Dan Snow's History Hit - The Red Army Surrounds Berlin

Episode Date: April 10, 2025

By April 1945, Soviet forces stood at the gates of Berlin. From the summer of 1944, Hitler's armies had suffered a series of cataclysmic defeats that had left them shattered and desperately trying to hold on in front of the capital of the Third Reich. But how the Soviets' been able to bring the once mighty German Army to the brink of total defeat, and did the Wehrmacht have one last throw of the dice to save the Nazi regime?In this episode, Dan is joined by Professor Evan Mawdsley, author of Thunder in the East: The Nazi-Soviet War 1941-1945 and former Professor of International History at the University of Glasgow. Evan helps Dan explore the stark differences in the narrative of World War II's final months across Western and Eastern Europe. They also discuss the key events from Operation Bagration in June 1944 to the Soviets' advance on Berlin in 1945 and how these tie in with the advance of the Western Allies. Also, could Stalin's strategic decisions have brought the war to an end sooner, and what did Hitler's last offensive in Hungary reveal about the dictator's priorities?Produced 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 everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. In the West, we often talk and share stories about the British, the Canadian, the American liberation of Western Europe. But in the East of the continent, and to the Russians in particular, that story of liberation is told very differently indeed. In the East, June 1944 is not primarily linked in people's minds with D-Day. It's remembered as being the start of one of the most enormous military offensives in history. The Soviet Operation Bagration would rip German army groups to pieces. It would inflict the greatest defeat on the German army in its history. Bagration swept German arms off Soviet soil. And as you know, Stalin wasn't prepared to stop there. The sequel was hardly as intense. And on this podcast, I'm going to look at the winter and the

spring of 1945, 80 years on from those events. This is the story of how the Soviets ground their way towards Berlin and how Hitler launched one last offensive, forgotten in the West, but telling because it was an offensive not to protect Berlin, but Vienna, not to protect Berlin, but Vienna, showing in the last days of his life his true loyalties to the city where he'd once lived, where he'd come of age as a young man. To help me with this job, I've got Evan Maudsley. He was the Professor of International History at the University of Glasgow. He's written many books, including Thunder in the East, the Nazi-Soviet War, 1941-45. And his most recent book is Supremacy at Sea, all about victory in the Central Pacific. It's coming out in paperback

in May. Please check it out. This is another episode in our D-Day to Berlin series when we chart the course of the final months of the Second World War. We've got more episodes coming up, but we're getting very, very close indeed to the Führer's capital of Berlin. Here's Evan Morsley. Tell us how it happened. Enjoy. 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 lift off, and the shuttle has cleared the tower. Evan, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Can you give me a sense of just how monumental the catastrophe that overcame the German army on the Eastern Front was

in the sort of second half of 1944 from the launch of Operation Bagration. Yeah, thank you very much for inviting me to take part. Bagration is the starting point, I think, and it's good to sort of think about that going through to Berlin. What actually happens there is this huge hole is blown in the German army with the destruction of Army Group Center. Suddenly, really, things do completely collapse, and it's's a kind of arc which goes from Bagration to Berlin. It's a kind of continuous steamroller process. And the point I'd like to make really now is to say, well, it's not as simple as that, but it's 11 months between June 1944 and Operation Bagration and May 1945, the fall of Berlin. It's quite a complicated process before it actually gets to that stage. So, Bogratan is certainly the key point because the Germans are rolling back.

Well, let's talk about that complicated process. I guess, first of all, though, is this just a sign that the Germans are fundamentally broken or have the Soviets just come on so much in their fighting ability and their material advantages. Why is this last year of the war a story of pretty uniform German retreats rather than the seesawing on the Eastern Front that perhaps we see earlier in the war? I think, in a way, there's no turning back after Berggration. The thing about Berggration, by the way, which one might stress is that it's the point at which the Germans are kicked out of Russia. Until that stage, until June 1944, the Germans are still fighting inside Russia. So that suddenly changes. It's true that the Red Army by that time is really formidable in terms of numbers and

in terms of experience. There's a kind of Darwinian event going on where the incompetent officers and commanders have been weeded out and they've been replaced by much more capable people who are experienced with the war. But also, in material terms, the Red Army is so much stronger. But there is a stage in which this is a to and fro. And what's going to happen at Belgrachion is that the Germans can fall back, basically, to the Vistula River in the middle of Warsaw, and they can hold. They have a lot of ground. They have to leave Russia. They lose the battle in Belarusia, but they fall back across eastern Poland, and they're able to hold on in Warsaw and on the Vistula. So,

to that extent, they are able to recover, and that's quite important. I suppose there is a to and a fro because as you go forward, you run out of supplies and so on. You run out of lines of communication, and that's happening to the Russians as well. They've advanced several hundred miles from Belorussia to the Vistula and then they're kind of stuck and that's a problem for them. The other thing that happens to them is that a lot of opportunities suddenly open up once they reach Poland. From the German point of view, so at the onset of winter 1944, dare they dream that perhaps they finally found a line, perhaps on the Vistula for some period of time. held Warsaw on the Vistula for some period of time. That wasn't something that they were getting desperate about. And in fact, the point to bear in mind, Dan, is that what happens after they get to

the Vistula is that they stop, the Russians stop. And in August, Stalin actually calls a halt. He says that everyone is going to be on a strict defensive for a period of time while we consolidate our position and do other things. Other things involves going south into Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria. But the drive directly west to Berlin comes to an end at that stage, and it doesn't pick up again until January of 1945, when the Russians launched the Vistula-Oda operation. So yes, I think the Germans could have been reasonably, it isn't as dark to them as it actually became.

With our Western bias, we talk about D-Day, the battle for Normandy a lot. How do the losses, how do the blows inflicted upon the Wehrmacht, upon Nazi Germany compare in the East and the West in this summer and autumn fall of 1944? Is it possible to ask who was taking more of a toll on the German forces? Well, it was certainly the case that the Russians were taking a bigger toll on the German forces than the Western Allies were. In terms of casualties on the Allied side, they are much higher on the Eastern Front. I think it's important to bear in mind that there are parallels between the Eastern Front and the Western Front,

because the invasion of Normandy in June coincides with the catastrophe of Operation Bagration, much more costly for the Germans than Normandy is. Normandy doesn't last. I'm not in any way trying to trivialize what happened in Normandy. It's one of the most important campaigns of the war, and it is a kind of war-wearing campaign. But in terms of losses, Russian losses in the East are in the hundreds of thousands. Allied losses in Normandy are in the tens of thousands. And that's, I think, probably similar to what the German losses are. One difference is that a very large number of German divisions are destroyed in Belarus. Either they're trapped in a huge encirclement or they break up as they're retreating, whereas the Germans are able to

pull back out of France eventually and to move back towards the Netherlands and Belgium just to slow things down and to hope to get a line on the German border. So if you try to compare the two, it's substantially worse in Russia for the Germans than it is in the West. When does Berlin become a sort of realistic target? I mean, when does Stalin think, right, we're going to push West, and this time we're going to hit the capital of the Third Reich? Is it not until after Christmas and the beginning of 1945? They are still stuck on the Vistula, so it's not an immediate thing that they can do. on the Vistula, so it's not an immediate thing that they can do. But in October and November of 1944, the Russian high command, the so-called Stavka, begins laying out a plan for a Berlin

operation. And they are thinking of an operation which is going to take place early in 1945. This would involve the kind of central armies of the Russian forces. Stalin takes direct control of that operation that's being planned. This drive to Berlin, which has always been a central feature of Russian planning and also Russian propaganda, is something that Stalin wants to take direct responsibility for. responsibility for. And so Stalin and the Stavka create this striking force of the three most strongest formations within the Red Army, three army groups. The army groups are called in Russia fronts, fronty, creates three army groups under Stalin's overall command. Stalin's in Moscow, he does everything by telegraph or teleprinter. He doesn't go out to the front lines, but he's certainly overseeing things. And the core figure in this is Marshal Zhukov, who's the commander of the 1st Belarusian Army Group, with two other marshals, Marshal Rokossovsky and Marshal Konev,

on his northern and southern flanks. This is the striking force which is being aimed at Berlin. This is the striking force which is being aimed at Berlin. The operation, as planned, is supposed to begin in January, and it's supposed to last about seven or eight weeks with a two-stage operation. It will end in February with the capture of Berlin before the beginning of the kind of rainy season, what's called, in Russian it's called, you have a kind of spring fall when movement is much more difficult than it was in the winter or in the summer. And that's how the plans laid out. So what goes wrong, if you like, with Stalin's plan? Why is there not a hammer and sickle flying over Berlin by February?

That's kind of the $64,000 question. There are a range of things that happen which interfere with things. One of them is that inevitably, the German resistance is quite heavy, which slows things down. In fact, Zhukov is actually really more successful than I think he'd originally expected because within a matter of weeks, he's actually on the Oder River, which is maybe about 40 miles to the east of Berlin. But unfortunately, that's where he stops. He can't get beyond that. So you get this position at the beginning of February where the Russians are really very close to Berlin, but they're unable to push forward to do that. And the explanation for that, I mean, there are several explanations, but I think the one that probably is most important

is that they get sidetracked, the Russians get sidetracked into operations in East Prussia, without getting into the complications of geography. But basically, if you imagine there's a kind of central thrust, which Zhukov is leading, which is going towards Berlin, and he's got an army under Rokossovsky up to the north and another one on the Konyab to the south. The problem is that Stalin also wants to take East Prussia as well as Berlin that East Prussia has to be detached from Germany, and it's got to be under some form of Russian control. Now, that's still the case under the USSR, under the Russian Federation. Königsberg, the center of East Prussia, Kaliningrad is a Russian city. It's under Russian control. So, that's also a priority for Stalin.

And also, if you look at the layout, East Prussia is perched on the flank of the Russian army trying to move to Berlin. So, there's always a danger that the forces in East Prussia will push down and cut the spearheads of the Red Army off as they try to get to Berlin. So, from Stalin's point of view, it's important to take East Prussia and to defeat that threat, and also to achieve the kind of diplomatic situation that he wants where he can control East Prussia after the war. So the need to divert troops to do that, basically, Rokossovsky, rather than going along the right flank of Zhukov, turns 90 degrees off the path to the west and drives north to the Baltic to cut off East Prussia. And it's a loss of that force which takes a real push out of the drive to Berlin in February. That's why on the Oder, Zhukov is forced to stop. There's a pause.

A strange echo of Hitler's decision to attack north and south during the original operation Barbarossa into the Soviet Union. Interesting stuff. It's also like what happened to the Russians in 1920 when they attacked Poland. The battle on the Vistula then was also being caught on the flanks by surprise. That was probably also in Stalin's mind. He was being cautious. Although they were going to win the war, they wanted to do it reasonably quickly and without embarrassment. So there was the danger there. But yes, I think there is a parallel with a war on this kind of huge scale, both in 1945 and also, as you suggest, in 1941. Listen to Dan Snow's history.

We're looking at the war in Eastern Europe 80 years ago. More coming up. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. To be continued... 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. Again, in the West, we can be a little bit naughty talking about the Battle of the Bulge as Hitler's last offensive, but I learned that there was an offensive on the Eastern Front as well. And it strikes me in a slightly odd direction. Tell me about Hitler's decision-making in the spring of 1945. With our kind of Western view of what's happening in the war, and this

is certainly true of the Americans, the view I think is that the Battle of the Bul happening in the war, and this is certainly true of the Americans, the view, I think, is that the Battle of the Bulge is the last gasp of the German army in December of 1944. But in fact, the last gasp of the German army was in March 1945, when some of the same forces that took part in the Battle of the Bulge also took part in an attack in Hungary. The 6th SS Panzer Army is kind of one of the elite forces

of the German army. And having pulled back from the Battle of the Bulge, it was then thrown into Hungary and took part in the battle there. Basically, the Russians kind of hoped that Hungary would change sides. Hungary was on the German side during the war, hoped that the Hungarians, like the Italians, would give in and that they could make progress on the southern part of the Eastern Front. But that didn't happen because the Hungarian government held together under Hitler. It was overthrown by a more pro-fascist government. But in any event, there's a long campaign in Hungary, which nobody knows about, which is nevertheless very important, which goes on from October until maybe February 1945.

And latterly, that campaign is about Budapest. One of the odd things about the war on the Eastern Front is there aren't many battles in cities. I mean, Stalingrad is an exception to that, and Berlin will be an exception later on. But Budapest is one of the few places where there's a long battle inside the city between the Russians and the Germans and Hungarians. And that battle is one which eventually is resolved in February 1945 when Budapest is captured by the Russians. But it's kind of like Warsaw on the Vistula. Budapest on the Danube is also a key to the

whole transport system of Hungary, just as Warsaw in Poland was the center of the whole transport system of Poland and Central Europe. So for Hitler, it's quite important that he can counterattack and once again get control of Budapest. Hitler is a southerner. I think one should not lose track of that. We often blame the Third Reich on Prussian militarism, but Hitler was an Austrian and he was very much a South German. So his heart wasn't really in fighting a battle in the north.

I mean, he didn't really care a great deal about aspects of Prussia, but he did care a lot about Austria, and he did care a lot about Vienna. So the point about the loss of Budapest was that the next step for the Red Army would be advancing on and getting to Vienna, which is a place that Hitler really valued. What he did was he launched this final attack to counterattack, to get back, to reconquer Vienna and get into a stronger position there. There are other reasons for that as well.

One is that Hungary is one of the last Romanian German sources of oil. There are oil wells in Hungary. And so that was important. So he was keen to do that. So what he does is he launches an attack from the West back towards Hungary. There's a big lake in Western Hungary called Lake Balaton. Lake Balaton is about 50 miles long. It's about 20 miles to the West of the Danube, to the West of Budapest. And so Hitler launches an attack from there at the beginning of March in the hope of overrunning the Russians. It's kind of like Kursk in 1943. It's the same kind of attempt to overwhelm the Russians. This time it really doesn't work. The Russians are much

stronger. It's now the rainy season, so the tanks get kind of mired down as they attack. The general they're facing, Marshal Tolbukhin, is very able and is able to stall the Germans. And within two weeks, this offensive, mainly by the 6th SS Panzer Army, is stopped and the Russians are able to resume the initiative. So within weeks, by the middle of April, they've got right across the western side of Hungary, reached Austria and moved into Vienna, about two weeks before Berlin falls. So it's an interesting episode. It could be argued that by sending elite troops to fight in Hungary, Hitler weakened the defenses of Berlin at a critical point. I don't think it was a crucial reason for the fall of

Berlin, but certainly it made the Russians' tasks easier than it would have been otherwise. And again, just to ask the question, why is this the vaunted Wehrmacht that we're so used to hearing people eulogize? They just can't seem to achieve the same effect on the battlefield they can a couple years before. Is this because the British, Americans, the Soviets, they've got better kit, they know what's coming, they know how to deal with it, they've got air supremacy. What's the key Soviet ingredient here? How do they blunt the advance of the mighty 6th Panzer Army? They're now fighting very strong Russian modernized forces.

Well, one of the things about the Russians, by the way, which I think one can lose sight of, is that they've always believed in what's called deep battle, which is armored thrusts deep into the enemy's rear lines to kind of paralyze the enemy forces. That involves using very heavy tank forces, using aircraft, using artillery. But they also had the advantage that the Russian army is now much more mobile than it was in 1942-43. And that's partly explained by Lindley's American trucks. Certainly, Zhukov himself thought that Studebaker was one of the key names to know about when you were trying to understand what happened on the Eastern Front.

And this kind of mobility was able to give the Red Army a kind of range that it had never had before. But I think beyond that, it's just the mass of Soviet forces is just so much stronger than what the Germans can put up in 1945. The Germans really are in a much weaker position, and they're fighting on two fronts as well. So what's happening in Hungary is kind of like what's happening in the Rhineland at the same time. The German army there is also collapsing, and the Germans are falling back towards the Rhine. So Stalin redoubles his efforts to take Berlin in March, does he? He puts the Soviet offensive back on track after his foray to the north. Yeah, I think that's the next stage. And it's not connected to

Balaton particularly. It happens more or less the same time. But at the end of March, Stalin says, okay, that we've now reached a stage where we can launch an attack. That's partly because the rainy season is now over and things are better for the Red Army than before. But I think in the background, when the Allies are talking about what to do next, the general consensus in terms of discussions between the Allies is that the war is going to end in the middle of the summer, that it's not going to end immediately. There's going to be a lot of fighting involved before Germany is actually defeated. The German army still has some strength, and it's possible the German armies will withdraw into the south. They'll draw into the mountain areas of southern Bavaria and Austria, and they'll hold out there for a long period of time, and they'll prolong the war. That was seen as a really serious

danger. And whereas I think probably both the West and the Russians thought that Berlin was indefensible because it lies on flat territory. It's easy to encircle and so on. It's not the same as the kind of mountainous range to the south. Even so, they thought that Berlin might hold on for some time. Things change that are both political and military. In a way, the political one is the more interesting, but it's also military. What happens is Operation Varsity, which is when the British army crosses the Rhine into Germany itself. It's also roughly the time when the Remagen bridge over the Rhine is captured by the American army. So all of a sudden, the key defense of the Third Reich has collapsed with the loss of the Rhine line. In fact, a very large army group under General Modell is trapped in the Ruhr, its biggest pocket of the entire war.

Stalin is worried that it's possible the Allies will get to Berlin first. And he thinks it's conceivable that the Allies, the Western Allies, British and the Americans, will do a deal with the Germans. There are negotiations going on in Northern Italy, which involves the garrison there and the Western Allies. So Stalin worries that this is a possible danger where the Allies might be able to get to Berlin before the Red Army does. And I think that is very important as an incentive at the end of March when he decides, well, we have to actually accelerate things and move forward. So on the 2nd and 3rd of April, Stalin hosts a conference in Moscow, which involves Stalin, it involves Zhukov,

it involves the other two marshals in the East, Konyiv and Rokossovsky. And they lay out a plan for a near immediate attack on Berlin. Now, that's harder than you might think, because both Rokossovsky and Konyiv are fighting some way away from Berlin. Rokossovsky is on the Baltic, Konev is in Silesia. It takes about two weeks to get things together. But by the middle of April, they are finally able to launch the attack on Berlin. And within two weeks, they will succeed in overrunning the city.

Before you enter the city itself, how fierce was that fighting to sort of break into those German defensive positions? The Germans, I mean, the Germans defending their capital, did they fight particularly hard for those positions? Most of the fighting doesn't take place in Berlin. It takes place in front of Berlin. It takes place as Red Army troops encircle Berlin. So the actual kind of chronology of events is that the offensive sort of starts on the 16th of April. It's being launched primarily by Zhukov

and his first Belarusian army group. That's the main kind of thrust of what's planned. In a couple of days, that offensive gets bogged down at a place called Zaylov, which is just to the east of Berlin. It's not a kind of mountain range, but it is relatively hilly ground where the Germans do make something of a stand. Things become kind of confused. Zhukov blames Stalin for this, that they had too many troops to squeeze through, too narrow a gap. In any event, that does sort of sort itself out after a couple of days. While that's going on, Stalin decides to also let Konev loose on Berlin at the same time. So he gives Konev a directive not to go into Bohemia, which would be a possibility, but instead to encircle Berlin from the sort of southeast and move around to southwest and then get behind Berlin. And he gives Zhukov a similar directive. So in a sense, what he's set up is a race between Konyiv and Zhukov to encircle Berlin.

But what they do is that rather than blasting through the middle of Berlin, there are four tank armies, two with Zhukov, two with Konyiv. And they loop around Berlin and they meet to the west of Berlin, and they cut the city off. And when that happens, the war is over, fundamentally. Berlin is lost. There is no chance of the city holding out. But it's that operation to smash through the German front line and then to encircle Berlin is what causes the casualties. By the time they get into Berlin, they're so chaotic that there's no way the Germans can put up any kind of resistance inside the city. By the way, it's interesting that the fighting in East Prussia was, in fact, almost twice as costly in terms of lives for the Red Army as was the battle for Berlin.

So it wasn't actually the biggest part of the struggle for Germany. Another thing that's interesting to bear in mind is that Allied losses in Germany and the West were quite light by the time all this is going on. By the time the Americans get over the Rhine at Remagen, there's only broken back resistance in Germany. And the Americans only lose about 10,000 men actually in Germany itself in the fighting there. there. Speaking of those Americans, though, if they had been prepared to take much higher casualties and pursue the same sort of callous attitude towards casualties as Stalin, could they have reached Berlin first? I mean, was there an option, do you think? Or is there simple geography at play here? Yes, I think that's one of the big questions which came up at the time, and I think came up later on, was this a great missed opportunity? It would have to be the American army because the British army is farther north. The army would have got to Berlin, would have had to be an American army. If the American army had got there first, it would have psychologically

and politically have had quite a big effect. And I think Stalin knew that. But I think as you suggest, Dan, it's really an issue of geography that when all this is taking place sort of from the middle of February, the Russians have only been 40 miles away from Berlin. When the Western armies are still to the west of the Rhine, the Russians have always been very close. So it's hard to think that under any circumstances it would have been possible for the Americans to get there first. for the Americans to get there first. Another fact that might be involved, at least in Stalin's mind, is that you might have a situation where the Germans wouldn't resist, that in fact, Germany would collapse and let the Americans through into Berlin in order to get a more favorable peace than they were from the Russians. They probably had a strong sense that they would be treated better in the immediate short term by being defeated by the

Americans or the British than they would by being defeated by the Russians. So the Russians would have faced stiffer resistance. Aside from being callous and brutal, the Germans also were callous and brutal, but they had a sense maybe that the Western allies would be the easier ones to come to terms with. Another thing you might just bear in mind, it's again this question of the Alpine redoubt. It's one of the reasons why Eisenhower was reluctant to go into Berlin because he thought, well, we can't get to Berlin anyway.

And the real danger is prolonged resistance by the Germans fighting in the south. So that should be our priority. And finally, the thing that I think also we can't lose sight of is that under the zonal agreement about the war, which was made in 1944, Germany is divided into three zones of occupation, and Berlin is within the Russian zone. So whatever happened, Berlin was always going to be in an area that was not Berlin itself, but the surrounding area around Berlin would have been under Russian control. As the Soviets advanced, would it have felt like liberation as we understand it? Again,

or am I just conditioned by Allied propaganda? But there's a sense in places like France and Holland that troops are welcome. There was almost a festive atmosphere. As the Red Army rolled across both areas of Europe occupied by the Nazis and then onto German soil itself, how did they act towards the local population? Did the local population find themselves liberated? I think at one level, not. I mean, we could talk about Poland for an hour, you know, and discuss whether in fact the Poles felt themselves being liberated by the Russians. Some Poles probably did. I think certainly Polish nationalists did not. And so for a whole lot of reasons,

they weren't happy with the Russians occupying Poland. Hungary is different. Hungary actually had had an authoritarian dictatorship under Admiral Horthy. And then during the war, it had an awful fascist government laterally. 400,000 Jews were killed in 1944-45 coming from Hungary and going to Auschwitz.

I don't think that Hungarian nationalists would have felt liberated by the Red Army. I think Jews probably did. I think that for people who were oppressed, mightily oppressed by the Germans, they certainly felt that the Russian armies played a liberating role. Probably also, you know, in France and in Italy, there were quite strong communist parties. And from their point of view, the Russian advance is a kind of a struggle of liberation. That's important. I mean, this is politically quite contentious. The Russian word for liberation is oslobashgenia. Certainly a major part of the Russian self-image is that we liberated Eastern Europe. That was an enormous contribution to the outside world,

and it was a major source of support in Eastern Europe. Certainly, it was used to justify control over Eastern Europe until 1989, 1990. So, it's part of history. Clearly, the Russian armies did not behave in an impeccable way. We all know about mass rapes and looting and so on. Not the frontline troops, but the troops behind them were responsible for all kinds of activities. So I think that's a factor. But I think also, again, it's very current because one of the rationales behind the current Russian government is nationalism and the history of the Second World War. And the key event in that

history of the Second World War is the role the Red Army plays in Eastern Europe, in Germany, in 1944-45, which is seen as a liberating struggle and was, in fact, liberating. It did, in fact, drive something much worse out of Central Europe. But I think, again, these things are always more complicated than one might think. And certainly, do the people who were east of Europe feel themselves liberated by the Red Army? And the answer probably is yes and no.

Not so much. I mean, remember also that there's a Stalingrad underground station in Paris, which is a kind of memory of that time when the Red Army is seen as being

the great force which destroys the German army. I think to some extent that's true. I can understand how one can value the role of the Red Army in the defeated Nazi Germany, but still have questions about the role of the Red Army in

the liberation, how much that was a liberation of Eastern Europe and of Germany. Well, Evan Maudsley, thank you so much for coming on this 80th anniversary and talking us through it all. Thanks a lot. Thank you very much. and talking us through it all. Thanks a lot. Thank you very much. Thank you very much to Professor Evan Morsley for that brilliant overview. Be sure to tune in next Friday

when the continuation of our D-Day to Berlin series, we reach a climactic battle in the Second World War in Europe. The brutal, bitter, street-by-street fight for the capital of the Third Reich, Berlin. To make sure you don't miss that or any other episodes of Dan Snow's history, there's plenty of other good ones around as well,

just hit follow in your podcast play and it'll drop into your library automatically. Goodbye for now. Thank you.