Berlin 1945: Last Stand of the Nazis | Frontlines Ep. 07 | Documentary

the front line is combat at its most brutal drives people to extreme acts for many complex reasons they were fighting for each other not for patriotism but for their buddies we reveal the most decisive front lines in the second world war and take you deep into the heart of battle with the men who were there they were attacking with divisions and I had one rifle company with about a hundred men I was down to my last box of ammunition we had no food and we were hurting Hitler's Thousand-Year Reich must face its nemesis as the Red Army closes in on Germany's capital it's fought its way in some cases all the way from the gates of Leningrad and Moscow and certainly Stalingrad and they have scores to settle the Nazis genocidal regime will finally collapse as Berlin's captors seize the prize but right to the end there'll be a bloody price to pay it's Incredibly Close Range it's incredibly personal and it's unbelievably violent it's an ungodly and awful uh horrifically nasty battle 1945 and the end game of the war starts to take shape with the last days of the Reich in sight all eyes are on the German Capital Berlin [Music] it's the largest city in Germany it is one of the largest cities in the world it is a logistical Center of Germany it's industrial center it is the seat of the government it is the seat of the Armed Forces as both the Western allies push East and the Soviets push West the shattered heart of Hitler's Reich is there for the taking but with Germany in ruins the Western allies are lukewarm about joining the fight to take it they say Berlin is not that important to them Stalin pretends to agree but secretly he wants his Red Army to take the capital at all costs let's start with um April Fool's Day first of April 1945 Eisenhower sends Stalin a famous Telegram and essentially it reads that the Allied armies are not interested in taking Berlin and therefore the field is open for Stalin to do that and Stalin sends this amazing telegram back saying well neither are we which is a complete travesty because there's nothing he would like more than to capture Berlin and the whole of the Russian war effort has been directed to really settling scores and Berlin would be the Pinnacle of that Island now has Berlin in his sights and as the Red Army advances towards the city he starts to make plans to crush it once Eisenhower says over to you then all bets are off that Stalin saying right we will capture Berlin there's going to be no pressure in time no one else is going to be breathing down on next we're not in competition with any of the other Allied Powers I'm going to catch up early in my own time and in my own way Stalin gives his commanders a punishing schedule to take the city he wants an attack to start in two weeks and the Soviet flag to be flying over Berlin two weeks after that Stalin's plan is to take Berlin on three fronts and encircle it a direct assault into the city from the east in the north to sweep around Berlin and attack it from the West and Northwest while linking up with the Western allies and to do the same around the South encircling Berlin and crushing it for Stalin it will be the crowning Glory of a long Fort war of Revenge he really saw Berlin as the center of Nazi Germany he saw capturing Berlin as a moment when the Soviet Union would quite literally physically overrun the Nazis in much the same way that the Nazis believe that capturing Moscow would be the symbolic moment of the conquest of the Soviet Union [Music] foreign [Music] Berlin might be the symbolic prize but in April 1945 it has little of its former glory a bombed out Wasteland its population has been dramatically reduced [Music] the civilian population of Berlin had suffered through six years of warfare and even though they were in the center of Germany they had taken quite a lot of casualties a lot of damage from Allied strategic bombing of Berlin tens of thousands of berliners had died in those bombing raids in addition they were suffering from shortages of food from shortages of consumer goods but the civilian population cannot look forward to the end of the war with optimism thousands of German refugees from the reichs Eastern territories bring accounts of Red Army atrocities West the civilian population of Berlin were absolutely petrified about the forthcoming arrival of the Red Army and and they had good reason to to do so everybody in the Red Army has a relative who's been killed by the Germans [Music] the conservative estimate of Russians killed in the Great Patriotic War is in excess of 20 million so every single one of those soldiers is bent on Revenge rumors of what Russian soldiers did to enemy populations had started to spread within the city and so the civilian population of Berlin was sort of living in this state of kind of suspended animation and Terror as they waited for the Russians to arrive there wasn't a lot they could do about it all they could do was wait and see what happened to them Stalin spares nothing in his drive to win his prize he will throw over 2 million troops thousands of guns aircraft and tanks at the city Berlin now faces a force almost as great as Hitler deployed to invade the whole of Soviet Russia four years earlier and trying to stop them the shredded remnants of the German army shadow of its former self let's just take a snapshot of the German Army at this stage it is all but disintegrated divisions no longer have any meaning they are scratch forces full of volunteers there aren't a lot of Tanks there aren't a lot of anything it's the very young the very old some cynical old Soldiers a few SS Fanatics this is a rabble and a shadow of the former German Armed Forces offered enormous casualties over the last four years and and the forces that were defending Berlin were a mix of some experienced and and effective soldiers but a lot of wounded veterans who had maybe only partially recovered a lot of older men who had been drafted in at the last second and a lot of very young boys teenagers 12 13 14 or 15 who had been pressed into service because there was nobody left to fight the Germans didn't really have the ability to defend Berlin against the Soviet tsunami the metal tsunami that was coming but they had to do the best they could the red armies are completely different Beast eight million strong outnumbering the Germans in every possible way matched perhaps only in ideology and determination it is so imbued with Soviet Doctrine and ideology it's fought its way in some cases all the way from the gates of Leningrad and Moscow and certainly Stalingrad and they have scores to settle Stalin's forces may be vast in number but his commanders rely on almost inexhaustible supplies of artillery ammunition and Firepower the Soviets relied very heavily on overwhelming artillery support overwhelming use of tank numbers and tank destroyers and just sort of a sledgehammer to crush um a German nut preoccupying the top players in Russian military politics is who gets to take Berlin the generals under Stalin are each desperate to be credited as the captors of the prize leading the Red Army Into the Heart of the City is geogi zukov of the first Belarusian front of a village cobbler he's a military man to his boots commanding the first Ukrainian front to the south of the city with orders to encircle Berlin from the West as zhukov's deadly rival Marshall Ivan konyev to the north of Berlin Constantin rokasovsky is charged with taking the second Belarusian front to connect with the allies and also encircle Berlin but the man most determined to be crowned the Victor will be nowhere near the front line the big worry in Stalin's mine is that whoever captures Berlin will be the Russian hero forever and of course in Joe Stalin's mind there is only one Russian hero that is Stalin himself to keep his Generals in line Stalin uses a tried and tested political trick he pitted his generals against each other as Rivals and zhukov and general konyev were really set against each other to see who could capture the city most quickly and most effectively it's not an uncommon thing for dictators to do is to set themselves up as the people who are ultimately going to resolve the rivalries make subordinates fight each other and you're the person they're going to come to to solve the problem facing the Red Army are some of the Germans most determined and experienced Commanders General Helmut feedling commanding the 56th Panzer Corps will face the Russian Onslaught in the initial phases of the battle and later take command of the defense of Berlin yeah his Commander is a highly experienced expert in defensive Warfare General gottard heinrichi he is leading Army group vestular tasked with stopping the Soviet Army at the Eastern approaches to the city reporting to him a loyal member of Hitler's Inner Circle General Lieutenant Theodore Busa of the ninth Army Stalin orders his Star General Georgie zhukov to take his first Belarusian Army from the river odor and to attack the main German defensive line at Zillow Heights Commando Baltimore are a heavily defended Ridge looking down on a boggy plane crisscrossed by narrow roads foreign for the ordinary civilians familiar homes streets and neighborhoods are quickly turning into a battlefield roof tiles were flung all over windows were shattered and cracks appeared in the front brick wall shortly thereafter we heard the chatter of heavy machine gun fire as the noise got closer we could hear explosions and rifle fire right in our immediate vicinity we could even hear the horrible guttural screaming of the Soviet soldiers shorts shattered our windows and shelves exploded in our garden on the 16th of April zhukov unleashes everything he has to take the Zelo Heights and he wants to be very very quick because he understands that konyev in the south is also launching an attack and he who gets to Berlin first will get the price will be the great Victor of the Battle of Berlin is foreign a vast artillery barrage hurl shells in a devastating rain of fire that rips up a wide front but General gottard heinriki has prepared well he knew how the Soviets were going to fight so what he does before the atturable she starts he withdraws his troops from the first defensive line and puts them back into the second main nine off defense which is in and around the Zillow Heights instead of pummeling the German infantry defending Zelo zhukov's artillery simply plows up unmanned Earth for kilometers while his targets are safely Out Of Reach with time now slipping by zhukov sends in the tanks they attack Zelo in narrow columns concentrated on the few roads and they make perfect targets for the German Defenders by this stage all the anti-aircraft guns 88 millimeter guns have been brought from Berlin and these start engaging the Soviet tank so they knock out one after the other and you might say becomes a bit of a Turkish shoot it's the first day of the attack and already zhukov is failing and worse is to come the Infantry should be walking over dead Germans after the artillery barrage but instead come up against a fearsome and determine defense the Russians are decimated the kind of flexibility and tactical strength of the the German Army worked really well in defense against these kind of Soviet assaults and all this comes together at the Battle of celo heights they are able to sort of fend off zhukov much more effectively initially than he and particularly Stalin expected sustaining extremely high losses zhukov has been humiliated by an enemy with a fraction of the resources and the Russian general knows he is being watched closely by Stalin the thing to always remember about Soviet generals is that they know that failure often comes with a bullet at the end of it Stalin was not a patient man and he had executed a lot of Soviet generals throughout the war for failing to achieve what he had set for them in classic style Stalin turns to zhukov's deadly rival Marshall konyev and hands him an opportunity he would never have dreamed possible Coney at this stage had been told to stay south of Berlin and concentrate on surrounding Berlin so all of a sudden konyev much to his surprise is given permission to wade into the southern suburbs himself rather than just simply sort of surrounding the city seizing his moment kanyev is ruthless his tank Army tears through the southern suburbs of Berlin meeting Little Resistance is a very clever psychological manipulator and he understands that both his generals will now push their armies harder than ever because they know in competition with each other and by doing that they will waste and spend lives as much as their leader wants because the prize is not keeping the casualties low the prize is eliminating Fascism and taking the heart of Berlin having lost 30 000 men in four days zhukov finally prevails at Cielo Heights and breaks through cutting the German ninth Army in three the road to Berlin is open but he is terribly behind schedule and he now has his rival kanyev to contend with Stalin wants the Soviet flag flying over Berlin by May the 1st the great Soviet holiday celebrating Labor Day it's just 10 days away and zhukov knows he doesn't care which general gives it to him crumble yesterday is a permanent drum today you inhale gun noise the ear is deaf it only hears the firing of the heaviest calibers the direction can no longer be made out we live in a ring of pipes that narrows every hour in Berlin and deep underground Adolf Hitler is micromanaging the war and the defense of Berlin he trusts fewer and fewer of his Commanders the day after Zelo Falls Hitler celebrates his birthday and receives visitors from all over Germany all the leaders fly in to present Hitler with birthday presents the Russian guns can be heard in the distance and Hitler is at this stage still believing in miracles in relief armies coming to bail uh Berlin out of trouble um Himmler turns up guring turns up and it's the last time everybody is sort of seen together one of the things about Hitler was that especially by 1945 he had really kind of lost touch with reality and he wasn't willing for his subordinate generals to tell him anything different than what he believed so Hitler is ordering imaginary units around the battlefield maps and his his own generals are too afraid to tell him that they don't exist where his closest Nazi advisors people like Himmler and Gehring are telling him complete nonsense because they don't want to upset him and have his wrath turned on them the Soviet armies are now focused on one objective taking the center of Berlin and the prize of all prizes the reichtag building long disused its historical symbolism mesmerizes the Kremlin star was particularly fixated with the reichstag because that's really where the Nazis began their climb to power Hitler started off in the reichstag and so the Soviets taking that building would really be a symbolic destruction of the Nazi control you showed the world the Soviet people that you have defeated Hitler you've defeated Berlin and you've defeated uh the Nazi right so to the Soviets this was of utmost importance but to reach the rice tag the Red Army will have to penetrate a city that has been working for months to make that as difficult as possible and where Hitler has ordered defensive preparations to make it impregnable the German plans to defend Berlin should be separated into the actual plans and the sort of imaginary plans that Hitler came up with but on the flip side his generals were also putting together a fairly substantial defense of Berlin and that defense was based on the idea that Urban fighting is enormously difficult and enormously costly for the attacker so the idea was to use Berlin itself as a fortress or a festung as the Germans called it every street Railway yard canal and embankment is now repurposed into makeshift ramparts of Fortress Berlin it included basically drafting most of the population of Berlin to work as laborers constructing fortifications and putting together kill zones and bunkers to try and drive off Soviet units and then putting together what forces they had left to occupy Berlin and the areas around it and defend it a whole city is now packed with tank traps and machine gun nests in a highly organized set of rings each more fortified than the last but with fuel supplies almost exhausted and the whole project manual labor not all of Hitler's plans materialize foreign the military jargon said that it would take the Soviets exactly 15 minutes to overcome the obstacles on the outskirts of Berlin because they would drive up they would look at it laugh for 14 minutes and then simply one minutes it would take them to drive over them so there was actually nothing really prepared and and the outskirts the barricades built of paving stones and reinforced with all kinds of junk rusted cars and bathtubs are not impressive and we cannot imagine that they will be a serious obstacle to Stalin's large tanks it will be over in two or three days we say far greater effort was put into the center of the city the location of Hitler's bunker the German starts preparing The Fortress or the Citadel which is the most inner defensive ring and this stretches all the way to the historic center of town near rice Chancery it included the fura bunker so Hitler was sitting in that inner defense perimeter and just as the defenses of Berlin stiffened towards the center so did the caliber of men for as well as the old men of the fox term and the boys of the Hitler Youth there were the fanatical units of the vaffin SS many from outside Germany these were volunteers from mainly occupied Nations the majority of those who were French SS from the Charlemagne Division and there was also the 11th SS Northland division which was Danes swedes and Norwegians crouching behind t-34 tanks and self-propelled guns the assault troops of conyevs and zhukov's guards fight up the streets and Parklands of suburban Berlin the original resistance by the germs is very very light because the resistance hasn't really been organized and it's only really when they hit the Metro Circle of Berlin that the German fighting really intensifies [Applause] foreign foreign Soviets penetrate the city the attack will slow down to stop start street fighting involving surprise attacks and ambushes and the advantage shifts to The Defenders who can exploit their local knowledge outside Berlin two German armies are slowly disintegrating South the remnants of the ninth Army of General Lieutenant Theodore Busa are encircled while in the north the last panzers of army group Vistula give way to rokusovsky's Second Belarusian front on the 25th of April Soviet and American forces meet on the river Elm it's an epic moment Germany is now effectively split in two foreign over the next three days the city is gradually squeezed and successor districts and defensive positions fall to the Soviet tank and guards armies Bridges and a power station industrial complexes and Metro stations are all taken as the battle's epicenter slowly moves to the Reich tag Hitler's advisors urged the fuhrer to leave Berlin with his Entourage and hold out in his Mountain Retreat Baptist Garden high in the Bavarian mountains over 500 kilometers away are there are lots of tunnels there there are lots of caves there's lots of underground headquarters and bunkers and so on and it's a natural place for everyone to go because that's where Hitler always felt most at ease he never liked living in Berlin he loved the Mountain Air and his staff were used to working in that environment anyway so there are several Yonkers 52s ready to take all the Personnel all their files down to Bavaria Bavaria might be surrounded by the allies but there was a good reason for his staff to want to see out the last days of the war there [Music] if you're going to be captured by the Russians you're going to have a miserable and you're probably going to spend the rest of your life in a gulag and so most people if they're going to be captured at all would far rather be captured by the Brits or the Americans than the Russians and so bertis Garden also is Allure because clearly that's where the Americans and French are going to be not the Russians the fuhrer's decision to stay in Berlin shocks his staff and supporters for the first time it's clear that the survival of the leader is not uppermost in his mind creating the image and the idea of a dominant Third Reich centered on the Nazis centered on the Aryan race and the Germans and that Berlin is really the Central City of this the fuhrer bunker the reichstag all of the places in the city itself this is Germany personified and frankly I think by the end for all his uh delusional state of mind he knew the war was lost so he essentially decided better to die a hero as he saw it um than flee um and possibly lose uh the symbolism that went with Berlin Soviet troops Reigns through the Berlin suburbs they wreaked the Revenge that everyone expected but it is on a scale no one dared imagine over one hundred thousand women and girls in Berlin are raped the Soviet High command essentially knew what was going on and they didn't so much encourage it as allow it to go on without much in the way of discipline or punishment for this they accepted this as something of a natural fact of life and let their soldiers do what they wanted to do and and the result was quite a horrific outpouring of violence on the German civilians and most horrifically on German women in the territories recovered by the Red Army during the war as many as 2 million women are raped and hundreds of thousands die as a result Soviet Fighters now move into the dense high-rise Center of Berlin it's where the Germans were their genius for defensive Warfare will be at their greatest advantage Urban Warfare is a completely different kind of warfare that and most other kinds of conflict it's defined by the city itself by the buildings by the streets by the population and it's utterly unlike what the Soviets and Germans had been doing in most of the Eastern Front foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] late April 1945 the Red Army was taking Berlin Street by Street and house by house some of the Red Army soldiers were armed with this the M 1891 Nagant rifle bolt action internal five round magazine iron sights extremely accurate weapon Berlin's front line now evolves into one of snipers and tank killing ambushes the Russian tank crews are suddenly highly exposed while their attackers can melt into the ruins with ease a Russian tank column moving along a main Boulevard into the center of Berlin than what the Germans will be looking to do is to Rob them of their protection by destroying typically the first tank in the line and then the last tank they're then trapped they can't go left and right and by then it's shooting fish in a barrel [Music] foreign the key thing about Urban Warfare is that it's very difficult and very slow going and enormously bloody when you have tanks and vehicles you naturally want to move down the roads of the city but there you're absolutely visible to the Defenders and the Defenders have set up all of their heavy Weaponry their machine guns their artillery to range in on those streets the streets it turns out are actually a death trap The Defenders have created an environment designed to lure in and destroy the Soviets as the Soviets pushed in they found themselves subject to enormous amount of Firepower and started suffering horrific casualties now the only way of taking the city is not Street by Street or even building by building but room by room what they learned very quickly is that you actually have to move through the buildings the ordinary infantry had to go into the buildings on each side and then start clearing each building of German Defenders blowing a hole in the walls into the next building and it's only after the Infantry has cleared the Defenders from all the buildings you can move the tanks and the artillery forward and the fighting goes from being these long-range and intensively large tank battles to being Soviet soldiers on one floor firing up staircases at German soldiers on the next floor up thank you while those same German soldiers throw down hand grenades to try and blow up the Soviet attackers it's Incredibly Close Range it's incredibly personal and it's unbelievably violent caught in the middle of all of this chaos and destruction where a couple of million German civilians cowering in Cellars down in the underground in anywhere they could find where they thought they might be safe from what was going on above them foreign s break into the buildings and and start attacking the German Defenders there they're also encountering German civilians who are getting killed and slaughtered in the fighting just as badly as the soldiers it's an ungodly and awful uh horrifically nasty battle most of the city is in Ruins but even now Nazi Fanatics are determined to fight to the Lost SS squads roam the streets looking for any signs of weakness and in particular white flags they summarily execute anyone found trying to surrender every house that hoists a white flag is a plague bacillus and will experience the treatment it deserves we are vegetating in a ghost town without electric lights or gas without water we are forced to think of personal hygiene as a luxury and hot meals as abstract Concepts we are living like ghosts in a vast field of ruins a city where nothing works apart from the telephones that sometimes ring glumly and pointlessly beneath piles of Fallen Masonry in a forest south of Berlin the shattered remnants of Bruce's ninth Army attempts to break out from the Soviet encirclement but the Red Army are ready and waiting their response was one of massive overwhelming violence the ninth Army and all of the German civilians and Hangers On who would coalesce around it were immolated the destruction was commented on by eyewitnesses at the time as being being truly breathtaking the end only about a third of the German forces about thirty thousand Men actually successfully escape the rest of them are either killed wounded or captured by the Russians in this pocket in Central Berlin German forces are now reduced to defending a small strip in closing the government District but they have numerous strong points to make every approach formidable but with Stalin's brutal timetable driving zukov on his men will stop at nothing to take the building obstacles that they had in their way was that they were going to have to cross the spray River and get over the mulka bridge because the German Defenders knew that and someone had positioned all their defenses accordingly the fighting there is quite severe how the Soviets take quite some casualties eventually they managed to seize the bridge they push across it and they now reach koenigsplatz which is the square in front of the rice talk this was a huge open space that was in effect a killing ground for any troops that wanted to get across it however they were determined by this stage not to take a step back and in a fantastic successful operation managed to get across the kernings Platz to actually get to the doorways of the reichstag itself some of the Soviet soldiers managed to cross the river by avoiding the multca bridge altogether foreign [Music] foreign orientation foreign bunker Hitler marries Ava Brown and shortly afterwards is told the Berlin's Defenders are about to run out of ammunition [Music] staff ask for permission to break out of Berlin and Escape Hitler forbids it in the afternoon of April the 30th Hitler kills himself he actually commits suicide and in sort of typical Nazi Overkill he not only swallows poison but shoots himself to make sure that the job gets done effectively Ava Brown also takes her life with a cyanide tablet Hitler has given her burned in the garden of the rice chancery [Music] many of the Soviet soldiers attacking the reichtag were equipped for close combat with one of these [Music] as the Red Army stormed Berlin this weapon came to the fore this is the ppsh 41 fully automatic machine pistol 70 round magazine this weapon can fire single shot but it's not designed for that this weapon is designed to fire fully automatic [Applause] making the right start was a grim task there are some 2000 SS soldiers defending it the Soviets had to take it room by room Corridor by Corridor and this was the weapon they used [Music] on reaching the Reich tag the Soviet rifle division find a massively defended building full of fanatical Fighters and Stalin's deadline for taking it is just hours away the building had been fortified they had bricked up some of the entrance ways they'd use a lot of rubble the destruction that had been wrought on it made it in so many ways a very defendable place eventually the Soviets managed to blast their way into the building using Dynamite they then had to fight their way through room by room staircase by staircase through the reichstag against Defenders who for them it really was their last stand while other Soviet units spread to other official buildings around the reichstag the upper floors are secured with the battle raging below several soldiers and official photographers scale the exterior roof of the reichtag to Hoist the Soviet flag an act of carefully staged political propaganda that delivers to Stalin exactly what he's ordered [Music] the capture of the reichstag looks look spontaneous the Russian troops roll up there they go up to the top they raise a flag not a bit of it this has been carefully thought about for a long time beforehand specific orders from Stalin nkvd fighting troops and even the flag that's unfurled has been made especially for the occasion it's unusually large it's been made from bed spreads of the appropriate color found stitched together long before the troops ever get to the reichstag [Music] but who is this image really for only for the Russian people but more importantly the real rationale behind that picture is it's for the Germans you need a common image which says to the German people Berlin has fallen to the Red Army your worst nightmares have come true and that is it complete and total defeat in a way you could never have conceived of [Music] David [Music] son resolution tonight Berlin may be a smoking ruin under Soviet control and Hitler dead but the remaining German High command still tries to negotiate the non-negotiable the German Defenders were desperate to avoid the prospect of an unconditional surrender they by this stage that they were going to lose the course but what they wanted was to to have some conditions imposed within the surrender that would be to their advantage and so that will be for instance all officers will be allowed to carry and keep their side arms and so on and that their wounded will be treated well accordingly etc etc and they will be able to almost work in partnership with the Soviets to take over the the remaining areas of the city the Germans in their desperation to avoid that scenario met a Soviet delegation at the templehof airport and tried to negotiate they were met by a very Soviet no and the next morning General chukoff Unleashed more of his enormous this way to Firepower on the remaining parts of the city under German control in an effort to get them to to hand over the city unconditionally just after midnight on the 1st of May the Red Army gets a message from the headquarters of General Helmut vidling the commander of Berlin asking for a ceasefire the Soviets agree but that now triggers a vast Refugee problem there were millions of people moving around not only Berlin but around Germany and a lot of those were soldiers both Soviet and German but a lot of those were civilians hundreds of thousands of people are literally trying to flee the city and get whatever Refuge they could whether it's somewhere else in Germany whether it's somewhere in Austria whether it's getting to the American and British lines the German civilians want to get away meanwhile in the Fiora bunker two senior Nazis Martin Bowman and Wilhelm munka attempt to escape Berlin with a group of junior staff nearly all are killed but the breakout triggers a Soviet clap down that will mean the deaths of thousands more civilians desperate to escape to the Western allies Stalin wanted to capture as much of the leadership as he could and so the response was for the Soviets to try and keep the German civilians within within Berlin something that they often executed with extreme violence crowd control is hard if you're not trained for it and the only tool that the Soviet soldiers really had was their weaponry and they proved all too willing to uh to use it the fleeing crowds make for Berlin's exit roads and in the Mayhem are forced onto two bridges that will get them to safety in Berlin the way to get another city is via Bridges they moved in particular towards the charlottenburg bridge in the Van Damme bridge and there they knew they had to get to the other side in order to try and get to some kind of safety the Soviets had weapons pointed at those bridges machine guns tanks artillery but in the semi-hysteria that gripped the thousands of fleeing civilians and and armed Personnel they literally stampeded in a human wave across the bridge they came under Mass fire casualties were utterly utterly Dreadful as a result barely a handful managed to escape the last few days of the war were an unbelievable scene of chaos and death and and horror as Soviet forces struggled to contain the population of Berlin needling and his staff surrender unconditionally to the Soviet Union for Berlin is over here no my name is [Music] [Music] thank you