Berlin had gone down, not, as the Führer had hoped, in a Wagnerian burst of glory that would serve as an inspiration for future generations, but in a ragged wave of destruction. Fierce resistance mingled with plundering; troops fighting desperately in cellars contrasted with corpses hanging in the streets, the work even at this late date of flying courts-martial. Scenes of horror were commonplace, but the fighting seemed strangely detached, with none of the urgency of Stalingrad. This was not the rallying point but the death knell of the Wehrmacht. It had finally been crushed. The Soviet victory, however, had once more been costly. In the three-week Berlin operation (16 April–2 May), the Soviets lost over 360,000 casualties, of whom slightly more than 78,000 were killed, along with 2,000 armored vehicles destroyed. Total German losses are not known with any precision, the Russians claiming over 450,000 killed on the three fronts involved in the Berlin operation alone. This is certainly an exaggeration since the best estimate of German deaths arrives at an April–May total of 376,000 for all areas of fighting, although perhaps 125,000 German civilians died in the battle for Berlin (far more than in the Allied air raids on the city). For those Germans who had survived the fighting, the reality was both absurd and sobering. Hitler was dead, the Third Reich had vanished like a ghost, with hardly anyone taking notice, but the survivors faced “chaos”—“total and impenetrable chaos.”44
The fall of Berlin did not, however, end the fighting. As German forces struggled on to allow “valuable German people” to reach safety in the west, Stalin seemed ever more consumed by his paranoia that, at this late stage, his Western allies would still betray him and make a deal with the Germans. Moreover, he showed every determination not to be cheated of his hard-won victory and to acquire as much of value as he could. In both these impulses, one can, perhaps, see the seeds of the future Cold War, but, at the time, the more immediate concern was with the Red Army’s old nemesis, Army Group Center, which had come so agonizingly close to conquering Moscow. Ironically, although it had been shattered in the summer of 1944, it now formed a relatively intact force of over 600,000 troops guarding Saxony and Bohemia, the last industrial areas controlled by the Reich. Paradoxically as well, its final destruction would come not in Germany but in Czechoslovakia, one of Hitler’s first victims. Soviet attacks in March and April against the right wing of the army group had made disappointingly little progress, but, spurred perhaps by General Omar Bradley’s offer on 1 May of American assistance in liberating Czechoslovakia and the presence of Patton’s U.S. Third Army poised on the border with Bavaria, Stalin now ordered the First, Second, and Fourth Ukrainian Fronts to accelerate their advance.45
Even as Zhukov’s forces continued mopping-up operations in Berlin, the Soviets scrambled to regroup for the Prague Operation, which, with a combined force of over 2 million men and sixteen hundred tanks, was designed as a rapid thrust directly on the Czech capital. Although the attack was not intended to begin until 7 May, its timing was altered in response to an uprising in Prague on the morning of the fifth as well as reports of local German withdrawals. As Czech resistance fighters engaged in bitter street battles with German troops, they also made an appeal by radio for Allied assistance. With American troops already in Pilsen, just to the west, Stalin spurred Konev to launch his attack as quickly as possible. Konev responded by launching his strike from the north on the sixth. Within two days, his troops had seized Görlitz, Bautzen, and Dresden and, on the ninth, linked up with advancing Second Ukrainian Front forces for the final drive on Prague. On the night of 8–9 May, with the Western allies already having accepted formal German surrender and a further ceremony to be held in Berlin that day, Konev ordered two special tank detachments to race for the city. Over the next few days, from the ninth to the eleventh, Soviet forces ended the fighting in Prague, which had cost the Czechs some three thousand dead and ten thousand wounded, linked up with forces of the U.S. Third Army east of Pilsen, and accepted the surrender of the more than 600,000 German troops remaining in the Czech pocket. Perhaps fittingly, even at the end of this most destructive of wars, this last military operation, at least three days of which had taken place after the formal end of hostilities, had cost the Soviets twelve thousand killed and over forty thousand wounded. The spiral of violence unleashed by Hitler on 22 June 1941 had now run its course, but only after a final three-week campaign, the Berlin Operation, that resulted in another round of appalling Soviet casualties and the nearly complete destruction of the German capital.46
Despite the widespread perception in the West that the Normandy invasion was the event that defeated Nazi Germany, the real war had always taken place in the east as any look at relevant statistics indicates. In 1941, three-fourths of all German troops were fighting in the east, and, from December 1941 to November 1942, over 9 million troops on both sides fought in Russia, while in North Africa a relatively small British force contested Rommel’s Afrika Korps (which had relatively few German troops in any case). In November 1942, the British defeated Axis forces at El Alamein, inflicting sixty thousand casualties; that same month, the Soviets at Stalingrad surrounded and eventually destroyed four times that number. In July 1943, while over 2 million German troops fought at Kursk and in Ukraine and over 5 million on the entire eastern front, Allied forces invaded Sicily and expelled sixty thousand Germans from the island. Even after the Allied invasion of Italy, in October 1943, 63 percent of total Wehrmacht forces fought in the east, and, until the Allied invasion at Normandy, the Germans largely considered Western Europe as a reserve area. Nor did Normandy do much to change the proportions of troops on the various fronts since, in August 1944, roughly two-thirds of German troops were still engaged in the east.47
Casualty figures also reinforce this reality. In March 1945, the Ostheer had lost a total of 6,172,373 dead, missing, wounded, or taken prisoner, or almost exactly double its strength on 22 June 1941. Moreover, from June 1941, in no month of the war did the Germans suffer more deaths in the west than in the east, with December 1944 (the Ardennes Offensive) the only month that came close. Even then, the Germans suffered 85,000 deaths in the east (during a “quiet” period) compared to 74,363 on all other fronts. In the decisive months of June–August 1944, when the Wehrmacht was being torn asunder, the Ostheer lost 589,425 killed compared to 156,726 on all other fronts combined. Total Wehrmacht casualties in World War II have been estimated at over 11,300,000, including, by the most thorough calculation, 5,318,000 military dead. Of these, 2,743,000 (or 51.6 percent) died on the Ostfront through December 1944, while another 1,230,000 (23.1 percent) were killed during the Endkampf, the final months of the war, again with the great majority (at least two-thirds, if not more, or roughly 811,000) fighting the Russians. A total of 3,554,000 Germans (67 percent of total losses) thus died in combat with the Red Army. In addition, of the roughly 459,000 German prisoners of war who died in captivity, the great majority (363,000) perished in Soviet camps. That pushes the number killed by Soviet actions to at least 3,917,000 (74 percent of the total). By contrast, 340,000 German soldiers (6.4 percent) died in the western theater, with another 151,000 (2.8 percent) killed in Italy. Even if we assume that one-third of the deaths during the Endkampf were inflicted in the west (419,000), that means that 910,000 (17 percent) of total German military deaths were attributable to Anglo-American forces. If one adds the 138,000 deaths suffered by the navy, most in the Battle of the Atlantic, along with the remaining 96,000 who died in captivity, that brings the total of military deaths accounted for by the Western allies to approximately 1,048,000 (21.5 percent). Rather more sobering, anywhere from 360,000 to 465,000 civilians died in Allied bombing raids, a number roughly equivalent to the military deaths inflicted by the Western allies in Italy and the western theater. Almost four of every five German military deaths thus came at the hands of the Red Army. Certainly, no one today can visit any cemetery in Germany, and definitely no military cemetery, without being given a stark visual reminder of this reality: row on row of names with the sobering inscription “died in Russia” or “missing in Russia” next to them.48