On April 16, 1945, the last large-scale offensive operation of the Great Patriotic War began - Berlin. It lasted 23 days and ended with the fall of the lair of the Nazi empire. The last, very powerful enemy formations and reserves were destroyed.
The term “Berlin Operation” means the conduct of several offensive operations at once (Stettin-Rostok, Seelow-Berlin, Cottbus-Potsdam, Stremberg-Torgau and Brandenburg-Ratenow) by the forces of three fronts (1st Belorussian G.K. Zhukov, 2nd Belorussian K.K. Rokossovsky and 1st Ukrainian I.S. Konev), during which Soviet troops broke through enemy defenses to a depth of 100 to 220 km.
The Supreme High Command headquarters began developing the assault on the capital of the Reich back in November 1944, and its details were constantly being refined taking into account the experience of the Vistula-Oder, East Prussian and Pomeranian operations.
At the same time, close monitoring of the situation on the “second front” was carried out. In particular, at the end of March - beginning of April, the armies of the allies in the anti-Hitler coalition reached the Rhine and began to cross it.
The High Command of the Allied Forces planned to capture the Ruhr industrial region, reach the Elbe and develop an offensive in the Berlin direction. At the same time, in the south, American and French troops were tasked with suppressing enemy resistance in the areas of Stuttgart and Munich, as well as occupying the central regions of Czechoslovakia and Austria.
At the Crimean Conference, the border of the Soviet occupation zone was determined west of Berlin, but the Allies, not encountering strong German resistance, planned to launch the Berlin operation themselves. On top of that, Stalin seriously feared a separate conspiracy between Truman and Churchill with Hitler, the military or the Reichsfuehrer SS to open the German capital to US, British and French troops.
Today it is already obvious that there were no prerequisites for the capture of Berlin by the Anglo-Americans. The collapse of the German front whetted Churchill's appetite. The British prime minister wrote to Roosevelt about the need for a speedy breakthrough to the east and the capture of Berlin. However, this plan met with opposition from Allied commander Dwight Eisenhower. “Ike” noted that a headlong rush to Berlin with exposed flanks would greatly complicate the supply of the attackers, and on the way to Berlin it was necessary to defeat the group encircled in the Ruhr and prevent the Wehrmacht from retreating to the so-called Alpine fortress in Bavaria and western Austria.
Thus, the plans of the Allies and the Nazis did not coincide very much so that everything would turn out favorably for the honorable surrender of Berlin to the armies of the Anglo-Americans. Until the end of the war, the Germans tried to impose their will on the allies and were not going to wait for them to deign to bring up their troops.
However, Hitler’s military leaders did not spare manpower and equipment in order to delay and force Soviet soldiers to get stuck in countless sieges of every German town they encountered, every settlement on the way to Berlin.
For this purpose, the Nazis created a chain of “festungs” - fortresses, whose task was to disperse forces and exhaust the attackers through a long siege and assault. Perhaps the most striking examples of such a German strategy are the “festungs” of Königsberg, Poznan, and Breslau.
Fascist propaganda poster
Poznan, at that time part of the Third Reich, was a city much smaller than Berlin, but it became a tough nut to crack for Soviet soldiers. The assault on Poznań lasted for a month, and our losses amounted to 4000 people. The city was defended by a 25-strong German garrison. In the end, the city was taken, the garrison personnel were partially destroyed, partially captured, however, despite the result, precious time was lost.
Therefore, the advancing Soviet units simply bypassed Breslau and some other German fortified cities, assigning assault units to take them.
The very fact of the entry of the Soviet Army into German territory gave additional aggression to the defending Nazis. The German command managed to concentrate from 700 to 800 thousand soldiers and officers, a large amount of artillery to cover Berlin, and form a tank fist from the last reserve. General Busse's 9th Army alone was given 450 tanks - Panthers and Royal Tigers.
The relatively small number of German tanks assembled near Berlin was due to a serious miscalculation of the Nazi command, which threw the main tank reserves into the defense of Budapest in an attempt to retain the last oil fields in southern Hungary. There was nothing left for the dying German military machine to plug the emerging gaps on the Oder front.
In addition to the obvious motive - the defense of the German capital - the main idea of the defense of Berlin in April 1945 was formulated by General Busse, whose army directly covered the fascist lair.
“We will consider our task completed if American tanks hit us in the back,” Busse said.
With the exception of a handful of Nazi fanatics, the overwhelming majority of the military-political leadership of Germany was well aware that the war was lost, and therefore set a task for themselves and their subordinates: the demarcation line should pass along the Oder River. This would allow them to avoid retribution for atrocities on the territory of our country. It is important that this task forced even those officers who were in opposition to Hitler to give their all and serve the cannibalistic regime to the last.
There is a common myth that the Supreme High Command Headquarters should not have forced the Berlin operation and stormed a well-fortified city of three million, surrounded by an 800-strong group of Wehrmacht, Volkssturm and SS troops. They say it was worth waiting, and then Berlin itself would have fallen into Zhukov’s palm, like an overripe fruit.
However, in addition to the already mentioned political motives, Stalin and his soldiers faced another most important task - to end the war as quickly as possible, because every day it claimed tens of thousands of human lives, created orphans, poverty and hunger, and robbed the national economy of vital financial and material resources. resources.
In addition, the forced capture of Berlin would not have allowed the 200-strong group of General Busse, who was stationed on the Oder front and the Küstrin bridgehead, to join the German troops already deployed on the approaches to the city, as well as to enter the city with the remnants of the defeated Wehrmacht units scattered in the forests and rural outskirts.
The fall of Berlin itself should have produced (and did) a domino effect, followed by a cessation of hostilities on both the Eastern and Western fronts, a chain reaction of capitulations of the desperately resisting “festung” garrisons and a 250-strong group locked in Courland Wehrmacht, which the Germans themselves jokingly called “the world’s largest camp for armed prisoners of war.”
The fall of Berlin was followed by the inexorable collapse of Hitler's Germany and the victorious end of the Great Patriotic War by the Soviet people.
For obvious reasons, the Nazis most strongly fortified the territories from the Oder to Berlin, building the Oder-Neissen defensive line of three stripes 20–40 km deep and the Berlin defensive region. The most fortified was the second line of defense, passing through the Seelow Heights. The engineering and construction units of the Wehrmacht made the most of the slave labor of prisoners of war and ostarbeiters, turning every bump, lake or swamp into an insurmountable obstacle, and every settlement into a strong defensive point.
The streets of Berlin were blocked by impressive barricades, built not from piles of construction rubbish or sandbags, but from stone blocks and rails, carefully manufactured by German industry. Mountains of debris were formed during the assault on the city, when the powerful fortifications of the Nazis were hit with direct fire by 203 mm B-4 tracked howitzers, nicknamed “Stalin’s sledgehammers” and which terrified the enemy.
In addition to regular troops, militia formations or “Volkssturm” were involved in the defense of Berlin, and in Berlin alone there were 200 “Volkssturm” battalions.
The difference between the Soviet people's militia and Hitler's Volkssturm was striking. While volunteers from all segments of the population, including professors, clerks and musicians, joined our militia, recruitment into the Volkssturm was compulsory. And if in our country a person who did not want to join the militia was accompanied by the contempt of those around him, then a Volkssturm refusenik faced the gallows. In addition, as part of the “total mobilization” announced by Hitler, youths and pensioners were enlisted in the Volkssturm, plugging gaps in the defense and throwing them at Russian tanks with Faust cartridges.
At 5 o'clock in the morning on April 16, the 1st Belorussian Front, in a breakthrough area 27 km wide, for half an hour, using more than 10 thousand artillery barrels, multiple launch rocket systems and mortars, destroyed the first line of defense, and then transferred fire deep into enemy positions.
The advance of our troops was illuminated by 143 anti-aircraft searchlights to blind the enemy, as a result of which it was possible to break through the first line of defense in just 1,5 - 2 hours, and even in some places reach the second line.
By that time, the stunned Germans managed to come to their senses and bring up their reserves. The battle entered its most fierce phase. Enemy resistance was strong enough to slow the advance of Soviet infantry, supported by tanks and self-propelled guns.
The timing of the operation, however, required urgent measures, which is why Zhukov brought the 1st (General Katukov) and 2nd (General Bogdanov) Guards Tank Armies into battle. The German command was also forced at the end of the day to throw all the operational reserves of Army Group Vistula into battle.
The heavy battle lasted all day and night on April 17; by the morning of April 18, units of the 1st Belorussian Front, with the support of aviation from the 16th and 18th Air Armies, were able to take the heights. By the end of April 19, the Soviet armies, breaking through the defenses and repelling the enemy’s fierce counterattacks, broke through the third line of defense and went directly to Berlin.
It should be noted that authoritative historians call the widely circulated opinion about the battle on the Seelow Heights a myth as a military failure of Zhukov, which resulted in serious losses in men and equipment. In their opinion, many important details of the battle for Berlin were in the shadow of Victory, which made numerous speculations possible - both among foreign researchers and among home-grown “experts”.
It should be taken into account that it was not newcomers who took part in the assault on the Seelow Heights - the 8th Guards Army of General Chuikov, which gained experience in fighting in Stalingrad and other major battles. Half of the 175 tanks and self-propelled guns allocated to Chuikov were IS-2 heavy breakthrough tanks.
The lies described in numerous memoirs (for example, in Eisenhower's memoirs) that Zhukov ordered his infantry to cross minefields without clearing mines are not true. Soviet sappers did their job heroically, removing mines and making passages through minefields under intense German artillery fire.
And on the first, most difficult day of the battle at the heights, the losses of Katukov’s tank army amounted to only 36 vehicles, and not only burned out, but also damaged, that is, repairable. No hundreds of tanks were lost from “Faustpatrons” and “Panther” fire on the Seelow Heights. But in the German headquarters documents of the Wisla group for the same day there is an eloquent entry: “The last reserves have been used.”
On the contrary, as a result of a fierce battle, the Wehrmacht was thrown back a good ten kilometers, and the “Panthers” and “Royal Tigers”, hastily thrown into a counterattack, were subjected to natural beatings by the powerful guns of the IS-2 and “hunters”.
It is estimated that on April 14, the first day of the assault on the Seelow Heights, Soviet artillery fired something like a million shells at the enemy, which made an indelible impression not only on the surviving Germans, but even on the experienced and battle-hardened General Chuikov.
The tanks of generals Katukov and Bogdanov did not launch frontal attacks on German fortifications like blind puppies and did not wait to be shot from the heights, but looked for weak spots in the enemy’s defenses, groping for a passage north of the hills.
Yes, the battle on the Seelow Heights was fierce and difficult, but Chuikov’s guards did not go to the slaughter in waves of people, as modern sickening figures and gentlemen falsifiers, posing as “unbiased researchers,” like to show, but slowly and persistently crushed the enemy’s last reserves with the support heavy tanks, artillery and aircraft.
In fact, the German defense on the Seelow Heights was not breached, but was overcome by a flanking move on April 18, and the neighbors of the 8th Guards, the 1st Tank Army, pressed so powerfully that the German front simply collapsed, and their command began to withdraw troops at a rapid pace from the heights, since the line of fortifications east of Berlin threatened to become a death trap.
Soviet losses at the Seelow Heights have become the subject of speculation. Those who relished historical sensations out of nowhere passed off all those killed and missing during the Berlin operation from the Baltic to Thuringia as losses on the Seelow Heights, and even the wounded were declared dead.
As a result, the losses of the Soviet Army on the second line of German defense were announced at 300 - 500 thousand people, although from the documents it follows that the 8th Guards Army stormed the heights from April 11 to May 1, 1945 (that is, until the fall of Berlin) lost 4566 people killed and missing, and about 19 thousand more wounded, and 1st Tank Army - 1453 killed and missing, and 5857 people wounded.
For comparison: out of almost 40 thousand people of Weidling’s 56th Panzer Corps defending the Seelow Heights, only about 10 thousand managed to break through to Berlin.
Fierce battles on the approaches to Berlin crushed the main forces and reserves of Hitler's troops, as a result of which mainly disorganized military personnel from broken units and militant schoolboys from the Hitler Youth with a Faustpatron or an inferior Italian rifle fought for the capital of Germany.
Now imagine for a moment that our soldiers would have had to face the entire 56th Tank Corps (which included the SS Nordland division, two tank-grenadier divisions and one German airborne division), and what losses would then have resulted in for the Soviet troops urban battles.
This is the uniqueness and, I’m not afraid of this word, the genius of the Berlin offensive operation, given by the formula of Marshal of the Soviet Union Zhukov: “The more the enemy throws his troops towards our troops here, the easier and faster we will then take Berlin, since the troops It is easier to defeat the enemy in an open field than in a fortified city.”
During the entire period of the Berlin offensive operation, the irretrievable losses of the Soviet fronts amounted to 81 thousand people and 270 thousand wounded. Almost 10 thousand killed and wounded Poles should also be added here. The Nazis' military losses are estimated at almost 400 thousand irrevocable and 280 thousand prisoners. The exact number of deaths of police officers, Volkssturmists, Hitler Youth and other paramilitary organizations of the Reich is still unknown, even approximately.
Experts on the Berlin offensive operation:
Vladimir Kornilov, historian:
“The opinion is widespread among our liberals, and in the West, that too many casualties were allegedly committed during the Berlin operation. As if there was no point in rushing, “it was necessary to wait for the allies,” “and all this was sacrificed so that the Soviet soldier would get the glory of capturing Berlin.”
This does not stand up to any criticism - there is a lot of work by many strategists of that war, which prove that everything that the Soviet military leaders could do in order to win this war, they did, and did brilliantly.
It is clear that in April-May 45 the positions of the Red Army were much stronger than their opponents, but we must not forget that Hitler gave the command to fight to the last, mobilized both the elderly and children under arms. Accordingly, the resistance was fierce, that is, they fought for every block, every house and street. This was very serious resistance.
If someone thinks that they had to stand, wait, and everything was already decided, this, of course, is not true. Then we would give Hitler the opportunity to mobilize new forces, train them, and strengthen the cities. Of course, it was impossible to take such a risk.”
Hero of the Soviet Union, veteran of the Foreign Intelligence Service, Colonel Vladimir Gorovoy:
“By the end of the war, Churchill openly took an anti-Soviet position and attracted the remaining undefeated German troops to carry out an operation against our troops, to launch the so-called Operation Unthinkable, so that the Allied forces, in cooperation with the German divisions (and the British did not disarm them), would open military operations against our troops. Therefore, Berlin was interesting to them only in the sense of capturing it earlier.
We took Berlin quickly enough - the West had no chance of getting ahead of us. But the goal of capturing Berlin before us was set by Churchill to the Allied command. True, in the West today they don’t want to remember this.
Now everything is being turned upside down, there is a colossal falsification going on. They say that we suffered huge losses, we won the war thanks to our allies, and our participation was minimal; the actions of the West were supposedly decisive.
Our counter-propaganda should be more active, but we are muting it. This needs to be discussed on central TV channels in prime time, when the majority watches TV.”
Igor Korotchenko, editor-in-chief of the National Defense magazine:
“This is an outstanding final operation of the Great Patriotic War, which allowed the Red Army to hoist the Victory Banner over the Reichstag and put an end to this war. Then came unconditional surrender.
We pay tribute to the Soviet commanders and Supreme Commander Joseph Stalin, who planned and implemented this operation.
As for our so-called “Western partners,” they don’t like to remember Soviet victories. The West was in no hurry to open a second front; they waited for Germany and the Soviet Union, fighting against each other, to exhaust their strength, and then America would enter the war to become the main beneficiary of the victory. Therefore, they delayed until the very last moment, and when we were already preparing to take Berlin, they conducted separate negotiations behind the back of the Soviet Union in order to conclude a separate peace with Germany. Today the West does not want to remember this - these are pages of history that they cannot be proud of.
We have something to be proud of and our patriotic actions such as the “Immortal Regiment” and “Road of Memory” are what ensure continuity and historical connection between generations.”
Chairman of the Presidium of the “Officers of Russia” organization, Hero of Russia, Major General Sergei Lipovoy:
“Let's start with the fact that the West, in principle, does not like to remember who exactly made the decisive contribution to the victory over fascism. That is why the main attention of Western propaganda is focused on the events of the Western Front, which the Germans surrendered quite easily before the Berlin offensive operation, concentrating the main forces in the eastern direction.
In addition, England and the United States could well (and perhaps even wanted) to contribute to prolonging the war and concluding a separate peace with Hitler. The West is also trying to keep silent about this.
In fact, none of the allies was particularly keen to help the Soviet Union, which bore the brunt of World War II on its shoulders. The West then took a wait-and-see attitude, and its main motives were political - to bite off a sweeter piece of the “German pie”.
The thousands of losses of other countries and the terrible philosophy of world domination of the Nazis did not worry him so much.
Perhaps this is the main conclusion that could be drawn from these events both then and now - Russia should rely only on itself, and its allies may well weave their own intrigues in secret. Unfortunately, the West still has not understood that it is better not to joke with us: Russia firmly defends its interests and pursues its goals persistently and confidently.
Now one of these goals is to prevent Western propagandists from distorting the history of World War II, denigrating and consigning to oblivion the feat of Soviet soldiers. That is why commemorative events such as the “Road of Memory” are so important, which tell the truth about the cost of victory in this war, the most terrible of all world wars.”
If you find an error, please select a piece of text and press Ctrl + Enter.
Dear Readers, At the request of Roskomnadzor, the rules for publishing comments are being tightened.
Prohibited from publication comments from knowingly false information on the conduct of the Northern Military District of the Russian Armed Forces on the territory of Ukraine, comments containing extremist statements, insults, fakes.
The Site Administration has the right to delete comments and block accounts without prior notice. Thank you for understanding!
Placing links to third-party resources prohibited!
Thank you!
Now the editors are aware.