Robin Oomkes, Kreuzberged and Marcel Krueger provide a local timeline of WW2’s Battle of Berlin…

“The events […] are distant and strange, but they happened not very long ago, to that woman sitting right in front of me, insisting I take another slice of bread and butter and a fresh cup of tea.” – Anna Reid, Leningrad

In the spring of 1945, after six years of war, the last major battle in Europe was fought between the Soviet Union and Hitler’s Third Reich.

The Battle of Berlin, one of the most bitterly contested offensives of the entire war, saw a gigantic army of 2.5 million men unleashed in a deadly assault against the remnants of the Wehrmacht—an assault designed to crush Nazi Germany once and for all.

For the Soviet Union, Berlin was the ultimate prize, the city being the heart of the Reich and the place where Adolf Hitler was hiding in his bunker. If Berlin could be captured by the Red Army before English and American troops reached it, most of Central and Eastern Europe could be brought under Communist control.

For Adolf Hitler and his most fanatical followers, there seemed to be still some misguided hope to defeat the Red Army at the gates of the capital. In reality, the Nazi’s final defiant and vain gestures served only to prolong a bloody and horrific battle: in the burning ruins of Berlin, hundreds of thousands of Russian and German lives were lost, and the resultant Soviet victory would divide the city, and the continent, for the next 44 years.

Both legacies, the War and the Iron Curtain, have shaped, and continue to shape in some ways, the contemporary city many of us call home today.

April 16th 1945: Battle of Seelow Heights

by Robin Oomkes

From their positions on the Oder-Neisse Line, Soviet 1st Belorussian and Soviet 1st Ukrainian Fronts begin their final push on Berlin. Hitler’s order of the day, dated on the previous day, is released to all German troops, ordering that anyone found fleeing in the face of the Soviet attack is to be arrested or shot.

Even with half of Germany already occupied by Allied forces in February 1945 and no realistic hope of a military victory, Adolf Hitler showed no signs of surrender, preferring to fight to the bitter end, bringing country and population down with him.

From September 1944 onwards, Goebbels finally got the “Total War” that he had demanded in his February 1943 Sport Palast speech. It meant that all of German society was now drafted into the war effort, including previously exempt workers in sectors like postal services, the railways, theaters, and newspapers.

Most workers thus “released” were sent to the front. Those too old or young for active service were put in the Volkssturm, an inexperienced, under-armed militia charged with defending the Fatherland against the approaching Allies.

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