Berlin 1945

Karl Bahm

Description

In April 1945, the final dramatic act of World War II in Europe was played out in Germanys capital city. Berlin 1945: The Final Reckoning is a comprehensive history of the last battle of Nazi Germany, which would see the virtual destruction of a city, and the eventual suicide of Adolf Hitler. Berlin 1945: The Final Reckoning begins with a study of the background to the battle and a description of events on the Eastern and Western Fronts before the Soviet forces reached Berlin. The city's strategic importance to the German war effort and morale is considered, along with factors that caused the Western Allies to halt their advance on the Elbe rather than race the Soviet troops to the Reichstag. The German forces available for Berlin's defence and their actual defensive preparations (or lack of them) are covered in depth, as is the devastating destruction caused by the ceaseless Allied bombing and remorseless shelling by the Soviet forces. The book describes in words and graphic pictures how, in a city reduced to rubble, a bitter hand-to-hand struggle developed between fanatical Nazis, SS troopers, old men and young boys of the Hitler Youth and the hard-bitten Soviet front-line troops bent on revenge. The suffering of the soldiers and civilians are revealed in full detail, with personal accounts from those involved in the battle. The book also describes the events in the bunker behind the Reichschancellery, where Hitler spent his last months. Finally the reader learns how German commanders disobey the Fuhrer's orders to fight to the last man, and the fate of the city was sealed. The final chapter discusses the full implications of the battle for the Germans and Soviets, and briefly describes the search for Hitler's body. Berlin 1945: The Final Reckoning is a brilliant, superbly illustrated account of the battle that ended the Nazi dream of a 100-year Reich.

Sujets

• Histoire
• World War II
• Germany
• Berlin

Informations

• Publié par: Amber Books Ltd
• Date de parution: 06 mars 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781907446887
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 8 Mo

Extrait

This digital edition first published in 2011
Published by Amber Books Ltd United House North Road London N7 9DP United Kingdom
Website: www.amberbooks.co.uk Instagram: amberbooksltd Facebook: amberbooks Twitter: @amberbooks
Copyright © 2011 Amber Books Ltd
ISBN: 978-1-90744-688-7
PICTURE CREDITS
AKG London; Society for Co-operation in Russian & Soviet Studies (SCRSS); Süddeutscher Verlag; TRH Pictures; Ukrainian Central State Archive of Cine- photo Documents
All rights reserved. With the exception of quoting brief passages for the purpose of review no part of this publication may be reproduced without prior written permission from the publisher. The information in this book is true and complete to the best of our knowledge. All recommendations are made without any guarantee on the part of the author or publisher, who also disclaim any liability incurred in connection with the use of this data or specific details.
Contents CHAPTER 1 Introduction CHAPTER 2 The Race for the ‘Main Prize’ CHAPTER 3 Gotterdämmerung in Berlin CHAPTER 4 Preparing for the Battle CHAPTER 5 Breakout from the Oder CHAPTER 6 Berlin Breached CHAPTER 7 Red Noose Around Berlin CHAPTER 8 Hammer and Sickle over the Reichstag CHAPTER 9 The End Comes Orders of Battle Index
The end of Germany’s dreams of dominance: the corpses of three German soldiers killed in fighting for the city of Mogilev in Belorussia, liberated by the Red Army in June 1944, soon after the D-Day landings in Normandy.

CHAPTER ONE
Introduction:
The War Comes to Germany
After the glory years of 1939–42, the tide of the war turned against Germany at Stalingrad, and by 1944 it became clear that soon, for the first time since the Napoleonic era, foreign troops would tread on German soil on their march towards the capital of Hitler’s Third Reich: Berlin.
B y the beginning of 1945, Nazi Germany’s ‘Thousand-Year Reich’ was rushing towards its apocalyptic end, exactly 12 years after it began. On 30 January 1933, Adolf Hitler had been appointed Chancellor of the troubled Weimar Republic by President Paul von Hindenburg. After rapidly subordinating all political and military authority – as well as the social and cultural fabric of the country – to the dictates of his party, the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP, the National Socialist German Worker’s Party) Hitler began preparing for a war, the likes of which the world had never seen.
The war was formally unleashed on 1 September 1939, when one and a half million German troops invaded neighbouring Poland. Within days, the superbly trained and equipped Wehrmacht troops had vanquished the illequipped Polish Army. But, contrary to Hitler’s expectations, the violation of Poland’s sovereignty precipitated declarations of war on Germany from both France and Great Britain. After eight months of bluster and ultimatums – the so-called Sitzkrieg (sit-down war) or ‘phoney war’ in the West – the Germans finally launched a western offensive in May 1940. The Sitzkrieg became a Blitzkrieg as the French were defeated in just over a month, and were forced to sign a humiliating armistice in the very same spot in the forest of Compiègne, in the same train carriage, in which the German empire had been forced to sue for peace at the end of World War I. The newsreels of Hitler dancing his little jig of joy upon hearing of the French capitulation, and German troops marching down the Champs-Élysées, were seen all over the world. Great Britain, protected by the English Channel and the skill and bravery of the Royal Air Force, held out alone against Germany throughout the rest of 1940 and the first half of 1941. But although they had had to give up their plans for an invasion of Britain, the Germans were in undisturbed control of most of Western and Central Europe. With Austria, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, Denmark, Norway, and France occupied or under the control of client states, and friendly regimes in Italy, Spain, and Hungary, Germany could now turn her attentions East.
On 22 June 1941, at 0330 hours, mechanised Wehrmacht divisions, supported by Luftwaffe fighterbombers, poured across the Niemen River into Russia. The date had been carefully chosen for its historical significance. Exactly 129 years before, on 22 June 1812, an apparently invincible Napoleon Bonaparte had also crossed the Niemen to attack Russia. However, Hitler should have studied his history a little more closely; Napoleon was forced to begin his disastrous retreat only six months after invading, eventually losing 95 per cent of his troops to combat and the Russian winter. Although it would take longer, and cost even more lives, a similar fate would befall the German invaders.


German confidence in the early days of Operation Barbarossa: With German troops closing on Moscow, the placard, dated 2 October 1941, reads ‘The Russian must die that we may live.’
Despite its having started late – the original launch date was May – ‘Operation Barbarossa’ initially made fantastic progress, raising expectations of a repeat of the Blitzkrieg against Poland. Hitler’s plan, which he had been formulating since shortly after the signing of the Russo–German Pact, called for 120 German divisions to annihilate Russia within five months, before the onset of the winter. Hitler wasn’t the only one so confident of a German victory. In July, the American General Staff had issued ‘confidential’ memoranda to US journalists that the collapse of the Soviet Union could be expected within weeks.
But Russia, a vast country tremendously rich in natural resources, manpower, and a fierce patriotism, was far from finished. If unprepared for the precise moment of the German attack, the Red Army was neither as small, as ill-equipped, nor as lacking in fighting spirit as the Nazis’ ideology proclaimed it to be. A month and a half into the campaign, on 11 August, the Chief of the German General Staff, Franz Halder, wrote in his diary:


The ‘carpet bombing’ which was inflicted on Germany by the Allies spared no sector of German society. Here staff clean up the operating room of Robert Koch hospital in Berlin after an air raid.
‘It is becoming ever clearer that we underestimated the strength of the Russian colossus not only in the economic and transportation sphere but above all in the military. At the beginning we reckoned with some 200 enemy divisions and we have already identified 360. When a dozen of them are destroyed the Russians throw in another dozen. On this broad expanse our front is too thin. It has no depth. As a result, the repeated enemy attacks often meet with some success.’
Not only had the Germans underestimated the sheer number of forces available to the Red Army, they had also underestimated how well equipped it was. Many of the Wehrmacht’s best generals reported with astonishment and a large amount of fear on the appearance of the Russian T-34 tank, the existence of which German intelligence had not an inkling. So well constructed and armoured that German anti-tank shells bounced off it, the T-34 instilled in the German soldier what General Blumentritt later called ‘tank terror’. These kinds of intelligence miscalculations would plague the Germans throughout the rest of the war.
But possibly the Germans’ greatest miscalculation was their ideologically driven belief that Slavic soldiers would be no match for the ‘Aryan’ Germans and that the Soviet Union, once attacked, would disintegrate into chaos and revolution. ‘We have only to kick in the door,’ Hitler assured his generals, ‘and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down.’ Instead, the German invasion – launching what the Russians still call ‘the Great Patriotic War’ – loosed among the peoples of the Soviet Union a tremendous surge in patriotism, both Soviet patriotism and Russian, Ukrainian, Georgian and other national patriotisms. At this point, nearly a quarter century after the revolution, and just after the terrible purge years of 1934 and 1940, there could have been little naiveté about the nature of the Communist regime. Despite a tremendous amount of resentment and antipathy towards the Communist leaders, the peoples of the Soviet Union remained, for the most part, passionately committed to the sovereignty of the state, as well as to the individual nations of which it was made up. This was a fact which westerners have never properly understood, and the Germans were to pay dearly for their misunderstanding.


German soldiers swing a field gun into position during training exercises. The successful military adventures and massive build-up, boosting the economy, made the war effort popular amongst most Germans.
By the end of November, with the fearsome Russian winter at full howl, Germany’s drive to Moscow had staggered and come to a frozen, weary halt on the outskirts of the city. The Wehrmacht’s Third and Fourth Tank Groups had penetrated as far as Istra, fewer than 25km (15 miles) north of Moscow, while the Second Panzer Army and the Fourth Army were further away on the south and west. Throughout the first week of December the Germans made repeated efforts to regain the momentum and take Moscow. But their exhaustion and losses, their overstretched supply lines, the seemingly limitless Soviet manpower resources, and above all the vicious, numbing cold – which froze solid exposed flesh, turned oil to sticky sludge, and made metal parts as brittle as icicles – defeated every attempt. With the German units ordered to hold their positions at all costs, the Soviets now went on the offensive, led brilliantly by Marshal Georgi K. Zhukov, the man who would, in three and a half years, drive his armies into the Germans’ own capital, Berlin.


‘General Winter’ has been reputed to be the Russians’ best defence against attack. But, despite an initial failure of preparation, the Red Army by 1942 was a superbly trained and equipped modern fighting force.
Only a year later,