Fall of Berlin
The Red Army took Berlin in two weeks in April 1945 at a cost of around 80,000 dead. The assault opened on 16 April on the Seelow Heights, where Zhukov attacked a prepared position with 143 searchlights pointed at the German lines to blind them, which mostly illuminated his own advancing troops in the smoke and dust; the heights cost several days and tens of thousands of casualties. Stalin had set Zhukov and Konev in explicit competition for the city, redrawing the boundary between their fronts mid-battle, which cost lives and got it taken quickly. Some 2.5 million Soviet troops, 6,000 tanks and 40,000 guns were committed against a defence of perhaps a million, including Volkssturm militia of the old and the very young and units that existed only on the maps in the bunker. The fighting inside the city was street by street with flamethrowers and point-blank artillery against a garrison that had orders to hold every building. Hitler killed himself on 30 April with the Soviets a few hundred metres away, having married Eva Braun the night before and dictated a will blaming the Jews for the war. The Reichstag was taken the same day and the flag photograph was staged the following afternoon. The garrison surrendered on 2 May. The mass rape of German women by Soviet troops in Berlin and across eastern Germany is estimated in the hundreds of thousands and was not publicly discussed on either side for decades. The city was then divided into four occupation sectors agreed at Yalta, which is how a capital taken entirely by one army came to be shared. The arrangement produced the blockade of 1948, the wall of 1961, and a divided Germany for forty-five years.
- Year: 1945 CE
- Category: Military
