Berlin in April 1945 had been bombed for more than four years. Large parts of the centre were already in ruins after the heavy American and British raids of early 1945, including the American daylight raid of 3 February that killed about 3,000 people. Between two and a half and three million civilians were still in the city when the Red Army surrounded it, most of them women, children and older men. The battle inside the city lasted about a week.

The defenders

Weidling’s forces were a mixture. His own LVI Panzer Corps, driven back from Seelow, had the remnants of several divisions: the Müncheberg Panzer Division, the 18th and 20th Panzergrenadier Divisions, the 9th Parachute Division and the 11th SS Panzergrenadier Division Nordland, whose ranks included Danish, Norwegian and other Scandinavian volunteers. A few hundred French volunteers of the SS Charlemagne division arrived in the city on 24 April and fought in Neukölln and around the government quarter. There were police battalions, anti-aircraft crews, and the Volkssturm, a militia of men between 16 and 60 raised in late 1944.

Many of the defenders were boys. The Hitler Youth under its leader, Artur Axmann, sent units armed with Panzerfaust anti-tank rockets to hold the Havel bridges at Pichelsdorf and Spandau and other points. Soviet and German accounts both describe children of 14 and 15 firing anti-tank weapons and dying in the streets. The German army had almost no fuel, few tanks and little artillery ammunition;

The storm groups

The Red Army had learned city fighting at Stalingrad, Budapest, Poznań and Königsberg. In Berlin it attacked with assault groups built around a few tanks or self-propelled guns, a section of sappers with explosives and flamethrowers, and a company or two of infantry, supported by heavy artillery firing over open sights. Infantry moved through holes blasted in the walls of apartment blocks rather than along the streets, where German Panzerfausts waited for the tanks. Soviet commanders brought 203 mm howitzers into the streets to fire at buildings at short range.

Soviet combined-arms and tank armies converged on the centre from every side. Chuikov’s 8th Guards Army and Katukov’s 1st Guards Tank Army came from the southeast, crossing the Spree and the Teltow canal and taking Tempelhof airfield on 26 April. The 5th Shock Army under Colonel General Nikolai Berzarin, who on 24 April was named the city’s first Soviet commandant, fought west through Friedrichshain toward Alexanderplatz. The 3rd Shock Army came from the north through Wedding and Moabit toward the Reichstag. Konev’s 3rd Guards Tank Army and 28th Army attacked from the south and southwest until Stalin’s boundary turned them aside.

The 1st Polish Army’s 1st Infantry Division fought alongside the Soviets in the centre, around the Technical University in Charlottenburg and the Tiergarten. On 2 May Polish soldiers raised their national flag on the Victory Column (Siegessäule) in the Tiergarten; 2 May is now Polish Flag Day.

The flak towers

Berlin’s three anti-aircraft towers, built in 1941–42 at the Zoo, in Friedrichshain and in the Humboldthain park, were among the largest concrete structures in Europe. Each was a pair: a gun tower carrying heavy anti-aircraft guns and a smaller fire-control tower. With walls about two to three and a half metres thick, they were almost immune to the artillery of the time. In the last week of April the Zoo tower, armed with 12.8 cm guns, supported the defence of the government quarter, and tens of thousands of civilians crowded into the three towers for shelter.

The towers surrendered only after Weidling’s order on 2 May. After the war the British blew up the Zoo tower in 1947–48; the Friedrichshain towers were blown up and buried under rubble mounds, and the Humboldthain tower was only partly demolished because it stood too close to a railway line. Its remains can be visited on guided tours by the Berliner Unterwelten association.

In the cellars

For most Berliners the battle was a week underground. Families lived in cellars, air-raid shelters, subway stations and the flak towers, coming out to fetch water from street pumps or to queue at the few shops that still had bread. People were killed in those queues by shellfire and by aircraft. Gas, electricity and running water failed in most of the city during the fighting. Many diaries from these days survive, among them the anonymous account published later as A Woman in Berlin, which also records the sexual violence that came with the arrival of Soviet troops, discussed in Chapter 9.

The U-Bahn and S-Bahn tunnels sheltered thousands. On 2 May the north-south S-Bahn tunnel was flooded where it passed under the Landwehr canal, probably by a German demolition charge, though the exact cause and timing have never been established. The death toll was for many years said to be in the thousands; later investigation suggests that the number who drowned was far lower, probably in the low hundreds at most, though many bodies of people killed in the fighting were later recovered from the tunnels.

Gallery · 6 photographs · select to enlarge

The city in the last week

Flying courts-martial

The regime’s terror continued to the end. Roving tribunals of SS men and military police, known as flying courts-martial, searched the cellars and streets for deserters and men who had left their posts. Soldiers and civilians accused of desertion or defeatism were shot or hanged from lampposts and trees, often with placards around their necks. Civilians who hung white flags from their windows risked being shot by German troops. These killings are recorded in many diaries and in postwar trials.

Into the centre

By 27 April the defenders held only a strip of the inner city about ten miles long from east to west and a few miles wide. On 28 April the 3rd Shock Army reached the Spree opposite the government quarter at the Moltke bridge. On the night of 28–29 April its 150th and 171st Rifle Divisions forced the bridge, which German engineers had failed to destroy completely, and fought their way into the Ministry of the Interior, which the Soviet soldiers called “Himmler’s house”. From there, across the open Königsplatz, they could see the Reichstag.

On 29 April Chuikov’s troops crossed the Landwehr canal from the south and began to fight toward the Tiergarten and the Chancellery. In the bunker, Hitler and the people around him could hear the battle overhead. The assault on the Reichstag and the last days in the bunker are told in Chapter 6.

Sources and further reading

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