Among them were barely trained Hitler youth, some only 15 years old, pressed into service with panzafer slung over their shoulders.

These children, alongside exhausted veterans and terrified conscripts, were now expected to hold back the largest army in history.

Meanwhile, Jukov’s forces pressed relentlessly forward.

German 88 mm anti-aircraft guns turned on the ground and infantry hunting tanks with Panzer Fousts inflicted heavy losses.

Yet the Soviets through sheer weight and determination gradually surrounded CEO.

At the center of the German defense was the ninth parachute division commanded by General Bruno Brower, a veteran of Cree, remembered for chain smoking cigarettes from a long holder.

His division included a handful of hardened men who had once served in Otto Scots commando units, but most were inexperienced Luftvafa ground crews barely trained for frontline combat.

The 9inth division collapsed under the storm.

On April 17th, one of its regimental commanders was killed outright.

Panic swept through the ranks and many of the Luftwaffer replacements broke and fled.

Even Brower himself cracked under the pressure.

The Cree veterans suffered a nervous breakdown and had to be relieved of his command, leaving what remained of his division to fragment.

The Germans attempted local counterattacks, but these two ended in tragedy.

The 101st corps, made up largely of officer cadets and teenage trainees, was thrown against Soviet armor.

To their horror, they discovered that the enemy had lined the flanks of their tanks with wire sprung mattresses stripped from nearby houses.

The Panzer rockets bounced harmlessly off, and the cadets were cut down in droves.

In the aftermath, the once proud Potdam Regiment counted only 34 boys still able to stand.

False hopes only deepened the misery.

Foreign Minister Yoakim von Ribentrop circulated a rumor that peace talks with the British were underway.

Clinging to this fantasy, General Theodor Berser, commander of the 9inth Army, told his men, “Hold on for two more days, then everything will be sorted out.

” The lie gave them nothing but more time to die.

Even the Luftvafa resorted to suicidal measures.

Fuckwolf 190 fighter bombers were ordered to attack Soviet pontoon bridges across the odor.

Two pilots mortally wounded deliberately crashed their planes into the structures in a last act of defiance.

But the sacrifice was meaningless.

The Soviets had already built 32 bridges across the river.

Against such numbers, individual heroics or desperation could achieve nothing.

Konev’s armored spearheads pressed relentlessly forward, racing through burning pine forests and across lakes and marshes toward the spree.

All day, his tanks thundered northwest, cutting a path toward Berlin.

That evening, when KV reported to Stalin, the Soviet leader contrasted his progress with Zhukov’s struggles.

With Zhukov, things are not going so well yet.

He is still breaking through the enemy defenses, Stalin noted, even suggesting that Jukov should attack through Kone’s bridge head.

Kf sensing opportunity, offered to drive directly on Berlin himself.

Stalin’s reply was swift.

Very good.

I agree.

Turn the tank armies toward Berlin.

The race was now official.

Inside Berlin, the news of the Soviet offensive was accompanied by a storm of propaganda.

Gerbles thundered over the airwaves, urging the population to resist to the last breath.

“Any German who offends against this self-evident duty to the nation will lose his life as well as his honor,” he warned.

The words rang hollow.

Everyone knew that the city was running on fumes.

Hinrichi’s men were asked to hold out with tanks that had no fuel, guns with no shells, and troops surviving on dwindling rations.

At dawn on April 18th, the eastern horizon glowed red as massive Soviet air strikes and artillery fire opened another day of destruction.

Zhukov, humiliated by Kv’s rapid progress, threw his forces back into the attack.

Once again, Soviet armor rolled forward into Panza ambushes, suffering heavily.

But at 9:40 a.

m.

, the Red Army finally cracked the German lines.

The shattered remnants of the seventh panza division once commanded by RML in its glory days fell back in chaos.

By midafternoon the German 9th army itself was on the verge of being split in two.

The CEO heights had finally fallen but at appalling cost.

Jukov lost some 30,000 men in the assault compared to around 12,000 German dead.

In just 3 days, the Soviets had bled more men than the Allies had lost in the entire campaign for Normandy.

The price of breaking through to Berlin was proof of the sheer brutality of this final battle.

To the south, Kv’s armored columns shrugged off a German counterattack on their flank and kept grinding westward.

Resistance was weakening by the hour.

For the Germans, desperation now dictated policy.

Hitler ordered the Vogderm in Berlin, poorly armed old men and boys to be stripped from the city and sent to reinforce the collapsing 9inth Army.

In reality, only 10 battalions and a few anti-aircraft batteries could be spared, leaving Berlin itself defended by little more than immobile flack guns.

Artur Axman, head of the Hitler Youth, even went so far as to offer his 15year-old boys to General Helmouth Vidling of the 56th Panza Corps.

Armed with panzer fousts, they were to be thrown against Soviet tanks.

Vidling was outraged, exploding at the idea of sending children into the slaughter.

Axeman reluctantly withdrew the order, but the regime’s madness only deepened.

At Pluten prison in Berlin, the Gestapo executed 30 political prisoners in cold blood.

Meanwhile, the 9inth Army itself was disintegrating.

Its units split in three directions under pressure.

The 9inth parachute division tried to regroup, but the paratroopers had nothing left.

They abandoned the battlefield, handing over their remaining ammunition to the arriving men of the SS Nordland Division.

On Reichtrasa 1, the main road leading east from Berlin.

A tide of refugees streamed west, shouting to the oncoming SS, “Ivan is right behind us.

” The Nordland division pushed east toward the front as the exhausted masses fled in the opposite direction.

At roadblocks, SSmen and military police searched for deserters.

Anyone caught was hanged on the spot, often in front of the same refugees who begged the SS for protection.

The hypocrisy was staggering.

Even as they executed others for desertion, the SS themselves were already making plans to retreat north to Schlesvig Holstein, where they hoped to surrender to the British instead of the Soviets.

On April 19th, the highways became death traps.

Soviet aircraft prowled overhead, striking relentlessly at anything that moved, civilian or military.

Columns of refugees were torn apart alongside broken remnants of German units.

The 101st Corps, made up of officer cadets and trainees dissolved completely, abandoning their weapons in panic.

Stragglers formed ad hoc battle groups, fighting briefly for a village or a crossroads before scattering again.

It was the image of an army in total collapse, fighting in fragments while the Red Army closed in with unstoppable force.

All the disasters unfolding at the front seemed to mean little to Adolf Hitler, now directing a war that was already lost from the depths of his bunker in the Reich Chancellory Gardens.

There, surrounded by compliant generals and ever loyal secretaries, he lived in a twilight world, detached from reality.

On April 20th, 1945, under clear skies, the Furer marked his 56th birthday, the last he would ever see.

The day was interrupted by the next to last American air raid on Berlin.

With the postal system collapsing, there were few gifts from the German people, but the Nazi elite gathered one final time to pay their respects.

Herman Guring arrived after abandoning his lavish country estate at Karenhal.

He had stripped it bare of priceless art treasures before ordering Luftvafa engineers to rig it with explosives.

Without looking back, he pressed the detonator, reducing his mansion to rubble, and then drove in his enormous car to Berlin to honor Hitler.

The gathering in the bunker was more funeral than birthday.

Aside from Gerbles and Hitler’s personal secretary, Martin Borman, most of the Nazi hierarchy were already plotting their escape.

Guring planned to retreat to Bavaria, Hinrich Himmler to Schlesvik Holstein, and Albert Spear to the mountains of southern Germany.

Hitler accepted a sack of donations collected by ordinary soldiers, remarking only that it felt lighter than in years past.

At the daily staff conference, the collapsing front was discussed in tones of resignation.

Hitler declared he would remain in Berlin to share the fate of the capital.

His subordinates quietly devised their own exit strategies.

Later that day, he appeared in what would be his final news reel, reviewing a detachment of Hitler youth.

The boys, some scarcely old enough to shave, had been awarded iron crosses for destroying Soviet tanks with panzafousts.

The frail furer, hiding his trembling left arm behind his back, walked slowly down the line, patting the children on the cheek while medals were pinned to their tunics.

That evening, deep underground, his mistress, Ever Brown, presided over a champagne party to celebrate his birthday.

Outside Hitler’s bunker, life in Berlin was collapsing.

Housewives queued for hours, clutching ration cards, waiting for scraps of food, and the one-page newspaper Gerbal still managed to print.

Even that was useless.

Its reports used vague language to disguise where the fighting was taking place.

That day, Berliners were told they would receive crisis rations of bacon, sausage, rice, peas, beans, and lentils.

Few ever saw them.

With water, gas, and electricity failing, families cooked half-rotten potatoes over makeshift stoves, three bricks propped on a balcony with a handful of sticks for fuel.

Offices shut down as shells and bombs made movement through the streets impossible.

The entire city waited in dread for the end.

By then, Jukov’s artillery had the range of Berlin itself.

Shells began hammering into a capital already wrecked by years of air raids.

To his tank armies, he gave the order.

Break into Berlin first and raise the banner of victory.

He wanted his guards to reach the city by dawn on April 21st.

In reality, they did not arrive until later that afternoon, crawling forward through rubble and fire.

South of him, Kv kept pressing his men through the spree vald.

His impatience boiled over.

“You are again moving like a hose,” he barked at one of his commanders, furious at the lack of speed.

There was no longer a coherent front.

What remained of the German 9th Army fought scattered holding actions at Venosian airfield.

Gunners depressed their 88 mm flack pieces to fire at ground targets, but the effort was futile.

Roads to the west were jammed with columns of refugees.

Vidling ordered the Nordland division, now fighting side by side with Hitler Youth and remnants of the 18th Panza Grenaders, to counterattack.

The effort collapsed.

The Hitler Youth were trapped in a burning forest.

The Germans fell back once more.

In the chaos, a solitary King Tiger tank briefly turned the tide.

It destroyed two T-34s with its 88 mm gun, forcing the Soviets to halt and regroup.

But such moments were fleeting.

The Nordland Scandinavian nurses, retreating with their men, were caught in the slaughter.

One young nurse discovered her lover among the mortally wounded and cradled his head in her lap until he died.

German discipline disintegrated completely.

Soldiers who had not eaten in days broke into abandoned houses, devouring whatever they found.

Others collapsed into beds, boots still on, desperate for a few hours of sleep.

One Hitler youth boy slept soundly through an entire battle raging nearby.

Officers tried to restore order at Pistol Point, but even the SS flying courts marshal, once feared for their ruthlessness, were overwhelmed.

Some execution squads themselves deserted.

Soviet interrogators later recorded that as many as 40,000 deserters were already hiding inside Berlin before the Soviets broke in.

The remnants of Vidling’s 56th Panza Corps pulled back again, falling into Berlin’s western suburbs and linking up with the shattered 101st Corps along the city’s northern edge.

At Bernau, the Soviet 47th Army smashed through the last line of resistance before the capital.

After firing a triumphant artillery salute, the 47th Army and Second Guard’s tank army drove inside the Otterban Ring.

The race for Berlin was over.

KF and Zhukov had arrived at the gates of the city and the final storm was about to begin.

By April 21st, Berlin itself was beginning to unravel.

At the city’s defense headquarters, a procession of high-ranking officials lined up, all demanding passes to escape before the capital was encircled.

Gerbles had decreed that no man capable of bearing arms may leave Berlin without permission.

The high command were desperate to get out.

Lieutenant General Helmouth Raymon, in charge of the city’s defenses, gladly signed more than 2,000 passes in a single day, eager to be rid of men he regarded as nothing but useless mouths and cowardly armchair warriors.

That same morning, Berlin was struck by the final Allied air raid of the war.

Almost immediately afterward, the first heavy shells from Soviet guns began falling into the heart of the city.

[Music] Hitler, huddled in his bunker, could scarcely believe that the Red Army was now close enough to bombard central Berlin directly.

The cost to civilians was immediate and brutal.

Casualties mounted as Berliners queued for rations or water at street pumps.

Simply crossing a road had become a gamble with death.

Families buried their valuables in gardens and sellers, hoping the Soviets would not find them.

The great institutions of Berlin shut down one by one.

The German Trans Ocean news agency and Reich sender Berlin went silent.

The telegraph office closed its doors for the first time in a century.

Its final message came from Tokyo.

Good luck to you all.

Templehof airport saw its last flight.

A transport plane carrying nine passengers who escaped to Stockholm.

Berlin’s 1,400 fire brigades were ordered to withdraw westward to save themselves for the postwar era.

Gas, water, and electricity failed almost entirely.

Only two operations carried on.

The meteorological station in Potdam continued to log the weather without interruption, and by decree, 11 of the city’s 17 breweries remained at work, still producing beer for a collapsing Reich.

But law and order dissolved.

Hungry civilians turned to looting.

Freight trains stalled in marshalling yards.

Markets and department stores were broken open.

People staggered away with armfuls of whatever food they could find.

Tins of apricots, sacks of beans, even chocolate.

Shopkeepers sold off stock at fire sale prices, knowing money was already worthless, and the Soviets would plunder anything left behind.

For those with nothing, survival meant cutting up the carcasses of dead horses that littered the streets.

It was the last source of meat in a starving city, and families cooked it over brick stoves as the Soviet shells rained down.

By now, Hitler was demanding the impossible.

He ordered the 9inth Army to hold a line that no longer existed.

While the 56th Panza Corps retreated along roads littered with corpses from Soviet strafing runs, the Red Army moved to close its ring around Berlin, determined to crush the city before the Americans could intervene.

Though the US advance had already halted at the Ela, Stalin’s paranoia convinced him that the Western Allies might try to seize the German capital at the last moment.

On Berlin’s eastern approaches, Jukov’s men prepared to strike south toward the spree.

To the south, Kanev’s tanks rolled into Zosen, the sacred nerve center of the German army.

There they found the Uber Commando Vermach’s underground headquarters.

the Maybach bunkers almost completely intact.

Generators still hummed, teleprinters clacked, and telephones rang with incoming calls from officers unaware their front had already collapsed.

When one German officer asked over the line, “What is happening?” The Soviet soldier who answered replied bluntly, “Ivan is here.

Go to hell.

” Back in Berlin, Hitler poured over maps and issued orders that bore no connection to reality.

He instructed the third SS Panza Corps to counterattack, ignoring the fact that the core existed only on paper.

Hitler spoke of elite divisions and decisive blows.

But in truth, General Kurt Steiner commanded little more than six exhausted battalions cobbled together from fragments of the fourth SS Police Division, the fifth Panza Division, and Naval Infantry who had never trained for land combat.

The Navy men I can forget about, Steiner admitted bitterly.

I bet they’re great on ships, but they’ve never been trained for this kind of fighting.

I have hardly any artillery, very few panzas, and only a few anti-aircraft guns.

I’ll tell you what, I have a completely mixed up heap.

He could not attack, even under threat of execution.

[Music] On the evening of April 22nd, Hitler dismissed Lieutenant General Helmouth Ryman as Berlin’s commander and bizarrely promoted a littleknown officer, Colonel Ernst Kyther, straight to Lieutenant General.

By the next day, the appointment was cancelled, leaving Berlin with no commander at all as Soviet forces entered the suburbs.

Zhukov’s men reached Iranianberg where they liberated hundreds of French prisoners who immediately wavedricolor flags and began marching west toward freedom.

Kf’s troops tightened the southern ring advancing to the Telto Canal.

There, a massive Vermach ration depot stood on the north bank.

Exhausted soldiers begged for food only to be refused by the administrator because the proper paperwork had not been completed.

Instead, he set fire to the storehouses, destroying what could have fed thousands.

As Soviet forces pushed deeper, they began combing through civilians, uncovering disguised German soldiers.

The wave of looting and rape began in earnest.

Homes were stripped of furniture, bedding, and even light bulbs.

While women faced the full violence of Soviet vengeance, that same day, two councils of war took place.

General Helmouth Vidling gathered his officers who all pleaded for permission to break out.

Some to link up with the shattered 9inth Army, others like the Nordland division, hoping to reach Steiner in the north.

But there was no escape.

Vidling’s men were at the breaking point.

Filthy, holloweyed, unshaven soldiers who had not tasted their iron rations in over a week.

They scavenged abandoned houses for tins of pork and stale bread.

The 9inth Army fared no better.

Its men wandered in small groups, out of fuel and out of order.

Communications were so broken that even Army Group Vistula no longer knew where the front line was.

That afternoon, Hitler demanded news of Steiner’s counterattack.

When told none had occurred, he erupted in a rage.

Before his terrified staff, Hitler ranted that the war was lost.

He declared that he would stay in Berlin and kill himself rather than surrender.

It was his most violent outburst yet, shaking even those accustomed to his tantrums.

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