Eastern Front · Soviet Union and Poland vs Germany
Battle of Berlin
16 April 1945 – 2 May 1945
Three Soviet fronts with 2.5 million men attacked from the Oder and Neisse, encircled Berlin and fought through it street by street. Hitler killed himself in the Reich Chancellery bunker on 30 April, and the garrison surrendered on 2 May.
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Day by day
— Seelow
Zhukov opens at 03:00 from the Kustrin bridgehead with a bombardment by 9,000 guns and 143 searchlights turned on the German positions; the light blinds his own infantry in the dust and smoke and the Seelow Heights hold. Konev crosses the Neisse at Forst behind a smokescreen and does better. Between them they have 2.5 million men against about a million.
— Through
The heights are taken on the third day at a cost of some 30,000 Soviet dead. Konev is already sixty kilometres beyond the Neisse and Stalin has told him to turn his tank armies north for Berlin. The Ninth Army is left holding a line that no longer joins anything.
— The ring and the Elbe
Zhukov's and Konev's spearheads meet at Ketzin west of Potsdam on the 25th and Berlin is surrounded. The Ninth Army, cut off in the forests round Halbe, spends the next week trying to break west to Wenck's Twelfth Army. The same day patrols of the 69th Infantry Division and the 58th Guards Rifle Division shake hands at Torgau on the Elbe.
— The Zitadelle
The defenders are squeezed into a strip along the east-west axis about fifteen kilometres long and three wide, defended by the last of the LVI Panzer Corps, police, Volkssturm and a French SS battalion. Tempelhof was lost on the 26th and Gatow on the 25th, so nothing can fly in. Weidling asks for permission to break out and is refused.
— The Reichstag
The 150th and 171st Rifle Divisions cross the Konigsplatz under fire and fight room by room into the Reichstag; a banner goes up on the roof late that night, and the building is not wholly cleared until the next morning. In the Fuhrerbunker three hundred metres away Hitler shoots himself at about 15:30 and Eva Braun takes poison. Their bodies are burned in the Chancellery garden.
— Surrender
Goebbels and his wife kill themselves in the Chancellery garden on the evening of the 1st after poisoning their six children. Weidling crosses the lines at dawn and surrenders the garrison at 06:00; the order to cease fire goes out over loudspeakers through the morning. About 134,000 men come out of the ruins, and some 80,000 Soviet soldiers died taking the city.
