Inside The Battle Of Berlin With Dan Snow: The Brutal Final Weeks Of WW2

Hi everyone, welcome to the Dan Snow's History Podcast on YouTube. Today we're looking at a super grim episode in our past but a very important one. If I'd 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 Selau 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. Anthony thank you very much 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 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. Does Stalin identify that Berlin is the key target? 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 V-Day at 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. 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 asked anybody but so he says he does he sort of go well we're not really going Berlin we're just advancing on a broad front. Well that comes a little bit later I mean that comes that doesn't come until 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 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 his 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 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 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 workforce tank as well and even their sort of JS-1s, JS-1s and JS-2s they did have much broader tracks which coped with the snow far better than the Panzers who kept on sliding in all directions but they also had the kit in terms of the warm weather kit or the rather cold weather kit of their padded jackets and they had the right stuff for their guns. But my god those men suffered I mean you know 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 U.S. 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. We've got the Germans facing them as you say Hitler's issuing orders that are out of date by the time they even left the Führerbunker. What is the state of 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 early spring 1945 Soviet troops have swept across eastern Germany. Are they there at the gates of Berlin? Today they're about 60 miles from Berlin maximum. They're still having some trouble in the north what's 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 Stettin i.e. the mouth of the Oder to be ready to be part of the Berlin operation it was 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 Ramadan because then Stalin knew the very next morning from General Suslov Parov who was his liaison officer with the American headquarters that they were across so he knew that he had to accelerate everything. Zhukov, Marshal Zhukov commanding the first Belorussian front and Konev were ordered immediately back to Moscow and were told to prepare plans for the Berlin operation. So they had all together 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 I mean a vast, vast force but above all think of the artillery, the God of War as the Russians, the Red Army used to call it. I mean ready for the opening bombardment from the Oderbrook this was the the marsh plain outside either side of the Oder underneath the Zelo 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. I mean it was sort of one of the most massive 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 is 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 at that point Stalin, we've talked about Stalin lying, these lies again, the Americans and Brits were sort of quite interested weren't they in, 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 Olesen were 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, but then he had actually in a very naive way, Eisenhower, without even consulting either Montgomery or even Teddy, his own chief of staff, and telling nothing to the British at all, had sent a signal to Stalin telling him exactly what all 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 and this was a notorious signal, SCAF 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 on to 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, a Belarusian front just on that bit and Konev to the south, well we're talking about well over three million men, it dwarfed anything that the west had, but the important thing was of course that Eisenhower was persuaded for a moment that maybe they should go for Berlin as well, and this is when this is when Simpson's Ninth Army had reached the River Elbe and then you got some of their troops across, and on the other side there was the German Twelfth 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 the American Second Armoured 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'll suffer a hundred thousand 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'd 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 he's an exemplar of that here, whereas Eisenhower is 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 say basically 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 where the atomic bomb was going to work and whether they'd have to invade Japanese home islands which would cause massive casualties. Speaking of civilian populations dragooned into militia groups, talked about the key battle for Berlin, Zillow 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? They were a complete mixture, you had a certain number of SS troops, there were some of the SS units in fact of course slightly further back not involved there, of course were foreign, you had these Norwegians, Danes, Swedes or whatever in the Nordland, you had a Dutch SS, you had a 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 they were dug in, the Zillow 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 millimetre guns up top and dug in but with a very weak first line which was very much that they knew that the Russians would sort of bombard the whole lot, they were actually in 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 was supposed to, he started off by sending in two of his armies of 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, Konev he was saying was really advancing very fast in the south you know, why are you having such trouble you know I'm 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 realise quite how steep that hill was and many of them even with their broad tracks were struggling hard. 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 centre 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 around 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 but 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 resignation at some moment and then apoplexy of anger at anything that goes wrong. Of course he was refusing to admit that on the situations map that something which was marked as a division was probably you know of a battalion strength but something that was marked I mean you know it was the famous thing in that film of Steiner you know because he thought he had a whole SS corps well actually all of Steiner's troops been taken away from him and he basically had a headquarters and a few sort of guard troops and he was expecting that Steiner was going to do this counter-attack 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 counter-attack and you know and Berlin would stay Berlin and Vienna would be captured recaptured again and all the rest of it. I mean it was a sort of fantasy land. I had a fascinating time with General von Freitag von Loinghofen who was actually in the bunker all of this time with Hitler watching what was going on. He was he was Guderian's you know chief of chief adjutant and you know it was amazing you meet these guys and you shake their hands and you think that hand shaking Hitler's hand I mean it was it was extraordinary but they were huge help when doing the research. And what was his he was a member of one might call the reality-based community presumably Guderian and him did he 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 Hitlerhörige as they were called the really loyal Hitler obsessives who were going to do like for example Krebs and Burgdorfer you know they 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 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 different characters. The other one I'm also very useful is the general Rudvanesia who was again another one's there there in the bunker and I remember you know he was describing how you could 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 completely out of it in so many ways and there was Eva Brown waiting in sort of in her sitting sitting sitting room worrying about whether she was going to get her jewellery back which she was getting Jewish prisoners to mend for her from one of the concentration camps. I mean it was a mad mad work. You write so beautifully in your book on Berlin saying it the the terminal stage of a regime tells you so much about it and what those dying moments of national socialism what what does that 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 29th 30th of April there was an absolute orgy going on upstairs. Karl Junger his secretary realized that the Goebbels children hadn't had anything to eat or whatever she went up to 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 all any impressionable young women for sort of champagne and food and a final party you know to lose their virginity or whatever before they were hit 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 of the Führerbunker sort of it was all very correct and so forth as the Hitler after the after the wedding ceremony then dictates his final will and testament appointing all the successors who was going to be the next right Chancellor who is going to be the head of the party and 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 always remember terminal events and he said that the great achievements in national socialism would be forgotten as a result well and this is where one says that you know it is actually the downfall of a regime like that which actually revealed its sheer squalor its sheer filth once they once the Soviets had smashed the Zeller Heights positions asunder and they're marching towards them they're moving towards Berlin how serious was the defense of Berlin I mean did they were they was there any sense in which they could hold that the Soviets on the outskirts of town the tie of the correlation of forces meant that it was impossible there were some sharp battles and remember they did have uh some of these SS uh troops of the SS Nordland which had tiger tanks and so forth um 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 um and then the artillery started firing so again they were firing another couple of million shells into Berlin from the outside it was interesting um any 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 came out sort of screaming and yelling what's this when they explained to him that they were already within artillery range uh and you can imagine all the Russian gunners were painting you know for Hitler goring for Goebbels or whatever you know on their shells and then firing them with glee into the um but you know in fact the people who were being killed were usually women queuing at the last shops where which might have any food uh because um although and then they were raiding 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 uh squads and fellow gendarmerie uh going around executing hanging deserters you mention all those women no effort had been made to evacuate non-combatants no and in fact um Goebbels and um had been warned that of course um what about milk for babies you know um 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 his what was called his Nero order that everything should be destroyed Hitler basically believed that because as actually it was General D'Amesio 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 it and so he the Nero order is famously issued around this time the Nero 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 the cross them or whatever so 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 you've got to somehow survive um but as far as Hitler was concerned this was a gutter dimmerung um and level Germany and particularly yes and he 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 even it was an Ozymandias if you like to use another metaphor incredible and so as the Soviets move into the city are they is there fighting house to house well there's fighting various places for example Tempelhof airfield there's quite a back tank battle there with the again army this this was the old Stalingrad army yeah so very just we stopped there and Stalingrad is the man the name a name that will forever attach 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 into 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 and you know all those guys Chuikov 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 cities 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 um firing artillery ahead uh and the trouble was that the tankers um were basically adding uh old bedsteads to the top of their tanks and around the sides and all the rest of it to act as active spaced armor against the Panzerfaust being fired at so that made them very very awkward and they began by advancing down the middle of the street well that was they found the thing 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 sort of railway trucks pushed over onto their side and buses filled with stones manned by a mixture of Volkssturm with the old people's militia and Hitler youth and some soldiers thrown in but on the whole most of them were really part of sort of Gerber's call out and they were the ones who who basically were obviously going to suffer in all of this sort of this sort of fighting but they did manage to inflict a certain number of a certain number of casualties and then the the great tank hunters or panzer panzer hunters were actually the French part of the French SS Charlemagne and it was fascinating interviewing some of those old fascists who were still around when I when I did the book and their their attitude about here was here was the future of Europe I mean they almost talked about themselves as if there was a future of the common market or you know of European Union at a time paradoxically of course when Stalin had gone completely nationalist uh so forget international communism it was 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 hordes so talk about a switch of identities it was rather bizarre and so those French former SS men you met they they didn't feel particularly embarrassed about their service they maintained that they were on the right side of history oh definitely they were they were still convinced they were on the right side of history yes absolutely and it was a little bit like in the Spanish Civil War they were convinced that actually they were fighting the um not and that was even as I say before the second how long does that battle go on in Berlin well the battle went on until really until the the May the 1st in fact it was still a little bit going on on May the 2nd May the 1st was when they really caught and captured the Reichstag which Stalin had defined as the objective within Berlin rather than the Reich Chancellery um anyway they sent uh 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 uh ready for interrogation and many of them were kept for years afterwards just in case the boss wanted to know something more um from those people there so um they really uh the fighting at this particular point as I say once the flag was raised over the Reichstag of course that was of course completely fake all those photographs uh one of the problems was that as they held up the red Soviet banner um it revealed in all the stolen watches on his arm uh because that was the first thing they went for they went for the watches first and then for the women um Uri Uri as they used to shout as they came in until people had to hand over their watches and and then it was far with 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 uh they were all because um the Russians had no idea of German anti-Semitism that had been repressed ever since the Nazi-Soviet pact um so you know when I remember I'm sort of interviewing someone I mean the uh you know that was the cry far is far you know 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 one it was and it but in a way it was quite important because one had um material there coming from the Russian archives which is why they were so angry about the book um which actually explained a lot about violence and war what was interesting was that it was far worse actually in the first place when they got into East Prussia because there they were looking for revenge and anger and bitterness and it was unbelievably violent I mean even Solzhenitsyn even wrote a poem about it um Prussian night uh brilliantly translated by Robert Conquered um it it was unimaginable but by the time they got to Berlin there they were being very selective and the point was a number of them explained when we interviewed you know um the important thing was to try to attach yourself just to one of them who would defend you from by all the others because this was it was which was the basic thing of the Red Army many of them because I think they'd had such uh they'd all been humiliated and it was a knock-on process um really their humiliation come in training the way that they treat them and see this still today in the Russian army um and as a result um it was really the knock-on theory of oppression uh and there were the German women and actually they've been also Polish women, Hungarian women, all respect uh who were there basically who would be their victims and sort of get rid of the uh humiliation that they felt that they themselves because they've been so brutalized by their MCOs their officers and this I think we still see in Ukraine we've seen in the in the atrocities in Ukraine it's it's just been I remember when researching in Moscow in the 90s 5,000 a year 5,000 suicides a year amongst the recruits of the Russian army it's worth saying you've now you don't have access to those Russian archives anymore and you've been banned from Russia oh yes I mean I'm liable to five years in prison if I go out this was this was a law brought in by Sergei Shoigu a doomer uh that anybody who insults the Red Army in the Second World War is liable to five years um but um you know uh fortunately I still have ways of researching in Russia through various friends and there are other places to go on vacation and I don't have to go to the Black Sea um Hitler commits suicide well no it's 30th more I mean on the early hours is that and yet fighting goes on there's fighting did anyone try and surrender at that point well they um oh yes obviously individuals 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 uh full gendarmerie um but already things are breaking down in that way um there are many as I say shooting themselves others trying to break out from Berlin through the through the cordon um in most cases can help it hoping to get to the Elbe and crossing over to be made business by the Americans rather than uh by the Russians I mean the great joke or so-called joke um at Christmas in fact just beforehand had been you know be practical give a coffin was the one joke and the other one was you know optimists are learning English and pessimists are learning Russian um the question of who got who got to Berlin first and that's why uh when the Americans got across the Elbe um the um uh Russians got so nervous thinking that um there was going to be that they would be in Berlin before them what kind of casualties did the Soviets sustain in this in this great push for Berlin a third of a million of whom um over a hundred thousand 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 uh they didn't want them cluttering up Moscow it looked bad they were sent to the north they were sent to their summer camp even though they were more wounded I mean that's that's how the so it's hardly surprising um if you're going to treat your own people so badly how they're going to then treat the enemy and knock on again and what was the 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 but but turns out Stalin was right about Berlin it was totemic it was totemic yeah absolutely and Berlin basically was completely uh well surrendered by the 2nd of May um and uh Stalin though was um furious because it wasn't sort of the end of the fighting and he then only heard on the 8th of uh well really on the evening of the 7th of May but the uh 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 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 sorry so these are uh pro-Hitler Russians so 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 uh and fighting on and so they changed sides and uh and joined an uprising with Czech partisans against the Germans um and so as far as Stalin was concerned the war was still going on they were still fighting in Courland where a whole army group had been cut off so uh he wouldn't allow it until midnight on the 9th and this is when uh Zhukov when Field Marshal Keitel signed the declaration signed the surrender uh under the instructions of Zhukov and there was Zhukov with um our Chief Marshal Tedder and a French uh representative in the form of General de Lattre Antony thank you very much tour de force eight years ago you can watch and listen to all sorts of other second world war content on history here on this youtube channel on all of our podcasts on our subscription tv service so please go and do that Antony's been on the podcast before so go and dig up a back episode of that if you like but if you want to watch more of these youtube films please like and subscribe so they'll drop into your feed automatically every single thank you