In seventeen days the Red Army broke Berlin’s three lines of defence and took Hitler’s capital street by street

02Berlin, February–April 1945

Holding the outer line needed 100 divisions. Berlin had 60,000 Volkssturm, a third of them unarmed

The city’s defence, as a German staff officer, Wilhelm Willemer, described it for the US Army in 1953, was three lines. The outer one, the Hauptkampflinie (“main line of resistance”), ran for about 100 km: along the Teltow Canal in the south, round the Müggelsee in the east, along the Tegeler See and the Havel in the west. The second followed the Ringbahn, the circle railway, for about 35 km, mostly as single strongpoints, because the hard soil could not be dug in the time there was. Inside lay the Zitadelle, the government quarter, an island formed by the Spree and the Landwehr Canal.

Between the lines the city was cut into eight sectors, lettered A to H. Willemer’s staff study judged that the outer line alone needed at least 100 battle-worthy divisions. Inside the Berlin Defence Area, Beevor counts about 45,000 troops and 40,000 Volkssturm; the commandant’s own report listed 92 Volkssturm battalions, some 60,000 men (sources differ).

Against them came 2,300,000 Soviet troops across the whole operation, with 6,250 tanks and self-propelled guns, 41,600 guns and 7,500 aircraft, and 155,900–200,000 men of the two Polish armies beside them.

06The dead

The battle for the city killed some 22,000 Berlin civilians

No one recorded the dead day by day; only totals survive, and each is counted over its own ground. The Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung gives about 22,000 civilians killed in the battle for the city. Antill gives 125,000 for the whole operation, from the Oder to the Elbe. They are different ground, not rival counts.

Soviet losses of every kind, killed, wounded and sick, came to 352,475 (Krivosheev). The German military dead, 92,000–100,000, rest on incomplete archives.