Soviet artillery before Berlin, April 1945. The Bundesarchiv caption does not record the exact place.Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-E0406-0022-012 / Unknown / CC BY-SA 3.0 de
The Seelow Heights · 16 April – 19 April 1945
The last German line before Berlin ran along a low escarpment above the Oder. Zhukov’s front needed four days to break it, from 16 April to 19 April 1945. How many men it cost is still argued over, and the figure most often repeated was also the one the East German memorial put on its souvenir medal.
01The ground
The section below is measured, not drawn: the European Copernicus elevation model, sampled along a straight line from the Oder through the memorial on the Heights. The positions laid over it are schematic; the sources describe them in kilometres and miles, not on a survey.
The ground from the Oder to Seelow, measured
Terrain: Copernicus DEM GLO-30 © DLR, Airbus DS, EU/ESA · places © OpenStreetMap contributors · positions schematic
East of Seelow
By April the Red Army held bridgeheads on the west bank of the Oder. Zhukov’s main force was to attack out of the one at Küstrin, straight toward Berlin.
The Oderbruch
Between the river and the Heights lies the Oderbruch, here about 7 m above sea level. The spring floodwaters had left it waterlogged.
The German side
On Hitler’s order of 30 March, the main battle line was dug two to four miles behind the front. Most of the troops were taken out of the forward positions just before the barrage.
16 April, before dawn
About 500,000 shells and mortar bombs fell in the opening barrage; 1,236,000 rounds by the end of the day. Much of it fell on forward positions that most of the troops had left.
As the infantry moved off
140–143 anti-aircraft searchlights were turned on the German positions. The memorial’s record: “But the searchlight beams, reflected by dust and fog, dazzled and hindered the Soviet attackers.”
The escarpment
On this line the ground climbs about 43 m in some 500 m. Chuikov’s 8th Guards Army attacked straight at it.
Nightfall, 16 April
Both tank armies were thrown in during the day and only added to the tangle. At nightfall the attacking divisions were all still in front of the German main battle line.
02The odds
The German 9th Army under Theodor Busse held the Oder front east of Berlin with 14 divisions, by the US Army’s official count. Zhukov’s front alone counted 908,500 men at the start of the operation. Hitler had promised Heinrici reinforcements and sent mostly untrained air force and navy men.
Above Busse stood Gotthard Heinrici, at the head of Army Group Vistula since March. Two days before the attack, a Soviet probe of five divisions and 200 tanks failed to take the Heights. Hitler’s order of the day to the Eastern Front, kept at the memorial, ended:
Berlin bleibt deutsch, Wien wird wieder deutsch und Europa wird niemals russisch.“Berlin stays German, Vienna will be German again and Europe will never be Russian.” The same order: “Whoever orders you to retreat is to be arrested at once and, if need be, shot on the spot, whatever his rank.”
Each pair is drawn on its own scale from zero. Tanks and artillery: the US Army’s official history. The three Soviet fronts that attacked toward Berlin together counted 2,500,000 men.
03The breakthrough
The fighting went on day and night. The days below follow the US Army’s official history, which draws on the German war diaries and the Soviet official account.
16 April
Day one
The barrage, the searchlights, and an attack that piled up in the mud. Both tank armies were thrown in; at nightfall the Germans still held their main line.
To the south: Konev’s infantry had crossed the Neisse on the first day, breaking in as deep as six miles.
17 April
Day two
A reserve army, the 47th, and both tank armies were thrown in against two small areas, southeast of Wriezen and at Seelow; two German reserve panzer divisions held them to minor gains.
To the south: the Stavka changed the plan on the second day and ordered the 3rd and 4th Guards Tank Armies to strike for Berlin as soon as they broke through.
18 April
Day three
Soviet armour broke in ten to 12 miles west of Wriezen and southwest of Seelow. The 9th Army held its front together through the day.
19 April
Day four
The southern group reached Müncheberg; the northern group, the 2nd Guards Tank Army in the van, broke through west of Wriezen. Next day, Hitler’s birthday, “the battle for Berlin was lost.”
The line runs from 16 April to 20 April on one scale. Stalin’s telephone threat to dismiss Zhukov, told on the sheet this story replaces, is not in the sources checked; the turn of Konev’s two tank armies is.
Commanded the 1st Belorussian Front. His plan put the whole weight of the attack straight across the Oderbruch at the Heights.
Georgy Zhukov, commander of the 1st Belorussian Front, 1945. Grigory Vayl, 1945. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.
Commanded the 1st Ukrainian Front to the south. He crossed the Neisse on the first day; on the second, his tank armies were ordered to strike for Berlin.
Ivan Konev, commander of the 1st Ukrainian Front, 1945. Unknown author, 1945. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.
Head of the Stavka, the Soviet high command. By the Soviet official history, it was the Stavka that changed the plan on 17 April and set the two fronts racing for Berlin.
Joseph Stalin at the Potsdam Conference, August 1945. US Army Signal Corps, 1945. Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.
04The count
No agreed figure exists. The published counts measure different things: killed, missing, wounded, or all of them. Krivosheev’s official loss tables give no Seelow figure at all; they fold the battle into the operation that ran on to Berlin. Each bar is a source, not an estimate of the same number.
Losses at the Seelow Heights, by source
Isaev, from the front’s archival returns
The historian Aleksei Isaev, working from the 1st Belorussian Front’s own returns, counts 5,000 to 6,000 killed and missing.
Isaev
Counting the wounded too, Isaev reaches about 20,000: a far larger number, but the same men.
Beevor
Antony Beevor’s history of the battle gives “just over” 30,000 killed: five times the archive’s count of the dead and missing.
GDR souvenir medal, 1980
The same figure was struck on a souvenir medal sold at the memorial in 1980: “30 000 gefallene sowjetische Helden”, thirty thousand fallen Soviet heroes.
Beevor
For the German side Beevor gives 12,000 killed. No archive count has been published for it.
Krivosheev, Zhukov’s front
For scale: over all 23 days from the Oder to the Elbe, Krivosheev’s tables give Zhukov’s front 37,610 dead and missing, and 179,490 casualties in all.
05The memorial
A Red Army soldier leans on the turret of a wrecked German tank on the crest at Seelow. Lev Kerbel and Vladimir Tsigal made him; he was unveiled on 27 November 1945, one of three victory monuments Zhukov ordered along the road to Berlin, at Küstrin, Seelow and Berlin-Tiergarten. Soviet war graves lie below him.
In 1972 the GDR built the memorial around him. The Federal Agency for Civic Education says plainly that it “glorified the Red Army’s victory over the Nazi regime”; a new exhibition, free of the old ideological brief, opened in 1995.
The searchlight beside the museum is the clearest case. It has stood there since 1977. It is an APM-90, built after the war to light military runways, and until 1989 visitors were told, wrongly, that it had shone in the battle. Under the GDR it lit the monument at ceremonies.
30 000 gefallene sowjetische Helden.“Thirty thousand fallen Soviet heroes”: the reverse of a souvenir medal sold at the memorial in 1980, now in its collection.
The medal’s figure is the same as Beevor’s, and five times the count of dead and missing from the Soviet front’s own returns. The memorial’s records today give the searchlight count as 140 and say plainly that the lights blinded the attackers.
The memorial’s collection also keeps a poster from its first exhibition, “The key to Berlin”: before the offensive, oversized keys were dropped by parachute over the 8th Guards Army, marked 1945 on one side and 1760 on the other, the year Russian troops had been handed the key of Berlin in the Seven Years’ War.
The Heights held for four days. Then the road to Berlin was open, and the battle for the city was lost before it began.
What it cost is still a matter of whose count you read.
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