April 16, 1945 – World War II: The start of the Battle of Berlin, with one million Soviet troops attacking the heavily fortified Seelow Heights
On April 16, 1945, the Soviet Red Army launched its offensive, opening a preliminary massive artillery bombardment that landed on the mostly undefended banks of the Oder River. Soviet ground forces then advanced, with much of the heaviest fighting centered on the strongly fortified Seelow Heights, where Marshal Zhukov’s 1st Belorussian Front, comprising 1 million troops and 20,000 tanks advanced head on to German 9th Army’s 100,000 troops and 1,200 tanks. By the fourth day, the Soviets had broken through, sustaining heavy losses of 30,000 killed and 800 tanks destroyed, against 12,000 German casualties.
The series of massive Soviet Counter-Offensives recaptured lost Soviet territory and then swept through Eastern and Central Europe into Germany.(Taken from Soviet Counter-Attack and Defeat of Germany – Wars of the 20th Century – World War II in Europe)
Berlin and Defeat of
Germany The Soviet offensive into Germany centered on Stalin’s two main
objectives: that the Red Army was to rapidly push far to the west as possible
to beat the Western Allies into capturing as much German territory as possible;
and that Berlin was to fall into Soviet hands, first, to deal with Hitler and
second, to gain possession of Germany’s nuclear research program. For the campaign, Stalin tasked three Soviet
Army Groups, together with the Red Army’s best commanders: 1st Belorussian
Front led by Marshal Georgy Zhukov; 2nd Belorussian Front led by Marshal
Konstantin Rokossovsky, to the north of Zhukov’s forces; and 1st Ukrainian
Front led by Marshal Ivan Konev, to the south of Zhukov’s forces. The combined forces were massive: 2.5 million
troops, including 200,000 Polish soldiers, 6,200 tanks, 42,000 artillery
pieces, and 7,500 planes.
For the defense of outer Berlin, the Wehrmacht mustered 800,000
troops, 1,500 armored vehicles, 9,300 artillery pieces, and 2,200 planes. The main defensive lines for the eastern
approaches to the city were located 56 miles (90 km) at Seelow Heights
and manned by German 9th Army. The
German military had taken advantage of the delayed Soviet offensive on Berlin to construct
these defenses. The Germans positioned
these lines 10 miles (17 km) west of the Oder River,
which would prove significant in the coming battle.
On April 16, 1945, the Red Army launched its offensive,
opening a preliminary massive artillery bombardment that landed on the mostly
undefended banks of the Oder
River. Soviet ground forces then advanced, with much
of the heaviest fighting centered on the strongly fortified Seelow Heights,
where Marshal Zhukov’s 1st Belorussian Front, comprising 1 million troops and
20,000 tanks advanced head on to German 9th Army’s 100,000 troops and 1,200
tanks. By the fourth day, the Soviets
had broken through, sustaining heavy losses of 30,000 killed and 800 tanks
destroyed, against 12,000 German casualties.
To the south, Marshal Konev’s 1st Ukrainian Front also broke
through, with lead elements advancing through open country to the west which
would eventually meet up with U.S. Army troops at the Elbe
River, and armored units advancing
rapidly toward Berlin. A race now developed between Marshals Zhukov
and Konev on who would capture Berlin
first.
Marshall Konev’s offensive trapped German 9th Army in a
large pocket west of Frankfurt. In a pincers movement, forces of Zhukov and
Konev advanced through the periphery of Berlin,
closing shut to the rear and encircling the city on April 24. Meanwhile, Marshall Rokossovsky’s 2nd
Ukrainian Front positioned north of Berlin, thrusting on April 20, broke
through German 3rd Panzer Army at Stettin, and advanced rapidly west, soon
meeting up with elements of the British Army at Stralsund in the Baltic coast.
On April 24, the battle for the inner city of Berlin began,
with some 1.5 million Soviet troops facing Berlin Defence Area units, a motley
of Wehrmacht units (45,000 troops), Berlin police, Hitler Youth, and the Nazi
Party’s Home Guard “Volkssturm” militia (40,000 armed civilians). Hitler, who directed the battle from his
underground bunker in Berlin, and who yet believed that the war was not lost,
ordered German 12th Army (deployed to confront the Western Allies) to head for
Berlin and link up with the trapped German 9th Army, and for the combined units
to encircle and destroy the two Soviet Army Groups in Berlin, which was an
utterly impossible task. German 12th
Army ran into a Soviet stonewall and was forced back, but battered elements of
German 9th Army (some 30,000 of the original 200,000 troops) maneuvered through
gaps in the Soviet cordon, and both formations retreated to the west and
surrendered to the Western Allies.
By late April 1945, for the Germans, the battle of Berlin and the wider war in Europe
and World War II were lost. On April 30,
Hitler took his own life in his underground bunker below the Reich Chancellery
in Berlin
just as Soviet troops were closing in.
On May 2, Berlin
fell as the city’s garrison surrendered to the Red Army.
Admiral Karl Doenitz, head of the German Navy, took over as
head of state and president of Germany, succeeding as such as mandated in
Hitler’s last will and testament. With
the Third Reich falling apart and the Wehrmacht defeated, Admiral Doenitz was
determined to end the war – as quickly as possible with the Western Allied
Powers, but to delay as much with the Soviet Union. The idea was to allow the many scattered
German units in the east and facing the Red Army to turn around and make a
fighting retreat to surrender to the Western Allies. Also, troops and civilians along the Baltic
coastal areas would be allowed time to evacuate to Germany. Immediately, a spate of partial capitulations
occurred in the west: on May 2 (signed on April 29), German forces (1 million
troops) in Italy and western Austria surrendered to British forces; on May 4,
German forces (1 million troops) in northwest Germany, the Netherlands, and
Denmark surrendered to British and Canadian forces; on May 5, German forces in
Bavaria and southwest Germany surrendered to U.S. forces. At the same time, fighting continued in the
east, although encircled German forces in Breslau
surrendered on May 6, ending a nearly three-month siege.
General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander, then
saw through the German ploy, and being greatly concerned that the Soviets might
suspect that Germany wanted to make a separate peace with the Western Allies
(which in fact was what Admiral Doenitz intended), ordered that no partial
capitulations would be accepted, and Germany must unconditionally surrender all
its forces.
On May 7, 1945, on Admiral Doenitz’s order, General Alfred
Jodl, the German Armed Forces Chief of Operations, signed the instrument of
unconditional surrender of all German forces at Allied headquarters in Reims, France. A few hours later, Stalin expressed his
disapproval of certain aspects of the surrender document, as well as its
location. At his insistence, another
signing of Germany’s
unconditional surrender was held in Berlin
by General Wilhelm Keitel, head of German Armed Forces, with particular
attention placed on the Soviet contribution, and in front of General Zhukov,
whose forces had captured the German capital.
Shortly thereafter, most of the remaining German units
surrendered to nearby Allied commands, including German Army Group Courland in
the “Courland Pocket”, Second Army Heiligenbeil and Danzig beachheads, German
units on the Hel Peninsula in the Vistula delta, Greek islands of Crete,
Rhodes, and the Dodecanese, on Alderney Island in the English Channel, and in
Atlantic France at Saint-Nazaire, La Rochelle, and Lorient.
Some units defied the surrender order for a few more days,
including German Army
Group Center
(with some 600,000 troops) in Bohemia and Moravia, which since May 5 had been trying to put down an
uprising by the Czech resistance in Prague. But with the Red Army (comprising 1.7 million
troops) soon joining the battle, the Germans made a futile attempt to fight its
way to the west to surrender to U.S. forces.
However, German Army Group E in Croatia,
along with the collaborationist Chetnik militia, succeeded in breaking through
Tito’s Yugoslav Partisan lines to reach Italy, where they surrendered to
the British command.
