One of the final battles of World War II. It took place from April 20 to May 2, 1945, and it ended with the fall of Berlin to the Soviet Red Army, which took revenge for the suffering of the Soviet people since 1941.
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In April 1945, the Soviet Union assembled outside Berlin one of the largest concentrations of military power ever seen. Within the city, already repeatedly pounded by Allied bombing, refugees and citizens were protected by a scratch force of stragglers and the remnants of shattered formations, supported by militia and units of the Hitler Youth—one battalion of which was sent into battle with an average age of 14.
In a race to win the glory of capturing the city of Berlin, Soviet marshals Ivan Konev and Georgiy Zhukov were willing to accept enormous casualties and inflict colossal damage. Within five days, the two forces had linked up and encircled Berlin. Soviet artillery fired nearly two million shells during the final assault. All Berliners could do was cower in their cellars and hope that rumors of relief, or even that the Americans had joined forces with Germany to expel the Red Army, might be true.
Within the city, there were few fixed defenses. The urban terrain offered some advantage to its defenders, especially because, in their hurry to advance, Red Army tanks went in without adequate infantry support. The Hitler Youth could, and often did, destroy Soviet tanks by ambushing them with Panzerfaust antitank rockets. Indeed, many defenders fought with suicidal courage; three of them, armed only with a machine gun, held off Soviet attacks on the Helensee bridge for two days. However, the Soviets’ firepower was overwhelming—a single shot from a sniper could be answered by artillery fire, or by Katyusha rockets, leveling the entire building from whence it came. The suspicion that a cellar might contain defenders would result in Soviet grenades being tossed in, with no regard for civilian lives. For German women, the greatest fear was rape, and Soviet soldiers committed this on a vast scale.
In his bunker, in the center of the city, Adolf Hitler remained convinced that Berlin could be saved. He gave hopeless orders for armies that scarcely existed to break the siege. Joseph Stalin, too, was not without his own delusions; he was obsessed with taking the Reichstag building, although it had not been used since 1933 and had no strategic value. This obsession cost heavily in the number of Soviet soldiers lost.