Dan Snow's History Hit - The Battle of Berlin with Sir Antony Beevor

Episode Date: April 17, 2025

Warning: this episode includes discussion of subjects like suicide and sexual assault that some listeners may find disturbing.80 years ago, the Soviets launched their final assault on the German capital. Having swept across Eastern Europe with the Wehrmacht fleeing before them, this was to be the final, apocalyptic battle that marked the collapse of the Nazi regime.Joining us is one of the great military historians, Anthony Beevor, author of 'Berlin: The Downfall 1945'. He explains the strategic moves that brought the Red Army to the gates of Berlin, the desperation of the German defence and the tragic fate of Berlin's civilian population.Produced by Dougal Patmore and James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.We'd love to hear your feedback - you can take part in our podcast survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on.You can also email the podcast directly at [e-mail].

Hi everyone, welcome to the Dan Snows History Hit podcast. Today we're looking at a super grim episode in our past, but a very important one. If I had to say where and when I think I would least like to have been in history, I think Berlin in the spring of 1945 would be a strong contender. Massive industrial warfare, intense bombing, two savage authoritarian murderous regimes sending men and women to their deaths in enormous numbers amid the ruins of a once mighty city. Destruction, murder, sexual violence on a massive scale. It's grim, but it's also important and dramatic. 80 years ago, the fall of Berlin marked the final collapse of the Nazi regime after six years of brutal war.

Here to tell us all about it is one of the greatest military historians of our time, a leading voice on the Second World War, Sir Anthony Beaver. He's going to take us from the Battle of Zeilau Heights through to the unconditional surrender of Germany to the Allies. It's not going to surprise you to hear, given everything I've just said, that this is not one of our lightest topics, so a heads up that we will be touching on topics like suicide, sexual assault, and other areas that people will find disturbing. But without further ado, let's get into it. Here's Anthony Beaver on the Battle of Berlin. T-minus 10. Atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima.

God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And liftoff, and the shuttle has cleared the tower. Antti, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Great to be with you, Dan. By the spring of 1945, what shape are the German field armies in? I mean, is it even possible to talk about a defensive scheme for the German capital?

Or are they just like a boxer that's been beaten so badly and just lying on the ropes? Well, one has to remember that on the 16th of December of 1944, they had launched this huge offensive in the Ardennes, which took the Americans by surprise. And where these forces were then going to be used afterwards, because when they pulled them back, Stalin, of course, was appalled, thinking, well, I'm now going to have the bulk of the Panzer armies facing me. And this is when he accelerated and brought forward the Great Winter Offensive on the 12th and 13th of January. This was going to be the first stage, if you like, of the Berlin operation.

It was going to be the advance from the River Vistula in Poland all the way to the River Oder in Germany. And one lot attacked northwards into East Prussia, while the other two fronts, as the Russians called them, the first Belorussian front and the first Ukrainian front under Konev, were attacking in towards Germany. So this was sort of the key moment when they were actually going to basically break the German army on the Eastern Front. And does Stalin identify that Berlin is the key target here?

Stalin knew that Berlin was going to be the key target, not just because of Lenin saying, you know, he who controls Berlin controls Germany and he who controls Germany controls Europe. But also because there was another very important point, which we'll come on to a bit more later. It was a question of the nuclear facilities, because they had already started or were starting Operation Borodino, which was using information stolen from the Manhattan Project in America by Soviet spies and trying to create their own atomic weapon. And for that, they wanted to get the German scientists at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin and any of the nuclear material.

So it's so interesting that we keep thinking about the sort of hard cut off on V-Day, the end of World War II, but already by late 44, early 45, these politicians, these generals are thinking about the world after the war. Oh, well, very much so. I mean, in fact, even more so, one can say that the Cold War didn't start in 1947, as is often said. The origins of the Cold War, actually, in 1941, it was the traumatic shock of that German invasion, which so traumatized Stalin, he was determined to occupy the whole of Central Europe, especially Poland, so that the Soviet Union could never suffer from a surprise attack again in the future. So is Stalin honest with his

Western allies? Okay, never. He's never honest with anybody. So does he sort of go, well, we're not really going to Berlin, we're just advancing on a broad front? Well, that comes a little bit later. That doesn't come until March. What one has to remember is that we have this first phase where they do this extraordinary charge from the Vistula westwards. I mean, to give an idea, some of the tank brigades, they would come up against a frozen river, open fire with the main armament of their tanks to smash the ice, and then just drive straight in and across. And if the river was deeper than they thought, then the first tank

would get drowned. But in most cases, those rivers, the north-south rivers, were on the whole fairly flat. And so they drove through up the other side and just charged on. And because Hitler was controlling everything from his headquarters, from the Führerbunker, by the time that orders came through, I mean, the Soviets were already past the headquarters. So this is why it was a total collapse all the way through until they got to the River Oder. The ability of the Soviets to fight in the depths of winter, whether it's the Dnieper crossing earlier in the war or these crossings, I mean, that must have been so difficult for the men involved

and the enemy they faced. Well, they did have some major advantages. I mean, their tanks, especially the T-34, which was their sort of workhorse tank, and even their sort of JS1s, JS Stalin 1s and 2s, they did have much broader tracks, which coped with the snow far better than the panzers who kept on with sliding in all directions. But they also had the kit in terms of the Cobra, the kit of their padded jackets,

and they had the right stuff for their guns. But my God, those men suffered. Some of them marched for 12,000 kilometers when you think of the advances that they made. But the other great irony, of course, was they had half a million US vehicles which had been donated through lease land. And in fact, the Americans would have got to Berlin long before the Russians if they hadn't given them all those vehicles. So again, it was one of those things Putin tries to deny that they needed any help from the Western allies. But in fact, at the time, Marshal Zhukov and Stalin and Khrushchev all acknowledged that without American help, they would never actually have survived. The Germans face them, as you say, Hitler's

issuing orders that are out of date by the time they even left the Führerbunker. Why are the Germans fighting on the Eastern Front in particular? It's just so clear, this is a catastrophic defeat. And yet, are they resisting? In many cases, they are resisting simply because otherwise it was a question of, you know, they knew they were going to die like rats in a hole or whatever it might be. But actually, they had no choice. What we must remember is that when it came to the bomb plot of July 1944, the British and the Americans analyzed the whole situation completely wrongly. They assumed that any army that was prepared to blow up its own commander-in-chief must be in a

state of disintegration. What they failed to realize was that because Hitler was still alive, the pressure both from Hitler, the Nazi party, the SS, the Gestapo, meant that they were going to have to fight on right to the end. And the last person alive would be Adolf Hitler, i.e. there would be no surrender while Adolf Hitler was still alive. So that actually is why the death of Hitler in Berlin is in many ways the key moment of the whole of the war in the West. So by early spring 1945, Soviet troops have swept across Eastern Germany. They're at the gates of Berlin. Are they? No, they're about 60 miles from Berlin, maximum. They're still having some trouble in the north, what was called the Baltic balcony of Pomerania. And this is where Rokossovsky was

having to advance through all the way to clear that, all the way to Stekin, i.e. the mouth of the Oder, to be ready to be part of the Berlin operation, as it's going to be called, which didn't take place till April. But before April, then the key moment came when the Americans got across the Rhine at Ramagan. Stalin knew the very next morning from General Susloparov, who was his liaison officer with the American headquarters, that they were across. So he knew that he had to accelerate everything. Marshal Zhukov commanding the 1st Belorussian Front and Konev were ordered immediately back to Moscow and were told to prepare plans for the Berlin

operation. So they had altogether from the Baltic at Stettin all the way down to Trieste, there were 6.9 million Soviet troops. That was well over twice what the Germans used in 1941 in Operation Barbarossa. So a vast, vast force. But above all, think of the artillery, the god of war, as the Red Army used to call it. I mean, ready for the opening bombardment from the Oderbrook. This was the marsh plain either side of the Oder underneath the Seele Heights, which was the key battle really for Berlin. They lined up all together some 9,000 guns and they fired 1.25 million shells on that very first day. And in fact, the effect was so devastating that everybody in Berlin suddenly found their walls were shaking and pictures were coming off the walls. And the women,

of course, came out and they were standing on the sort of landings of apartment blocks, knowing perfectly well that the battle had started and they had a pretty good idea of what their fate was likely to be once the Russians got there. And so that artillery bombardment, for example, dwarfs the enormous bombardment before the Battle of the Somme that the British fought. I mean, that's extraordinary. Just quickly, we've talked about Stalin lying, these lies again. The Americans and Brits were sort of quite interested, weren't they? They were worried about Bavaria and the sort of Nazi holdouts in the mountainous south. They weren't going hell for leather for Berlin, were they? Well, the lying took place from Stalin in March, towards the end of March, because basically he was preparing, he told the allies, oh listen,

we're not going to be ready to attack until May. Totally untrue. He'd given the order that they were going to be ready to attack on the 16th of April. In a very naive way, Eisenhower, without even consulting either Montgomery or even Tedder, his own deputy, his own chief of staff, and telling nothing to the British at all, had sent a signal to Stalin telling him exactly what all of his plans were. And Stalin saw that he was interested in still in this idea of the Alpenfestung, of the fortress in the Alps or further south. And he didn't believe that Berlin was important. So Stalin encouraged this. This was a notorious signal, 252, which he'd sent. And when the British found out, they were furious and Eisenhower was

rather shaken by this, not surprisingly. And Churchill got onto him and sort of simply said, listen, Patton and Third Army are sort of heading towards Czechoslovakia. We want to shake hands with the Russians as far to the east as possible. But Eisenhower's attitude, which was rather reflecting President Roosevelt's attitude, was that they're not interested in post-war politics. So the whole business about how badly Poland was being treated, which is what preoccupied Churchill, and all of that, we forget about. We just want to get the war over and done with as quickly as possible. So that's why the British were so angry. And at the same time, Stalin was rubbing his hands saying, oh, well, I think you're absolutely right. Berlin has no importance whatsoever. We'll be just sending some reconnaissance troops in that

direction or whatever. Well, I mean, for God's sake, I mean, when you're talking about a whole front of Belarusian front just on that bit and Konev to the south, well, we're talking about well over 3 million men. It dwarfed anything that the West had. But the important thing was, of course, that then Eisenhower was persuaded for a moment that maybe they should go for Berlin as well. And this is when Simpson's 9th Army had reached the Elbe, the River Elbe, and then you got some of their troops across. And on the other side, there was the German 12th Army. And funny enough, I mean, when I was researching, there was still the chief of staff of the army and the chief operations officer. And they said, we wouldn't have lasted 12 hours.

I mean, they had no anti-tank weapons whatsoever. And there they had in the American 2nd Armored Division, hell on wheels, ready to sort of smash through. And they could have got all the way through to Berlin. Now, this is one of the great what-ifs of the period, which Bradley started to panic. And he said, listen, we'd suffer 100,000 casualties. It's not worth it because already we had to remember that the agreement had been made that the occupation of West Germany would go up as far as the Elbe. Berlin would be divided up and all the rest of it. So basically, even if we capture Berlin, we'll still have to hand it over afterwards. Is it worth all those things? So actually, Eisenhower made the right decision for the wrong reasons. What he was afraid of was of blue-on-blue casualties.

They just shot down six Soviet fighters over the Oder. Stalin was furious, and Stalin was also very suspicious at the way that no Soviet representative had been involved in the surrender of the troops in Northern Italy. So there was a lot of paranoia and he was always afraid of this possibility somehow that the West might suddenly support Germany or whatever, or turn around and all the rest of it. I mean, talk about somebody who, shall we say, didn't trust anybody else. I mean, I don't think anyone would have really trusted Stalin, but he certainly, in this particular case, was determined not to be caught out.

So interesting, that old Sun Tzu adage of politics and violence being blended in war. Stalin's a big proponent of that here, or exemplar of that here, whereas Eisenhower's thinking of the more straightforward military terms without the great strategic or political ramifications. None whatsoever. As far as they were concerned, America was there just to save, pull Europe's chestnuts out of the fire, and then get home. But also, of course, there was a war in the Far East, which for most Americans was far more important than the war in Europe. And many of the troops were going to then be sent to the Far East, because they still at that stage didn't know whether the atomic bomb was going to work and whether they'd have to invade Japanese home islands, which would have caused massive casualties, not least among

the Japanese population, where 18 million were being forced into militia groups with bamboo spears and suicide charges. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. We're talking about the fall of Berlin. More coming up. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries.

The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit,

wherever you get your podcasts. Speaking of civilian populations dragooned into militia groups, talks about the key battle for Berlin, Sila Heights, you just mentioned, what state are the Germans in? Are these still professional German troops? Are these these kind of old men and young boys that we hear about? Who's under that massive artillery bombardment? Well, they were a complete mixture. You had a certain number of SS troops. Some of the SS units, in fact, of course, slightly further back, not involved there, were foreign. You had these Norwegians, Danes, both there were foreign. You had these Norwegians, Danes, Swedes or whatever in the Northland. You had a Dutch SS. You had French SS. You had the SS Charlemagne. And they were the ones who actually took part in the final battle in Berlin, as we'll see later. But at this particular point,

no, it was a mixture of professional troops. Yes, lots of Luftwaffe ground personnel basically dragooned into platoons and companies and so forth. And yes, Hitler youth on bicycles with Panzerfaust strapped to the handlebars who were expected to take on T-34 tanks. Now, the Sehler Heights are an impressive feature. And Zhukov, Marshal Zhukov, normally was very good about his sort of reconnaissance, but he underestimated the strength of this particular position. And with our 88-millimeter guns up top and dug in, but with a very weak first line, which was very much that, and they knew that the Russians would sort of bombard the whole lot, they were actually not too bad a shape. Because when that artillery barrage started, it really did

concentrate on the first line, which would be more or less abandoned. Then Zhukov made the big mistake. He started off by sending in two of his armies, basically infantry armies, which were supposed to clear it, and then the tanks would go through. But he panicked when he found that half of them, they just weren't getting up the slope and all the rest of it. Meanwhile, Stalin, who, of course, in his own particular malicious way, was creating competition between the two marshals. Konyov, he was saying, was really advancing very fast in the south. Why are you having such trouble there? And so Zhukov made this disastrous mistake where he suddenly decided to change the battle plan and push through the tanks. And already the ground had been so churned up by their own shells that the tanks had real trouble. And especially, they didn't realize quite how steep that

hill was. And many of them, even with their broad tracks, were struggling hard. So it was a hell of a battle. In fact, that was where they lost the bulk of their casualties in that particular fight. And it took them two to three days before they're on top and then getting onto Reichstrasse 1, which was the main road all the way from East Prussia through to the center of Berlin. And in that time, Konev was coming in from the south. And here we go back to this whole thing of Stalin's plan, which was to encircle Berlin with Konev coming in round through the south and Zhukov coming around through the north. And the point was to encircle Berlin to prevent the Americans breaking through from the river

Elbe, again, to protect Dahlem, which was where the nuclear facilities were, which he did not want to have sort of destroyed or lost. What state is Adolf Hitler in, in the Führerbunker? Adolf Hitler is in, shall we say, a curious mixture of moods between resignation at some moment and then absolute apoplexy of anger at anything that goes wrong. Of course, he was refusing to admit that on the situation's map, that something which was marked as a division was probably, you know, of a battalion strength. And I mean, you know, there was a famous thing in that film of, oh, it's Steiner, you know, because he thought he had a whole SS Corps.

Well, actually, all of Steiner's troops had been taken away from him. I mean, basically, he had a headquarters and a few sort of guard troops. And he was expecting that Steiner was going to do this counterattack, rather like sort of the Poles destroying the siege of Vienna or whatever, forgetting the fact it was Poles who saved Vienna. But anyway, and he was determined that Steiner, you know, would lead this counterattack and Berlin would stay Berlin and Vienna would be recaptured again and all the rest of it. I mean, it was a sort of fantasy land. I have a fascinating time with General von Freytag von Leuhenhofen, who was actually in the bunker all of this time with Hitler,

watching what was going on. He was Guderian's chief adjutant. And he was a member of what one might call the reality-based community, presumably, Guderian and him. Did he look around and think, this is all just completely... Oh, yes. Oh, yes. I mean, a lot of them. I mean, you know, the sensible ones.

I mean, there were a few, of course. I mean, there were the Hitler-Herrigs, they were called the really loyal Hitler obsessives, like, for example, Krebs and Burgdorfer. When it got to the end, they just drank the brandy and then shot themselves sitting there in the bunker. Goebbels was determined to die with Hitler or die at the end and so forth. And that's when they brought their

six children into the bunker, and they were going to kill all the children because they did not want them to live in a world which was not National Socialist. So one has to remember all of these different characters. The other one also is very useful is General Rick Vantnesia, who was again, another of the ones there in the bunker. And I remember, you know, he was describing how you could sort of talk to Hitler, and he would absolutely hear nothing. And I remember, you know, he was describing how you could sort of talk to Hitler and he would absolutely hear nothing. And I mean, you know, even if you sort of picked up a vase or something and sort of smashed it on the ground, it would have made no difference at all.

He was sort of completely out of it in so many ways. And there was Eva Braun waiting in her sitting room, worrying about whether she was going to get her jewelry back, which she was getting Jewish prisoners to mend for her from one of the concentration camps. It was a mad, mad world. You write so beautifully in your book on Berlin, saying the terminal stage of a regime tells you so much about it. Those dying moments of National Socialism, what does that tell us about the nature of it? Well, the whole thing was so grotesque. I mean, what was interesting was that

while Hitler was getting married down in the bunker on that night, the 29th, 30th of April, there was an absolute orgy going on upstairs. Traudl Junger, his secretary, realized that the Goebbels' children hadn't had anything to eat or whatever, she went up to sort of try and find some food for them. And to find that, I mean, the SS officers of the Guard and the Großdeutschland had invited in any impressionable young women for sort of champagne and food and a final party to lose their virginity or whatever before they were raped by the Russians. And she found this absolute sort of orgy going on upstairs. And yet down below in this sort of concrete submarine of the Führerbunker, sort of that was all very correct and so forth, as Hitler, after the winning ceremony, then dictates his final will and testament, appointing

all the successors, who was going to be the next Reich Chancellor, who is going to be the head of the party and all the rest of it. I mean, as if somehow this world could carry on. It was mad. But it was actually Albert Speer who was the one who complained bitterly, funnily enough. He's always been sort of given rather to an easier treatment, I think, in the post-war years. What he was so furious about was he said that people will always remember terminal events.

And he said that the great achievements remember terminal events. And he said that the great achievements in national socialism would be forgotten as a result. Well, this is where one says that, you know, it is actually the downfall of a regime like that, which actually reveals its sheer squalor, its sheer filth, frankly. Once the Soviets had smashed the Salau Heights positions asunder, and they're moving towards Berlin, how serious was the defense of Berlin? I mean, was there any sense in which they could hold the Soviets on the outskirts of town? The correlation of forces meant that it was impossible. There were some sharp battles. And remember, they did have some of these SS troops

of the SS Nordland, which had Tiger tanks and so forth. And so there were battles. But the main thing was, of course, it was the artillery. I remember Berlin had already been battered by the RAF and by the American air forces. And then the artillery started firing. So again, they were firing another couple of million shells into Berlin from the outside. It was interesting, only a few hours after the last air raid, there was this extraordinary silence in Berlin. And then Hitler was woken up early in the morning by the sound of shelling. And he came out sort of screaming and yelling, what's this? When they explained to him that they were already within artillery range. And you can imagine all the Russian gunners were painting, you know, for Hitler, for Goering, for Goebbels or whatever, you know, on their shells

and then firing them with glee into the city. But in fact, the people who were being killed were usually women queuing at the last shops which might have any food. And then they were raiding any stores they could find. I mean, it was sort of not quite rioting as such. But at the same time, you then had SS squads and Feldschirmdammere going around executing hanging deserters. So anybody who was found away from their unit, even if it was legitimate,

they were going to be strung up, usually with a card hanging around their neck, saying, you know, I am a coward or whatever it might be. It was a pretty nasty atmosphere. And you mentioned all those women. No effort had been made to evacuate non-combatants from Berlin. No, and in fact, Goebbels had been warned that, of course, what about milk for babies? Shouldn't they start bringing some cows into Berlin or things like that? They had made no provision for the women, no provision for the

children or anything like that. As far as Hitler was concerned, you have to remember when he issued what was called his Nero Order, that everything should be destroyed. Actually, it was General de Mezziar who said this to me. He said he had a hypertrophic identity with the whole of the German people. Because he was going to commit suicide, the rest of the German people had to commit suicide too, had to die with him. And so the Nero Order is famously issued around this time. And he says, bring down the temple, push down the columns, bring the whole building. Yes. And above all, smash the bridges, which had all the water supplies and the sewage and all the rest of it, going across them or whatever. And this is where Speer and some others did try to do their best, simply saying, you've got to think of the civilian population in the future. You know, they've got to somehow survive.

But as far as Hitler was concerned, this was a Götterdämmerung. Just level Germany. Yes. And he agreed with Speer that actually it wouldn't have the same cinematic effect if it had just been in Berchtesgaden. But the destruction of Berlin with all the monuments coming down, that would be something for the world to remember. It was an Ozymandias, if you like, to use another metaphor.

You listen to Downsend's History. Berlin will fall after this. Don't go away. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Janaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest

millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. And so, as the Soviets move into the city, is there fighting house to house? Well, there's fighting in various places. For example, Tempelhof Airfield, there's quite a tank battle there with the,

again, with the Nordland, fighting some of of Tricos Eighth Guards Army. This was the old Stalingrad army. Yeah. So if we stop there, Stalingrad is a name that will be forever attached to yours, but Chuikov is the man who fought in the gutters and the drains in the clinging to Stalingrad. And now he's leading that army that's pushing into Berlin. Extraordinary moment for them. Yes. And the irony is, of course, they're making some of the same mistakes that the Germans made when attacking Stalingrad. But if you're going to more or less destroy a city and remove it, turn it into ruins, you're providing actually very good defensive positions for the defenders.

Shrikov was sort of talking about the Stalingrad Academy of Street Fighting and all the rest of it. They made huge mistakes. Funny enough, similar mistakes to what Putin made when advancing on Kiev, because they had the first and second tank armies. When they had to encircle the city, they were only allowed to then start heading in towards the center. And one's got to remember the number of different, you've got about seven or eight different armies all heading towards the center, many of them shooting at each other because they were firing artillery ahead. And the trouble was that the tankers were basically adding old bedsteads to the top

of their tanks and around the sides and all the rest of it to act as spaced armor against the panzer fires being fired at them. So that made them very, very awkward. And they began by advancing down the middle of the street. Well, that was, they found was saying, so they had to do it on advance on both sides, sort of covering fire. And then, of course, there were the barricades. The Germans had made a lot of barricades, which were railway trucks pushed over onto their side and buses filled with stones, manned by a mixture of Volkssturm, the old people's militia, and Hitler Hitler Youth and some soldiers thrown in, but on the

whole, most of them were really part of sort of Goebbels' call-up. They were the ones who basically were obviously going to suffer in all of this sort of fighting, but they did manage to inflict a certain number of casualties. And then the great tank hunters or panzer hunters, panzerjägers, were actually the French, part of the French SS Charlemagne. And it was fascinating interviewing some of those old fascists who are still around when I did the book and their attitude about, here was the future of Europe. I mean, they almost talked about themselves as if there was the future of the common market or of European Union. At a time, paradoxically, of course, when Stalin had gone completely nationalist.

So forget international communism, it was Russia, Soviet Union, but the emphasis on Russia even more than the Soviet Union. While on the German side, they were claiming that sort of they were defending Europe, defending Europe, of course, from the Asiatic Horde. So talk about a switch of identities. It was rather bizarre. And so those French former SS men you met, they didn't feel particularly embarrassed about their service. They maintained that they were on the right side of history. Oh, definitely. They were still convinced they were on the right side of history. Yes, absolutely. And it was a little bit like sort of the Spanish right in the Spanish Civil War. They were convinced that actually they were

fighting the first battle of World War III. And that was even, as I say, before the Second World War. How long does that battle go on in Berlin? Well, the battle went on until really May the 1st. In fact, there was still a little bit going on on May the 2nd. May the 1st was when they really captured the Reichstag, which Stalin had defined as the objective within Berlin, rather than the Reich Chancellery. They sent anyway the sort of smash teams in because they were desperate. Stalin wanted to have every detail about Hitler's life.

He wanted to know everybody who was around him. They all had to be locked up specially, ready for interrogation. And many of them were kept for years afterwards, just in case the boss wanted to know something more from those particular days. The fighting at this particular point, as I say, once the flag was raised over the Reichstag, and of course, that was, of course, completely faked, all those photographs. One of the problems was that as they held up the red Soviet banner, it revealed all the stolen watches on his arm, because that was the first thing they went for. They went for the watches first and then for the women.

Uri, Uri, they used to shout as they came in. I'm sorry, people had to hand over their watches. And then it was far west far. And even if they were Jewish, because there were a lot of Jewish women who'd been held in one of the transit camps, they were all raped because the Russians had no idea of German antisemitism that had been repressed ever since the Nazi-Soviet pact. That was the cry, far is far, woman is a woman, and that was it.

I mean, it can't have been an easy book to write, this one, because of the extraordinary violence, and then also the sexual violence that followed the Soviet advance. It was, but in a way it was quite important, because one had material there coming from the Russian archives, which is why they were so angry about the book, which actually explained a lot about rape and violence in war. What was interesting was that it was far worse, actually,

in the first phase when they got into East Prussia, because there they were raping for revenge and anger and bitterness, and it was unbelievably violent. And most of the women were trying to commit suicide, slashing their wrists and all the rest of it, begging. I mean, Solzhenitsyn even wrote a poem about it, Prussian Knights. It was unimaginable. But by the time they got to Berlin, there they were being very selective. They would go into the bunkers or into the cellars where the women were hiding, and they would pick out there with torches. They'd pick out the ones that they fancied or whatever. And the point was, as a number of them explained when we did the interviews, the important

thing was to try to attach yourself just to one of them who would defend you from mass rape by all the others, because it was gang rape, which was the basic thing of the Red Army. Many of them, because they'd all been humiliated. And it was a knock-on process. Their humiliation had come in training, the way that they treat them, and see this still today in the Russian army. And as a result, it was really the knock-on theory of oppression. And there were the German women, and actually there had been also Polish women, Hungarian women, and all the rest of it, who were there basically who would be their victims and sort of get rid of the humiliation that they felt that they themselves had.

Because they'd been so brutalized by their NCOs, their officers. Yes, yes. And this, I think, we still see in Ukraine. We've seen in the atrocities in Ukraine. It's just the same. I remember when researching in Moscow in the 90s, 5,000 a year, 5,000 suicides a year amongst the recruits to the Russian army on average during that particular period. Adolf Hitler killed himself on the afternoon of the 30th of April. And yet fighting goes on, there's fighting. Did anyone try and surrender at that

point? Well, yes, obviously individuals surrender or whatever. They have to be very careful they're not being observed by some of the blocking squads or detachments of SS or 4th Gendarmerie. But already things are breaking down in that way. There are many, as I say, shooting themselves, others trying to break out from Berlin through the cordon, in most cases hoping to get to the Elbe and crossing over to be made prisoners by the Americans rather than by the Russians. I mean, the great joke or so-called joke at Christmas, in fact, just beforehand had been, you know, be practical, give a coffin. It was one joke and the other one was, you know, optimists are learning English and pessimists are learning Russian. The question of who got to Berlin first. And that's why when the Americans got across the Elbe, the Russians got so nervous thinking that they would be in Berlin before them.

What kind of casualties did the Soviets sustain in this great push for Berlin? A third of a million, of whom over 100,000 were dead, but the rest were basically were very badly wounded. And that meant becoming what was called a samovar, i.e. legless, armless. And when they were returned home, they didn't want them cluttering up Moscow. It looked bad. They were sent to the north. They were sent to some of the camps, even though they were war wounded. I mean, that's how the Russians treated their own people. So it's hardly surprising if you're going to treat your own people so badly, how they're going to then treat the enemy as a knock on again theory of oppression.

And we've talked about a little bit, but just give me a sense of the strategic importance of the fact that it was the Soviets who captured Berlin first and the surrender of the Third Reich came pretty quickly after that as well. I mean, it turns out Stalin was right about Berlin. It was totemic. It was totemic. Yeah, absolutely. And Berlin basically was completely, well, surrendered by the 2nd of May. Stalin, though, was furious because it wasn't sort of the end of the fighting. He then only heard on the evening of the 7th of May, the Western allies were going to celebrate the end of the war on the 8th of May, which is V-Day. As far as he was concerned, that was not on because fighting was still going on in various places around Prague, where Vlasov's Russian troops had been with the Germans and were

in German uniform, then in a desperate attempt to escape their fate, which was going to be a pretty nasty one. So these are pro-Hitler Russians? Well, they weren't necessarily pro-Hitler. Most of them actually had been starving in Russian camps and were given the opportunity of putting on German uniform and fighting on. And so they changed sides and joined an uprising with Czech partisans against the Germans. And so as far as Stalin was going, the war was still going on. They were still fighting in Courland, where a whole army group had been cut off. So he wouldn't allow it until midnight on the 9th. And this is when General Marshal Keitel signed the surrender under the instructions of Shukhov. And there was Shukhov with

Air Chief Marshal Tedda and a French representative in the form of General Lassigny. Lassigny, thank you very much indeed. Not at all. Well, there you have it, folks folks thank you so much for listening to that a difficult listen I think the story of the Battle of Berlin but really told by one of the all-time greats a huge huge privilege to have him on

this episode is part of our D-Day to Berlin series which we started back in June last year June 2024 and it covers the period from D-Day from the 6th of June 1944, right up to May 1945. So it's exciting to be reaching the conclusion of that. We've covered the major events, obviously D-Day,

the largest amphibious invasion in history. We've talked about the Battle of Arnhem, the Bulge, the massive Soviet offensives in the east that swept the Germans well out of the Soviet Union, through Poland, and into the German heartland itself. Next up, on the 30th of April, we'll be diving into Hitler's final days. You heard Antony touch on it there, but we'll be doing a deep dive,

just focusing on that just febrile, bizarre, fantasy, appalling world of the Reichsbunker beneath the Chancery as the world closed in on Hitler and his lackeys. And we'll be marking more 80th anniversaries this year as they come up. Make sure to check out our podcast feed, like and subscribe so you don't miss them. See you next time, folks. you you