For all practical purposes, on 20 April, Hitler’s fifty-sixth birthday, the battle for Berlin had been decided. Even as long-range artillery from Zhukov’s Third Shock Army brought the eastern suburbs under fire, to the south forces from Konev’s First Ukrainian Front were rapidly approaching the city, having successfully broken the Neisse-Spree defenses at Cottbus. Although Konev, too, had encountered unexpectedly fierce resistance, his troops, supported by effective artillery fire, had been much more adept than Zhukov’s at piercing the German defenses. On the first day, 16 April, they had not only forced the Neisse but also penetrated the first line of German defenses and punched a mile into the second German belt. German counterattacks the next day were beaten back as the Soviet advance reached a depth of ten miles. By the end of the nineteenth, Konev had achieved an operational breakthrough, with his forward tank units now racing some twenty to thirty miles to the northwest, in the direction of Berlin. On that same 20 April, Konev’s panzers cut the central nervous system of the German military, seizing the combined command center of the OKW/OKH at Zossen, thus eliminating any effective control over German military operations. They also penetrated into the southern suburbs of the city itself. Konev’s success in part stemmed from more favorable ground on which to operate as well as a curious misjudgment by the OKH, which had believed that the main axis of Konev’s advance would be to the southwest, in the direction of Dresden and the industrial areas of Saxony and Bohemia, and, thus, had positioned the strongest defenses on the right flank of Army Group Center.39
In these days, the only German success was registered in the north, where Rokossovsky’s Second Belorussian Front struggled to force its way across the lower Oder south of Stettin. Although the woefully understrength Third Panzer Army under General Hasso von Manteuffel had been able to limit Russian attempts, begun with the usual probing attacks on 16 April and then widened to full-scale assaults on the eighteenth, to secure and expand bridgeheads on the west bank of the river, even these tactical victories were misread in Berlin. Both Hitler and Krebs convinced themselves that they were not the last desperate efforts of a beaten army but signaled the possibility of building a stable defensive front east of Berlin. Inexorably, however, Manteuffel’s forces were ground down as the advance of Zhukov’s units to the south opened a gap that he could not cover and offered the enemy the possibility of a deep breakthrough to the west. By the twenty-fifth, the same day that troops of Zhukov’s First Belorussian Front and Konev’s First Ukrainian Front closed the ring around Berlin and that American and Russian troops met at Strehla and Torgau on the Elbe, Rokossovsky’s units were also poised for their own decisive breakthrough. Perhaps nothing symbolized so well the wreckage of the once-proud Wehrmacht than this union of its enemies, which split Germany in two. Although the official celebration of this epochal event that shifted the balance of power away from Europe for the first time in three centuries took place at Torgau, fifty miles downriver from Dresden, the initial encounter had actually taken place to the north at the small town of Strehla. There, just before noon, advance American and Soviet patrols had met amid the gruesome carnage of a German refugee trek. The banks of the Elbe were littered with the corpses of dozens of women, children, and old men, victims not of their enemies but of their own troops. Desperate to escape the oncoming Soviets, German soldiers had blown up the makeshift pontoon bridge even as civilians still streamed across. As many as four hundred might have been blown to bits or drowned.40
By this time, Hitler’s hopes of forming an effective defense of Berlin or of drawing the Soviets into a protracted, Stalingrad-like struggle for the city had evaporated. Although some local defensive successes on both the northern and the southern ends of the front, near Stettin and Görlitz, encouraged the delusional thinking so typical in the Führer’s bunker in these days, seemingly more realistic hopes had been placed in the possibility of a successful urban struggle. After all, Berlin would easily be the largest city to be conquered by an enemy army in the war, not only in terms of population, but also with regard to physical size. With a population swollen to 4.5 million people, and sprawling over an immense area, the city seemed perfect for prolonged urban warfare. Not only did it have an extensive subway system and underground network of canals that would facilitate troop movements, but many housing blocks, as well as the numerous flak towers that dotted the city, had already been fortified as strongpoints. In addition, British Bomber Command’s futile effort to create another Hamburg in Berlin had resulted in much more extensive destruction of residential areas than industrial complexes; the rubble-clogged streets of these neighborhoods had, thus, already been turned into potential strongpoints for urban fighting. Finally, the failure of Zhukov’s offensive to trap and destroy German forces east of Berlin meant that the possibility still existed for them to be drawn back into the city. Although Zhukov had in February already ordered that special storm troop units be formed for just such an eventuality, both he and the Stavka understood just how costly such fighting could be. Nor did Stalin relish the prospect of being tied down in protracted urban fighting since, in his paranoid vision, any time won by the enemy gave his Western allies the further chance to do the deal with Hitler that he expected and feared.41
Still, none of this came to pass for the simple reason that the Germans no longer possessed the strength to alter their fate. Although Hitler and Krebs in the Führer’s bunker continued to issue orders that were completely out of touch with reality and were regarded by their recipients with incredulity, the remnants of the Wehrmacht fought on more like a headless chicken than the formidable force of old. Even as between 21 and 25 April the Russians worked to complete the encirclement of Berlin, Hitler’s attempt to form a defense line, and, thus, his refusal to allow the intact units of the Ninth Army to withdraw, resulted in their being cut off from Berlin, isolated, and encircled. By now, too, the Führer’s seemingly endless stream of orders for shattered or nonexistent units to launch relief attacks toward Berlin were simply ignored by his field commanders, who thought increasingly in terms of fighting their way to the west to surrender to the Americans rather than the Soviets. By the time the ring had closed around Berlin, on 25 April, the Ninth Army too found itself surrounded. Rather than fight its way north into the city, however, its commander, General Busse, decided instead to seek a breakout with his remaining forces, perhaps 150,000–200,000 men, to the west and the Elbe. Beginning on the night of 25–26 April, and continuing over the next week, the troops of the Ninth Army fought desperately in a dense forest—a “dreadful mash of tortured human bodies,” according to the Soviet writer Konstantin Simonov—against fierce Soviet attacks to make it westward. On 1 May, in a last great effort, some troops and civilian refugees—with their numbers estimated at anywhere from 20,000 to 40,000—managed to reach their goal; 60,000 of their mates had fallen in the struggle, while roughly 120,000 went into captivity.42
The decisive battle for Berlin had been conducted outside the city. Despite Hitler’s hopes and Zhukov’s failures, what went on inside the city, violent and destructive though it was, amounted to not much more than a contested mop-up operation as the Germans had fewer than fifty thousand combat troops and perhaps forty thousand Volkssturm and Hitler Youth in the city. The surreal scenes in the bunker and the Führer’s periodic outbreaks of astonishing rage and hatred were little more than black comedy. By 30 April, Soviet troops, deliberately attacking along narrow sectors rather than on a broad front, had cut the defending Germans into four parts, then had begun smashing each piece in systematic fashion, using their storm troops, supported by artillery firing point-blank, to clear the defenders from fortified apartment blocks. Although especially heavy fighting raged in the subways, by 29 April they had cleared some three hundred blocks and, against fanatic resistance, reached the Reichstag building in the heart of Berlin. At 1:00 A.M. the next morning, 30 April, Hitler heard the final news that all attempts to relieve the city had failed. Shortly after 6:00 A.M., he held a last conference with his military commanders, at which he was informed that Soviet troops were near the Reich Chancellery and that the area could be held for no more than another twenty-four hours. Later that afternoon, accompanied by his new bride, the Führer committed suicide, following which his body was partially burned in a shell crater just outside the bunker. The next day, 1 May, troops of the First Belorussian and First Ukrainian Fronts joined just south of the Reichstag. Early the next morning, at 6:30 A.M., the commander of the city garrison, General Helmuth Weidling, capitulated with all resistance ended by that evening.43