the heights

On 17 April the 8th Guards Army and the 1st Guards Tank Army fought their way into Seelow itself and the ground immediately around it. The Germans counterattacked with their reserves, including the remnants of the Müncheberg Panzer Division and SS formations brought up from the rear, but they could not hold. The 18th was another day of very heavy fighting on the second and third defensive belts. North of Seelow, the 3rd and 5th Shock Armies and the 47th Army also pushed forward, while the 1st Polish Army fought its way across the Oder further north.

On 19 April the German front broke. The 9th Army’s line split, with its northern wing driven back toward the outer suburbs of Berlin and its southern wing, still anchored on Frankfurt (Oder), left in place as the Soviet armies swung around it. Müncheberg fell. The way to the eastern suburbs of the capital was open, and on 20 April the long-range guns of the 3rd Shock Army fired the first shells into the city.

The cost

Casualty figures for the Seelow Heights are disputed, because the official Soviet loss tables cover the whole Berlin operation rather than individual battles. The figure most often given for Soviet deaths in the battle for the heights is about 30,000, against about 12,000 German dead. Whatever the exact numbers, the four days on the Oder were among the costliest of the whole operation, and they came in the last month of the war.

Seelow is now a quiet market town in Brandenburg. The Seelow Heights Memorial (Gedenkstätte Seelower Höhen) stands on the ridge, with a Soviet soldier’s statue and a cemetery built in 1945, a museum and a collection of Soviet guns and armour outside. Soviet and German soldiers killed in the battle are still being found in the fields of the Oder valley; the German War Graves Commission and local volunteers recover remains every year. The losses of the operation as a whole are discussed in Chapter 9.

Sources and further reading

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