By the middle of April 1945, the war in Europe was entering its final act. In Italy, the Western Allies were driving deep into the north, while in the West, American, British, and Canadian armies had already crossed the Rine and were closing the trap around the Ruer Pocket before surging toward the Elba.

 Yet, despite the certainty of defeat, Hitler refused to accept reality, hurling his dwindling reserves eastward in a feudal effort to halt the vast Soviet war machine bearing down on what remained of the Third Reich. In this video, we will use the latest technology, archive footage, and firstirhand accounts from the men who were there to tell the story of the battle for Berlin.

 If you’re interested in how wars are actually decided by logistics, math, weapons, and doctrine, subscribe now. Turn on notifications and stay tuned for more indepth World War II analysis. Let’s continue. On the 16th of April, the Red Army unleashed the Berlin Operation, a colossal offensive designed to force the Odor and Nisa rivers, encircle the German capital, and seize it.

 The numbers involved were almost beyond comprehension. 2 and a2 million soldiers, 6,000 tanks, and enormous concentrations of artillery and air power would drive westward in one overwhelming blow. The offensive was structured around three fronts, the Soviet equivalent of army groups. The two most critical were the first Bellarusian front commanded by Marshall Georgie Jukov and the first Ukrainian front led by Marshall Ivan Kv.

 Over the coming weeks, these two commanders would compete fiercely for the prestige of capturing Germany’s greatest city in the prize that Stalin himself had designated as the ultimate symbol of victory over Nazi Germany. Facing them, the German defenders were in a dire state. Massively outnumbered and outgunned, they had no choice but to lean on the natural geography to shore up their fragile line.

 Dug in along the Odor Ny River barrier, they could still field roughly 1 million men, though of wildly uneven quality, and with critically limited armor and artillery support. The decisive ground for both sides lay at the very heart of those German defenses roughly 60 km east of Berlin at the CEO heights.

 Sitting directly in the path of Zukov’s first bellow Russian front. This position became the scene of 4 days of savage fighting that exacted a fearsome toll on the attackers. With an estimated 66,000 Soviet soldiers killed or wounded before the heights finally fell. But fall they did. And by the 21st of April, the road to Berlin lay open with Soviet armored columns racing to throw a ring of steel around the city.

 Further to the south, Marshall Konv’s first Ukrainian front had encountered considerably less resistance. His original orders called for a sweep south of Berlin. But when Zukov’s advance stalled at CEO, Stalin redirected Konev to strike directly toward the city from the southeast. Just days later, on the 25th of April, the two Soviet pinsers met and Berlin was sealed inside a ring of approximately 1 and a half million troops.

 The siege of the German capital could now begin. Within that encirclement, Berlin was descending into chaos. Is swollen with refugees and devastated by years of relentless Allied bombing. The city was a hollow ruin of its former self. The era of triumphant military parades along the Unden Lyndon and through the Brandenburg Gate was long gone.

In their place, 2 and a half million civilians, most of them living a subterranean existence [music] in sellers and subway tunnels now found themselves trapped in a city running desperately short of food, water, and medical supplies, all while enduring a ceaseless Soviet artillery bombardment. With what remained of the Nazi leadership consumed by the frantic preparation of improvised defenses, ordinary Berliners were largely abandoned to their fate.

 The city had been hastily carved into a series of defensive zones [music] with a Z or central zone forming the innermost ring around the government district. On paper, are these defenses looked formidable, but in reality, most were desperate. lastminute improvisations intended to buy time rather than hold ground, and they rarely succeeded even at that.

 Overturned trams packed with debris and hastily dug anti-tank ditches proved little more than a brief inconvenience to the overwhelming forces closing in. The troops manning these barriers were in many cases no real match for the enemy either. The garrison consisted largely of elderly men and teenage boys, stiffened by a handful of genuinely capable veteran formations, though even these were typically far below strength and utterly exhausted after months of continuous combat.

 Yet, Berlin itself remained a daunting objective, even for an army with such crushing numerical superiority. Consider the terrain. The city is threaded with canals and waterways connected by bridges, and its broad avenues are flanked by tall buildings with rows of windows offering perfect fields of fire.

 Conditions that made advancing tanks without [music] close infantry support a lethal proposition. The Soviets, however, were thoroughly experienced urban fighters by this point in the war. Their go-to method for cracking stubborn defensive positions was built around raw firepower. Heavy artillery pieces like this 203mm howitzer were rolled [music] forward to fire over open sights directly down the length of a street systematically smashing buildings [music] to rubble before infantry and armor saturated the area with high explosive shells and

submachine gun fire. Block by block and building by building, the Red Army ground its way toward the Zone. So let us take a closer look at the famous Zone, the area where the fighting [music] would reach its greatest intensity and at some of the key structures it contained in 1945. Bounded by the Landbear Canal to the south and the Spree River to the north, the zone was roughly defined by the route of the city’s Espawn Railway network.

Flying from south to north across the city, we pass in rapid succession the site of the Gustapo headquarters on Prince Alrech Strasa, then Herman Guring’s vast air ministry building, which remarkably still stands today, followed by the sites of the old and new Reich Chancellories behind which roughly 9 m underground lay Hitler’s furer bunker.

 This complex actually consisted of two separate structures, the Vor bunker and the later deeper edition of the Furer bunker proper. It was here when on the 30th of April that Hitler and his new wife Eva Brown would take their own lives. Continuing northward past the striking modern Holocaust memorial, we arrive at the iconic Brandenborg Gate and the boulevard of Unden Linden on the side of which [music] sits the Hotel Adlon.

 at that time pressed into service as a makeshift field hospital. But the building that matters most today and mattered most to the Soviets in late April 1945 is this one, the Reichto. This imposing structure, despite having stood unused as a parliament since the infamous fire of 1933, had been transformed by Soviet propaganda into a potent political symbol, declared the heart of the fascist state.

 For Stalin, planting the Soviet banner on the roof of the Reichto was therefore an act of supreme political importance in the definitive sign of victory over Nazi Germany. The key to taking the Reichto was the square then known as the Konix plots. Today, the area bears no resemblance to what it looked like in 1945. With the modern chancellory building on the left and the renamed Plata Republic in the center, it is a popular destination for tourists.

 It takes real effort to imagine the [music] ferocious battle that raged across this ground in the final days of the Reich. In this photograph from the 1930s, we can see the old Koix plots or King Square with the Reichto on the right, the diplomatic quarter and the former interior ministry. By 1945, of course, the scene was far less tranquil, and years of sustained bombing had reduced much of it to ruins.

But to truly grasp the fighting around the Reichto, we we need to understand the ground over which it was fought. So, let us move forward to this aerial photograph taken in April 1945. The Interior Ministry, widely [music] known as Himmler’s House, is on the left, and slightly closer to us stands the site of the Croll Opera House.

 Both are heavily damaged, but both would play critical roles in the battle to come. The square itself looks completely different from peace time. At its center sat a formidable obstacle, an abandoned subway construction site that had flooded, creating a water-filled defensive barrier directly in front of the Reichto.

When we shift our view a little further north toward the bend in the spree, we can also make out the ruins of the diplomatic quarter. The only building from that area still standing today is the Swiss embassy. But in 1945, it was a complete city block. So beyond it lay the two crossings that held the key to reaching the Reichto, the Malta Bridge and the Crown Prince Bridge.

Turning now to a remarkably rare piece of aerial film and slowing it down, we can explore the actual battlefield as it appeared shortly after the fighting had ended. Traveling west to east over Berlin’s central tier garden park toward the Brandenburgg gate with the camera angled to the left or northward outside the aircraft, we can identify the remnants of the Croll Opera House in the foreground with the shattered interior ministry visible behind it, overlooking the crucial Mula Bridge beyond.

 On the far side of the spree stands the shell of the huge Leer Bonhof, one of the city’s principal railway stations at the time. The remains of the diplomatic quarter can be seen to its right on the near bank of the river, including the Swiss embassy. Moving a little further east, in the foreground, we see the flooded remnants of the subway excavations that formed that irregularly shaped water barrier on the far side of which lies the open ground in front of the Richto ground that was lined with trenches and would witness some of the

most intense fighting of the entire battle. In the distance stands the crone prince in Bruca, spanning the spree. And finally, the Reichto itself comes into view. Heavily damaged, but unmistakable in the shot. As the aircraft continues its flight through the heart of the ruined city, we can turn our attention back to the northwest to pick up the story from the Soviet side.

 It was troops of the Third Shock Army, part of Zhukov’s front, ought to first reach this area from the north on the 28th of April. The 151st Rifle Division took up positions along the banks of the spree and their immediate objective was clear. Seize the Malta Bridge. It was no small task.

 The Germans had mined the bridge and thrown up barricades across it and they could pour fire down onto it from fortified positions within both the interior ministry and the [music] diplomatic quarter. And so it was here beneath a thick paw of smoke that hung over the entire city that the first Soviet attempt to storm the bridge was made.

 It was thrown back under devastating fire and a sharp German counterattack. The Soviets suffered heavy losses in that opening assault, but characteristically they were soon ready to try again. The second attack, spearheaded by Soviet armor, including several massive IS-2 heavy tanks, are pushed forward onto the bridge.

 Moments later, enormous explosions tore through the column. According to SS soldier Villie Ragman, the lead tanks simply disintegrated on the bridge. But what had caused this destruction? Unknown to the attackers, the Malta Bridge was being engaged by the most powerful fixed defenses in the entire area, located several miles away in the grounds of the Berlin Zoo.

 It was one of three colossal anti-aircraft flack towers that protected the city. And it had turned its guns on the bridge, encased in meters of reinforced concrete and armed with four twin 128 mm anti-aircraft guns on its roof. weapons originally designed to destroy four engine bombers at altitudes of 20,000 ft.

 The tower made short work of the far closer and far slower targets on the bridge. And now, during the lull between Soviet attacks, the Germans also attempted to demolish the bridge entirely, but the charges only partially detonated and a narrow strip of roadway just wide enough for a tank still remained. The Soviets launched a third assault. This time under the cover of concentrated artillery fire, Red Army tanks forced their way across and secured a foothold on the far bank.

Soviet infantry then began the grim work of clearing the stubbornly held positions in the diplomatic quarter and interior ministry. By the evening of the 29th of April, both were largely in Soviet hands and for the first time the final objective was within reach. Let us pause the action for a moment to look more closely at the interior ministry.

By this stage of the war, as we can see, it had been severely damaged or and the fight for these ruins was exceptionally brutal. It came down to room by room combat. And in fact, the breakthrough here hinged on a single window. Soviet soldiers forced an entry into the building right here at this ground floor corner.

 And over the course of that evening, thousands of Red Army troops passed through this very opening. By dawn on the following day, the building was secure and the path to the Reichto lay open. A remarkable episode occurred shortly afterward. A group of men, the remnants of the ninth Falsher Yoger division, emerged from the Lerta railway station behind the Soviet positions and charged straight through the startled Red Army troops to rejoin the German defenders fighting around the Reichto.

What ultimately became of them is not recorded, but their fate was almost certainly a grim one. You know, the prospect of actually seizing the final objective was far from simple. Let us take a look. By the early hours of the 30th of April, the situation was roughly as follows. Soviet forces had crossed the Malti Bridge here and now controlled most of the interior ministry and the diplomatic quarter.

However, the Croll Opera House and the edge of the Tier Garden Park both remained in German hands. Beyond the formidable water barrier that funneled the Soviet approach into a narrow corridor, lines of trenches and three powerful 88 mm guns covered the front of the building, supported by numerous machine guns and firing positions built into the bricked up and sandbagged windows of the Reichto itself.

 Any Soviet assault would have [music] to advance through a storm of fire before reaching the building. Ew. One of the men preparing for the inevitable assault was Vladimir Perversev who wrote a letter to his wife on the eve of the attack from the ground floor of the interior ministry. So far I am alive and healthy only.

 I am slightly drunk the whole time but this is necessary to keep up your courage. I am just 500 m from the rice tug. We have already crossed the spree and in a few days the fritzes and the hanses will be kaput. You write that part of the kitchen ceiling collapsed, but that is nothing. A six-story building collapsed on us and we had to dig our boys out.

 This is how we live and beat the Germans. Inside the Reichto, a garrison of approximately 300 men formed the core of the defense. Knowing that only death or captivity awaited them, most were prepared to fight to the bitter end. You But that resolve was not universal among the German troops in the vicinity. Gunter Debsky, a young conscript who had been assigned to a penal battalion after attempting to desert just weeks earlier, found himself posted beside the Reichto on the 30th of April.

 Gunter Debbki, we got the order to defend the south side of the Reichto. The Russians were not to take it. There was an SS unit inside the Reichto [music] and we were to be on the southern side. Then the commanding officer said to us, “I have received an order to send a negotiating party to the Russians at the other end of the Reichto.

” My goodness, I really thought he was an idiot. He told me to take off my undershirt, tie it to a broom handle, and go over with Porski. As fortune would have it, the officer was mortally wounded moments later. Debsky and Podgorski are considering the order which would almost certainly have meant their deaths to be void quietly slipped away out of sight.

 Let us return to the Soviet perspective. They now face the task of crossing 280 m of largely exposed ground. Today it is a peaceful 5-minute walk. But in 1945, for a brief and terrible period, it was the most fiercely contested stretch of earth in Europe. At 4 in the morning on the 30th of April, the Soviets made their first move toward the water obstacle.

 Aided by the smoke and brick dust thrown up by the bombardment, they pushed forward, but it was not enough. The German defensive fire was simply too intense. At 11, a second attempt was launched, but this too was beaten back, driven in part [music] by the sustained fire from the Zuflac tower. 3 hours later, a third assault went in, and this time the attackers reached the water obstacle, having silenced several key positions and most likely knocked out the 88 mm guns covering the front of the Reichto.

They were halfway there, but half the distance still remained. By now the Soviets had managed to bring forward large concentrations of field artillery and firing from positions outside the Ler station, an area known today as Washington plots, they began hammering the Reichto at virtually pointblank range in an effort to suppress the German return fire.

 Seeing the situation deteriorating rapidly and growing increasingly desperate, the officer commanding the defense of the Reichto, Ghard Babek put in an urgent call for armored [music] support. And remarkably, he received it on several Stu3 assault guns and one enormous King Tiger heavy tank from the SS [music] Nordland Division arrived around this corner on the south side of the Reichto, the very spot where Deky had been positioned a short while earlier.

Inside the King Tiger was its commander, Gayorg Deers. In his memoir, he described the scene. The Reichto building was already badly bombed. The plenary hall burned out. At the front of the building, we looked over to the Croll Opera building and saw a large number of T34s sitting to our right, about 30 of them, their gun barrels pointing at the Reichto building, at us.

After a thorough briefing of the crew, we dared to race around the corner and opened fire on this large number with success. But a single King Tiger could never turn the tide. More and more Soviet armor was now pouring across the Malta Bridge [music] and the newly captured Cron Prince to the northeast. With the northern side of the Koiglots now in Soviet hands, the attackers prepared for a final push on the Reichto.

It was no secret that Stalin was following the fighting with intense personal interest. He had made it unambiguously clear that he wanted the Reichto taken and the Soviet hammer and sickle flying over the building by the 1st of May, International Labor Day, a date of profound significance in the Soviet calendar.

To that end, several dedicated banner parties, small groups whose sole mission was to reach the roof of the Reichsto were now sent into the fight. i.e. the pressure intensified further when a premature report at 2 on the afternoon of the 30th claimed that a red banner had been spotted on the Reichto. The report was transmitted all the way to Moscow and to [music] Stalin’s desk.

When the error was discovered, the commanders responsible, almost certainly fearing the severe consequences of their mistake becoming known, threw themselves into frantic efforts to make the claim a reality, including an attempt to drop a banner onto the roof by aircraft. It failed.

 And so, with time running out, an all-out assault was ordered. There has long been debate about the exact point where the Reich was first breached. Some accounts point to a ground floor window on the north side nearest the spree, others to a spot on the southern facade. I But the most widely accepted version is that men of the 756th Rifle Regiment entered through the main ground floor entrance at approximately 6:00 in the evening on the 30th of April.

 Staff Sergeant Ilia Cenov, later awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union as one of the first men inside the building, recalled the moment. Initially, we got into a long hallway. It turned out that the entire enormous building was in motion. Somewhere steps were heard rumbling. [music] Somewhere people were shouting in German.

 It was not immediately possible to take stock [music] of the situation. One thing was clear, there were a lot of Germans in the building and we would have to do some fighting. What did not have, but we do, is a detailed floor plan revealing just how complex the layout of the Reichto truly was. Saw a labyrinth of rooms, both large and small, extending above and below ground.

It was a nightmarish environment for attacker and defender alike. And a prolonged and savage fight now began for control of the building. With long corridors, wide staircases, hundreds of individual rooms, and the building ablaze in multiple places, the battle inside the Reichto descended into room to room and hand-to-hand fighting that went on for hours without respit.

Gradually, the Soviets managed to drive a wedge through the German defenses by securing the ground floor, forcing some of the [music] surviving defenders up to the higher levels and trapping others in the multi-story basement below. This split prompted both sides to call on their artillery once more.

 The Soviets shelling the upper floors while the few remaining German guns targeted the ground floor in the fighting raged without pause throughout the entire evening of the 30th and deep into the night. The historical record remains unclear, but it is most likely that the first Soviet banner to fly from the Reichto was raised at some point during that night, placed here above the main entrance and lashed in place with belts.

Yet, even with the hammer and sickle now visible on the building, the fighting was far from over. The last pockets of fanatical German resistance inside the Reichto held out until the 2nd of May before finally completely out of ammunition and surrounded on all sides, they were compelled to surrender.

 In total, the fight for the interior of the Reichto lasted more than 30 hours. By the time those final shots echoed through the Reichto, I defenders across the city were emerging from basement and shattered buildings into [music] a dust choked, devastated Berlin, laying down their arms before the waiting victors. Let us head to the roof of the Reichto to examine one last iconic image.

 It is of course this photograph taken by Soviet photographer Yvani Calde. Arguably the single most recognizable image of the entire Second World War. Despite its fame, this photograph was staged. While it does show a red banner flying above the ruins of Berlin, it was taken probably on the 2nd of May, sometime after the first banners had been raised on the building.

As a point of interest, the image was also later retouched to remove one of the two wrist watches worn by the soldier in the foreground. Yeah, a small but telling detail that hints at the widespread looting and far darker episodes that would unfold across the city in the days ahead. A story perhaps for another time.

 For both sides, the price paid for Berlin was staggering. Estimates vary, but it is believed that between 80,000 and 100,000 Soviet troops and approximately 100,000 German soldiers were killed or wounded in the battle, along with perhaps as many as 20,000 civilians. In the days that followed, the first images of the fighting and the devastation it had [clears throat] wrought were shown to the wider world.

The Reichto, still the center of attention, became a place of pilgrimage for Soviet soldiers serving in Berlin, many of whom marked their visit by chalking and carving their names into the walls of the building. That graffiti was still visible when the first Western journalists arrived in the city to document the battle that had finally brought an end to Nazi Germany.

 The story of Berlin, of course, does not end there. Within months, the city would once again find itself at the center of global [music] attention. this time in the opening chapter of the Cold War, and it would remain so for the next five decades. Today, Berlin is a vastly different city, and the visible traces of the war that swept through it in 1945 are few and far between.

But look beneath the surface of the modern buildings and glass towers, and small reminders can still be found. the battlecard griffin that once adorned the Malta bridge, the last fading traces of Soviet graffiti on the roof of the Reichto, and of course the memorials. We honoring the many thousands who fell here in the closing days of the Second World War in Europe.

 That brings us to the end of this video. We hope you found it worthwhile. If you would like to support us in our mission to continue sharing stories like this with as wide an audience as possible, then please consider joining our growing Patreon community. Your support is hugely appreciated. That is all for this time. Thanks again and we will see you soon.