For educational purposes
Experience the terrible final battle for Berlin in 1945 from the perspective of the attacking Red Army and the positions of the shattered German forces that made a final desperate defence of the city.
Experience the terrible final battle for Berlin in 1945 from the perspective of the attacking Red Army and the positions of the shattered German forces that made a final desperate defence of the city.
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00:30In
00:50May 1945, the last battle of World War II was drawing to a terrifying conclusion.
00:56This, the most titanic of all conflicts, was certainly not about to end with a whimper.
01:05Although all hope of victory was long gone, the bitter fighting in the battle for Berlin
01:20would witness the frantic death throes of a desperate regime.
01:37These were the last acts of the greatest war in the history of mankind.
01:42This was Hitler's long-promised Gotterdammerung, the twilight of the gods.
01:51Those gods would witness the agony of a city sacrificed to make a dramatic exit for one
01:57man.
02:03Hitler was determined that if the war was going to be lost by Germany, that by virtue
02:08of having not proven their right to success, the German people should be dragged down with
02:14him in flames.
02:15So Hitler was determined that the war should be fought right to the bitter end.
02:19And if that meant the destruction of Berlin, if it meant the destruction of the German
02:23people, as well as himself, then so be it.
02:28You sleep together, you eat together, you are out there in this miserable situation together,
02:37you experience together that aha, the ball has given itself, that he is gone, the father-in-law.
02:45You feel abandoned, regularly abandoned.
02:48He has abandoned us.
02:50And what now?
02:58Although they faced a number of insurmountable difficulties in supply and materials, the
03:05German forces fighting to defend Berlin prepared to do their duty with great courage and thoroughness.
03:11The east side of Berlin was strongly fortified, with three separate lines of anti-tank defences.
03:23In the city itself, every street was to be turned into a strongpoint.
03:28Hitler had hoped to turn Berlin into a fortress.
03:32Ringed around the city were three structures which harked back to the medieval castles of old.
03:39These were the Flak Towers, three huge concrete castles with walls so thick that not even
03:46the heaviest artillery shells could penetrate.
03:50The first was located just off the Brunnenstrasse in the north of the city and was known as
03:56the Humboldthain Tower.
04:02The second was just to the east of the city centre on Landsberger Allee.
04:11And the third was in the south-west of the city at the Berlin Zoo.
04:17Their real purpose was to serve as anti-aircraft gun platforms to protect the city against
04:24the frequent Allied bombing raids.
04:27Each of the enormous gun towers had a satellite tower a short distance away for the artillery
04:34observers to control the anti-aircraft fire.
04:37Now, with the Soviet forces beginning to encroach on Berlin itself, they were to become a vital
04:44part of the defence ring hastily thrown up around the city.
04:50These defences were designed to protect the heart of the Nazi regime, located in a bunker
04:56close to the Chancellery building on Wilhelmstrasse.
05:04Nearby were the city landmarks at the Brandenburg Gate on the Unter den Linden and the Reichstag
05:11on Konigsplatz.
05:13All of these sites were to see savage fighting in the coming battle.
05:22These makeshift defences would take an enormous toll of casualties from the Soviet forces.
05:28It would cost the Red Army 333,000 casualties before they finally clawed their way into
05:35the Reichstag.
05:44In late 1944, with the tide of World War II running inexorably against Germany, Hitler's
05:52thousand-year Reich had already been brought to its knees, and it seemed there was a very
05:57real prospect of an end to the conflict before the end of the year.
06:02Germany in late 1944 had not the slightest prospect of victory.
06:07The very best the Germans could have achieved by December 1944 was to stave off an inevitable
06:13defeat by a few more months.
06:15The last hope that Hitler has is that the Americans and British coming from the west
06:23will reach the river Elbe, and when they meet up with the Russians, will get into some fight
06:29with the Russians, and the Americans and British will join with the Germans, and they will
06:37all jointly come together and drive the Judeo-Bolshevik menace back into Asia.
06:48From the skies over Germany, the Third Reich was experiencing destruction from the air
06:54on a scale never before experienced by any nation at war.
06:58Hundreds of thousands of German civilians had perished in a series of raids which devastated
07:04German cities.
07:07On Land 2, the noose around Germany was tightening.
07:17In the west, the Allies had at last established the long-awaited Second Front.
07:23But it was in the east, in the cauldron of the Russian front, that the events of World
07:28War 2 would be decided.
07:37By October 1944, the German army group besieging Leningrad had been driven back, and was now
07:44trapped in the Courland bridgehead.
07:48Following the success of Operation Begration, the great offensive against Army Group Centre,
07:54Russian armies were already on the border of Poland.
07:59In the southern sector, an unremitting pattern of defeat and retreat had seen the German forces
08:05driven back from Kharkov to the Balkans.
08:111944 had been a year of absolute catastrophe for the German armies in the east.
08:17Starting at the very beginning of the year, the Soviets embarked on a series of ten interlinked
08:23operational offensives that together drove the Germans back from outside the gates of
08:27Leningrad, right inside the Soviet Union, all the way back to within a few hundred miles
08:33of Berlin.
08:37The situation in 1944 in the east looked catastrophic and was catastrophic.
08:41They had lost Army Group Centre.
08:44Army Group North was breaking up very rapidly.
08:46Army Group South was desperately trying to hold onto the remnants of Soviet territory
08:52in the Ukraine.
08:54So the German army was on the run.
09:02We were in Moscow and now we were in Berlin.
09:06That's a big difference.
09:08You would have to be a great optimist to assume that the war could still be won.
09:14The war could not be won.
09:19Faced with disaster on this scale, the logical scenario would have been a German capitulation.
09:25In fact, the surviving German armies continued to offer dogged resistance to the very last
09:31days of the war.
09:36By and large, whenever the Soviets attacked, the Germans were able to give them a good
09:43thrashing on the tactical level.
09:45But the problem is, one, there are a lot more Soviet soldiers and Stalin is not even close
09:52to running out of people.
09:54And two, in order to achieve these wonderful tactical victories, the Germans are continually
10:04pulling back towards Germany.
10:08The effect of the military defeats of 1944 on Hitler were catastrophic.
10:14He began to hide himself away in his headquarters, unable to face the hollowness of his earlier
10:25boasts.
10:28Hitler found the psychological blows too great to rationalise.
10:33In January and February 1945, Hitler entirely discounted the fact that the Red Army itself
10:39was about to launch a major offensive into Germany.
10:42He dismissed this as fantasy and babbling and ridiculous.
10:47Hitler was, I think, absolutely exhausted.
10:50He was also a very ill man.
10:52In fact, some people would argue that mentally he had been ill perhaps ever since he came
10:55to power, if not before.
10:57I think, however, having said this, that it's clear that Hitler's behaviour during that
11:01last month of the war was an extreme mixture.
11:05On occasions, he would rant and rave and blame his inferiors and the German people generally
11:11for the disaster which seemed to have befallen Nazi Germany.
11:14But on other occasions, he seems to have behaved in a very rational, calm, calculated fashion.
11:23Ranged against the crumbling German armies was the immense strength of the Red Army
11:28and the revitalised Russian Air Force.
11:32From the Soviet point of view, this was meant to be the mother of all battles, and it really was.
11:37I mean, it was meant to be a stage, if you like, or a staging of a massive sense of Soviet
11:43military superiority and indeed the intention of not only the Red Army but the Soviet government
11:49and the Russian people and others actually to enter Berlin and make it their own.
11:54By now, the German army was massively outnumbered, and the best estimates are that they possessed
12:00one tank for every 16 which the Russians could put into battle.
12:05It's been estimated that against the one million men Hitler could deploy, some five million
12:11Russians could be deployed for the Battle of Berlin.
12:17While the Western Allies concentrated on the strategic bombing campaign against German cities,
12:22the huge Russian bomber force was deployed against military targets.
12:36By late 1944, wave after wave of fighter bombers flying overhead made it very difficult
12:42for German forces to move off the ground.
12:50We know something of the number of sorties that the Germans and the Russians were able to put up
12:55over Berlin during the Battle for Berlin. It was 12,000 per day for the Russians,
12:59it was 1,000 per day for the Germans.
13:02So in terms of actual fighting machines in the air over Berlin, it was a ratio of 12 to 1.
13:13The final assault on Germany itself began at the southern end of the front on 12 January 1945,
13:20when the massed tanks and infantry of the 1st Ukrainian Front under Marshal Konev
13:26moved against the German lines.
13:29The advance of the 1st Ukrainian Front swept through Poland and saw the Russian armies
13:34on the border with Czechoslovakia by the end of March.
13:39To their north, the 1st Belorussian Front under Zhukov swept aside the newly formed
13:45German Army Group A and, by the end of March, Zhukov's troops were positioned at Kustrin,
13:52only 50 miles from Hitler's capital.
13:56Further north still, the last remnants of Army Group Centre were trapped in a huge pocket
14:02centred around Konigsberg by the combined forces of the 2nd and 3rd Belorussian Fronts,
14:08advancing from north of Warsaw and Lithuania.
14:17The ragbag of forces fighting under SS Commander Himmler, known as Army Group Vistula,
14:22were also thrown back by the advancing Red Army.
14:42The enormous sacrifices which were made by men fighting in what were obviously lost causes
14:48was justified by both the men and their commanders on the grounds
14:52that the continued resistance against the Soviet thrusts had allowed thousands of refugees
14:57to escape from the terror of the Red Army advance.
15:06Looked at from the point of view of a German citizen, or even a German soldier in Berlin,
15:11in, let us say, March, April 1945, when they had seen the scope and scale and size
15:17of the Soviet advance through East Prussia, and they had seen what happened to German territories,
15:23then I think there was considerable understanding that it was absolutely essential, as far as possible,
15:28wherever possible, to hold off the Soviet advance, and that was their motivation.
15:38As they advanced into Germany, the Red Army had the opportunity to demonstrate
15:43that the forces of barbarism could be replaced by humanity.
15:47They chose instead to behave in a manner which aped the vile excesses of the regime against which they fought.
15:55From June 1941, when Operation Barbarossa began, the invasion of the Soviet Union,
16:00the Germans had treated both captured Red Army personnel and the civilian population of the occupied Soviet Union
16:06with a mixture of enormous brutality, deliberate brutality, and neglect.
16:11By 1945, and the battle for Berlin, it's reckoned that well over 20 million Soviet citizens had died,
16:19maybe even more than that.
16:21Hardly surprisingly, therefore, the Red Army that was accelerating its drive into the heart of Germany
16:27was absolutely determined to repay the Germans for the terror and the suffering on a massive and deliberate scale
16:35that the Germans had inflicted upon the Soviet people.
16:38The civilian population in the basement,
16:41completely frightened, old, women and children.
16:48They only left the basement, like in Grosny, to get water,
16:54to at least get a minimum of hygiene, and that was the case in Germany, as well as in Berlin.
17:00Hardly anything to eat, and constantly under threat.
17:06Unfortunately, the Red Army made the mistake of actually realizing this and raping the German women.
17:13Unfortunately, it came to these things that are still incomprehensible to me.
17:23In the face of Red Army retribution, the will to resist grew stronger.
17:28In the face of Red Army retribution, the will to resist remained,
17:31and in many cases, German resistance actually began to increase.
17:35There were even successful counter-attacks, which revealed to the Germans the level of horrors which awaited them.
17:47This footage, taken at a town recaptured from the Russians,
17:51shows evidence of atrocities committed while the town was briefly in Russian hands.
17:58All that remained for the ordinary German citizen was to wait for the Red Army to regroup
18:08and gather its huge strength for the final assault on Berlin.
18:14The grim joke began to do the rounds of the war-torn streets of Berlin.
18:19Enjoy the war while you can, because the peace will be terrible.
18:24Faced with a doomsday scenario, organized German resistance continued,
18:29and the final Soviet drive for Berlin could not begin in earnest until April 16th, 1945.
18:37To the northeast of the city, Marshal Zhukov, with the 1st Belorussian Front,
18:42is going to attack directly out of the Kurshtyn bridgehead, just across the Oder,
18:46and then drive across the Zelo Heights and drive into Berlin from the north.
18:52And the 1st Belorussian Army has actually been given the honour of capturing Berlin by Stalin.
18:58Now, to the southeast, at the confluence of the Oder and the Neisse,
19:03there is Marshal Konev's 1st Ukrainian Front.
19:06His job is to actually cross the Oder-Neisse line, to advance due west and then swing north,
19:13take Zilsen, which is the German military headquarters,
19:16but not to enter the city, not to actually engage in a battle for the city.
19:22The Red Army's offensive that led to the fall of Berlin was really made up of three separate phases.
19:28In the first, which lasted between the 16th and 18th of April,
19:32the Soviets fought a bitter breakthrough battle in order to penetrate the main belt of German defences
19:38on the rivers Oder and Neisse.
19:40After that, however, having broken through, the next or second phase of the operation
19:44really consists of deep, armour-spear-headed drives to encircle Berlin,
19:50which happens by the 25th of April.
19:52And after that, the third phase really involves the physical destruction
19:56of the remaining German forces within the city of Berlin itself.
20:02Even if they'd wanted to, the Berliners simply could not hoist the white flag
20:07The Berliners simply could not hoist the white flag and surrender.
20:11People forget it was Hitler who was in control in Berlin,
20:14and he gave the orders for the defence, and he demanded this, and he demanded that.
20:18So the question of the relevance of the defence of Berlin has really got to be decided in those terms.
20:24And it was ultimately a battle which was fought virtually to the last bullet,
20:28and almost to the last gasp.
20:31The German forces, which were still in the field, were determined to fight to the very last.
20:37So the closing battles of the war were as hotly contested as anything which had gone before.
20:4355 years on from the events of the battle,
20:46Herr Olek recalls the fighting on the outskirts of Berlin.
21:00Young people shooting at people in order to preserve themselves.
21:06This is a process which they consciously do not experience,
21:11which they experience only afterwards.
21:14And when the comrades fall next to them,
21:18and they are 17 years old,
21:21and are directly confronted with this war event,
21:27then this changes their mentality.
21:39There were still substantial Wehrmacht elements who fought to the bitter end,
21:44but they were now augmented by the men of the Volkssturm battalions.
21:57The Volkssturm was the absolute dregs of the German recruiting pool.
22:04And what they're doing to create the Volkssturm is,
22:09the Nazi party is getting pensioners, many of whom had First World War service,
22:17and not putting uniforms on them.
22:21They put a white armband on, they give them an old rifle and a few rounds,
22:25and they say, the Russians are coming, point your rifle that way and start shooting.
22:30It's a home guard. Dad's army.
22:34And the idea is that these Volkssturm soldiers will actually be used
22:39when the enemies, when the Western Allies or the Russians,
22:43reach their own villages or their own cities.
22:45They will fight in their own localities, places they know well,
22:49and places that they care about.
22:51Now, what actually happens is that the Volkssturm
22:54are used as replacements for regular divisions.
22:58And so that by April 1945, a large part, for example,
23:01of Heinrichi's army group Vistula is in fact composed of Volkssturm.
23:10Before they were swept aside, the men of the Volkssturm
23:13had become highly proficient in the use of the Panzerfaust,
23:17which was an anti-tank weapon of deadly effectiveness at short range.
23:21One additional obstacle which the Russians had to overcome
23:25were the wrecks of their own tanks,
23:28which frequently formed a convenient barricade across many of the streets
23:32where they'd come to grief against these hand-held rockets,
23:35which made the humble infantrymen the equal of the mighty T-34 tank.
23:42The German tank formations had been largely destroyed,
23:46but in the rubble-strewn streets of the German towns and cities,
23:50tank-hunting teams could get to close quarters,
23:54and the Panzerfausts claimed hundreds of Russian tanks,
23:58which were destroyed at close range by desperate men fighting in their own city.
24:12GUNFIRE
24:18There were other occasions where the Volkssturm proved less than resolute,
24:23as Herr Olek recalls.
24:42...in the form of the Volkssturm had disappeared.
24:45This, of course, made us helpless.
24:48And then the order came that we had to retreat with our units,
24:52i.e. into the city itself,
24:54because the Red Army had already surrounded us
24:58with tanks and, above all, as infantry,
25:02and had entered the outskirts of the city.
25:05This meant that if we hadn't moved, they would have encircled us.
25:12Hitler had by now become mesmerised
25:14by the arrows on the situation map in the bunker.
25:18Reduced to clutching at straws,
25:20he began to believe, once again,
25:22that the flags on the map represented real military forces.
25:27Hitler, as things get worse,
25:29is ordering army groups to do things
25:33that the army groups can't do,
25:36because it's no longer really an army group.
25:38The army group consists of six boy scouts and a Swiss army knife,
25:43instead of thousands and thousands of Aryan soldiers
25:47with their bond hair streaming in the breeze
25:49as they advance into Russia.
25:51And so Hitler starts to issue orders
25:54that have no relationship to reality.
25:58In particular, Hitler began to believe
26:01that Steiner's 11th Army could somehow link up
26:04with the surviving German forces north of Berlin
26:07and strike a decisive blow against the Russians.
26:11In reality, the grand-sounding title of army was illusory.
26:18The ragbag of forces at Steiner's disposal
26:21could only be described as an army
26:23in the deranged mind of Adolf Hitler.
26:26In fact, the depleted forces available to the German commanders
26:30still fighting on the outskirts of the city
26:33had no real prospect of halting the Soviet advance,
26:36never mind any question of reversing the tide.
26:52The battered German defenders
26:54had managed to mount a spirited defence
26:56on the Silo Heights to the east of Berlin.
27:01But the Soviet juggernaut,
27:03in the form of devastating massed artillery attacks,
27:06made the position untenable.
27:10The Silo Heights mark the western limit
27:13of the valley or floodplain of the River Oder.
27:16On the Silo Heights itself,
27:18the Germans had perhaps some of their best military units,
27:21specifically the 56th Panzer Corps,
27:23which by German standards in 1945 wasn't a badly equipped unit.
27:27This was because the main road
27:30from Küstrin via Selau to Berlin ran through this area,
27:34so the Germans were keen to try to deny the Soviets
27:37the best possible axis for moving towards Berlin quickly.
27:41So not surprisingly, the fighting on the Selau Heights,
27:44which is a fairly low escarpment, is extremely bitter.
27:51What happened is that at four o'clock in the morning
27:54on the 16th of April 1945,
27:56Zhukov's attack went in.
27:5810,000 guns opened up.
28:00It was the most concentrated artillery barrage in history.
28:03And then the Soviets attacked.
28:05Their shock formations went in first.
28:08The Soviets believed that nothing would actually have survived
28:13the immense artillery barrage.
28:15But very quickly, things started going wrong.
28:17Tanks bogged down.
28:19Troops began floundering around in the mud.
28:22And then suddenly, devastating fire opened up
28:25from the heights, and it was a massacre.
28:28We're talking about, by midday on the 16th of April,
28:34we're talking about 30,000 Soviet casualties
28:37piled up in the area between these low sandy ridges
28:41and the Oder River.
28:43The Soviets do manage to fight their way up the Selau Heights,
28:46but they take a lot of losses, it takes a lot of time,
28:49and the Soviets end up blaming this on tough German defenders.
28:53The reality is that the Selau Heights were hard to take
28:57because the Soviets hadn't done their ground analysis in advance.
29:03With the last natural obstacle against a Russian advance neutralised,
29:07the Soviets could now advance on the city itself.
29:24And then the road made a little turn,
29:27and before the first tank reached this curve,
29:30it was shot at.
29:32The result was that things fell apart.
29:36We had a gun, the 88-41,
29:40which had a V0 of 1,200 metres per second.
29:44It was the gun worldwide that had the highest velocity,
29:49the gun, when it left the gun barrel.
29:52Then they were all shot down.
29:55The infantry of the Red Army, which was always on the tanks,
29:58had already withdrawn.
30:02The tanks were glowing all night,
30:05with ammunition that exploded.
30:17Despite the best efforts of hard-pressed men like Herr Ohlik,
30:21the noose was tightening.
30:23Against this gloomy scenario,
30:25Hitler hung on to the hope of relief by General Henrizzi.
30:29But Henrizzi was no fool.
30:31He knew a lost cause when he saw one.
30:37As the commander of Army Group Weichsel, or Vistula,
30:41Colonel-General Goethard Henrizzi
30:44had the responsibility, essentially, for the defence of Berlin.
30:47However, Henrizzi was absolutely determined
30:50that if he could possibly help doing so,
30:52he would not fight a battle within Berlin itself.
30:55Now, Henrizzi had a weak command, but he was very good at his job.
31:00The biggest problem he had was he was one of the only
31:03senior German officers operating in the Berlin area
31:07who actually knew, actually understood and believed
31:10how badly off the Germans were.
31:13And he tried very hard to tempt the Soviets
31:18not to drive into Berlin, but to go around Berlin,
31:23in the hopes that when the inevitable defeat came,
31:27the city of Berlin and its population
31:30might not be as badly damaged as they would be
31:34if the Soviets actually fought their way into the centre.
31:41In order to prevent needless bloodshed and final, pointless gestures,
31:46Henrizzi moved his army away from the beleaguered city,
31:50leaving Hitler to fume in his lair.
31:56Matters took a further turn for the worse
31:59when Steiner's 11th Army was brushed aside
32:02to allow the Russians to complete the encirclement of Berlin.
32:10By April 22, Russian troops were fighting on the streets of the German capital.
32:15Both sides knew the insanity was surely about to end.
32:20But in the unconquered portions of the city,
32:23the street warfare raged on as bitterly as ever.
32:28THE FURHER
32:44Any prospect of a wholesale evacuation for the Führer and his entourage
32:49had now disappeared,
32:51and a radio broadcast on April 22
32:54announced that the Führer would stay in his capital to the very last.
33:02The cumulative effect of years of Allied bombing
33:05and the devastation caused by the heavy Russian artillery barrage
33:09had created a wilderness of rubble,
33:12full of ready-made strongpoints,
33:14which naturally favoured the defender.
33:24We had no doubt the Russians would take Berlin.
33:27But we were afraid,
33:29again selfishly,
33:31that we would have to stay in Stalingrad and fight over every house.
33:35We were glad we got out and were captured by the Americans.
33:55By saying that, I'm not saying that it was not bloody.
33:58It was exceptionally bloody.
34:00But the Germans simply had not faced the fact
34:03that they were going to have to fight in Berlin until very, very late in the day.
34:07And as a result, the Battle of Berlin was over in a matter of a week.
34:25Similarities between Berlin and Stalingrad are
34:28that there is a lot of artillery preparation of the battlefield
34:31before people go through.
34:33And as a result, there is a lot of rubble to fight in,
34:36and that makes defence easier.
34:39But the Soviets are getting used to fighting through rubble.
34:43They fought through rubble at Stalingrad.
34:46Chuikov, who was the Soviet commander at Stalingrad,
34:49is a Soviet commander in Berlin.
34:52He knows how to fight through rubble,
34:55so it's not a big obstacle to the Soviets as they attack.
34:58In addition, in many places, the Soviets were able to infiltrate,
35:01not just above ground, but also underground,
35:04because there was an underground railway system in Berlin.
35:07And the Soviet troops are sometimes able to go through these
35:10or through the sewers in order to go around,
35:13or more literally, underneath centres of German resistance
35:16and to emerge further in the city.
35:18In other words, bypassing these centres of resistance
35:21and going for the main target, which is the Reichstag,
35:24right in the heart of the Zitadelle,
35:26the final defensive zone within Berlin.
35:35The final Russian assault on Berlin began on April 26th.
35:40It was preceded by very heavy air attacks
35:43and, as always, a thunderous artillery barrage.
35:52It was now that the battles for the Flak Towers began.
35:56Among the last defenders was Herr Olek,
35:59who had retreated with the survivors of his unit
36:02to the Humboldthain Flak Tower,
36:05housing 30,000 terrified civilians
36:08in addition to the military garrison.
36:12Well, we retreated, retreated,
36:15and in the end, we landed in a Flak Tower.
36:20There, the Soviet army shot at the tower with their tanks
36:25and it always went clack-clack.
36:28It was as if they were knocking on a door.
36:34The Red Army had noticed that it was not to be.
36:39So, over a certain period of time,
36:42they fired 15 cm howitzers.
36:45And they had direct fire on the tower.
36:48That brought about such small concrete holes.
36:53Then there was another night attack with tanks.
36:56They always hoped, they knew,
36:58that we were stacked in graves around this tower.
37:03They attacked
37:05and we looked for cover.
37:08We laid down on the fallen comrades
37:12and defended this attack.
37:15And the next morning,
37:18we were able to see the Soviet corpses
37:21hanging over the graves.
37:29While Herr Olek and his colleagues
37:31were fighting their desperate battles,
37:33Hitler remained in his bunker.
37:36On the night of April 28th,
37:38with the Russian forces grinding
37:40ever closer to his headquarters,
37:42Hitler married his mistress, Eva Braun.
37:46After the wedding meal,
37:48he retired to write his last will and testament.
37:52He defiantly reaffirmed his belief in Lebensraum
37:56and indulged in one last vitriolic attack
37:59on the Jewish race.
38:02On April 28th, his morale plunges
38:05because news comes from Italy
38:07that Mussolini and his mistress, Clara Petacci,
38:10had been arrested.
38:12And then even worse news comes,
38:14that they had been strung up, upside down,
38:17murdered in a Milan square.
38:22On the afternoon of April 30th,
38:24having made his farewells,
38:26he poisoned his wife and his dog
38:29and then shot himself.
38:36Hitler was really worried
38:38that if he was captured by the Soviets,
38:42or indeed by his own people,
38:44they would hang him up from a meat hook.
38:47And Hitler was very concerned
38:50that he not be captured alive or dead by the Soviets.
38:56So is Hitler remotely interested
38:59in going out and standing beside his people
39:02and dying beside them like a German?
39:04Not at all.
39:05Hitler does not think along those lines.
39:08And Hitler therefore does not share his people's risks.
39:12He sits in a hardened bunker
39:14and he preserves his own life
39:16until he's sure that it's all up.
39:18And then he ends his own life
39:20after arranging that his body will be destroyed
39:24so that it's not hung up on a meat hook like Benito Mussolini's.
39:54On the same evening that Hitler committed suicide,
39:57the last battle was raging for the Reichstag.
40:24The indomitable defenders had bricked up the windows and doors
40:28and now made a desperate last stand
40:31which had to be overcome room by room.
40:39With the Germans inside still resisting,
40:42Sergeants Yagorov and Kantaria
40:45planted the victory banner of the Soviet flag
40:48on the Reichstag at 12 o'clock.
40:55It symbolised the triumph of the Soviet Union over Nazi Germany
41:00but it still remained a symbolic act.
41:15Despite all the enormous difficulties under which they now laboured,
41:19the logistical services of the German armed forces
41:22continued to produce minor miracles of supply
41:26which allowed some fairly formidable formations
41:29to enter the final battle for Berlin.
41:32Among them was the 503rd Heavy Tank Battalion
41:36equipped with the mighty King Tiger tank.
41:44These impressive machines fought alongside
41:47the 11th SS Division Nordland
41:50and even more remarkably,
41:52alongside a battalion of French volunteers
41:55which had formed a part of the Charlemagne Division.
41:58On April 25th, there were still 300 men available for combat
42:02in the French Volunteer Battalion.
42:05Together, these two formations played a key role
42:08in the defence of the government buildings in the centre of Berlin.
42:14In many respects, the Frenchmen had nothing to lose
42:18and there was even less at stake for their German masters.
42:24Non-German units made up a tiny minority of the defenders of Berlin.
42:29There were perhaps 3,000 or 4,000 of them,
42:32mainly Norwegians, Danes, a few hundred Latvians
42:36and a few hundred Frenchmen.
42:38These were almost entirely members of the Waffen-SS.
42:42However, although they only made up perhaps 3% or 4%
42:45of Berlin's defending strength,
42:48they had a disproportionate role in the defence of that city.
42:51Because they tended to be in elite regular units,
42:55they were well-equipped and they were ideologically committed.
42:58So they fight extremely hard during the Battle for Berlin,
43:02not least because, of course, they're well aware
43:05that should they be captured, their fate is likely to be much the same
43:09as that that they will meet if they go down fighting in armed combat.
43:13These are people who believe that if they surrender,
43:16they'll be repatriated to their homelands and tried as war criminals.
43:20So these guys have got to fight on to the bitter end.
43:24It is ironic then that Berlin, the old Prussian capital,
43:29the capital of the German Thousand-Year Reich,
43:33is in the end defended most effectively by non-Germans.
43:43The SS in particular knew that they could expect no mercy from the Red Army,
43:48which had long since adopted the practice of shooting SS prisoners out of hand.
44:01Perhaps it was this knowledge which kept many formations at their post
44:05during the dark days of the battles for Berlin.
44:09But as late as April the 26th,
44:11the commander of the 503rd Heavy Tank Battalion
44:15was able to report that he still had six tanks ready for active service
44:19in the defence of the routes leading to the centre of Berlin.
44:23Even more remarkable, they also had stocks of fuel
44:26and a plentiful supply of ammunition,
44:29including the bulky 88mm ammunition for the massive high-velocity guns
44:34which were carried in the turrets of these formidable machines.
44:39Backed up by the Panzerfausts of the French and Norwegian volunteers,
44:46this small battlegroup claimed dozens of Russian tanks
44:50during the bitter street fighting
44:52which marked the very last days of the Third Reich.
45:09Incredibly, even the backup and repair services
45:13of the remaining German tank battalions continued to function,
45:17and by May 1st, the number of tanks available to the 503rd Heavy Tank Battalion
45:23had actually increased,
45:25and there were now 11 tanks ready for action in the bitter street battles
45:30which continued as the diehards fought to maintain their shrinking perimeter.
45:39GUNFIRE
45:52In his memoirs, Marshal Konev admitted that the Soviet Army
45:56had lost 800 tanks in the fighting for Berlin.
46:00In many respects, this last nut was the toughest that the Red Army had to crack.
46:08GUNFIRE
46:13The Russians had announced that they would capture Berlin on May 1st,
46:17but the beleaguered defenders took perverse pride in the fact
46:21that by the morning of May 2nd,
46:23there was still fierce resistance in some sectors of the city.
46:27Although the official surrender took place on the afternoon of May 2nd,
46:31a number of German units nonetheless attempted to break out of the Soviet sector
46:36and make their way towards the Western Allies,
46:39with the result that Berlin was not finally pacified until May 3rd.
46:44GUNFIRE
46:50After the surrender, the city authorities estimated
46:53that there were something like 90,000 instances of rape
46:57which occurred in the last few days before the surrender of the city.
47:01For the ordinary citizens of Berlin, there could be no prospect of relief.
47:10Although military discipline would soon be restored,
47:13it was obvious that one barbarous and inhumane regime
47:17had been swapped for another.
47:20As the Red Army approaches Berlin,
47:24an order comes out to stop raping and murdering and looting
47:29because the Soviets have decided that they want to occupy this part of Germany after the war
47:35and they don't want the Germans in Eastern Germany
47:39to have a big hate-on for the Soviets.
47:42But you can't just switch off that level of hatred and aggression.
47:53As East Germans, three generations of Berliners
47:56would pay a heavy price for loyalty to the man
47:59who did not possess the personal courage to face the music.
48:26To be continued...