Gerbles, summoned to the bunker, declared his loyalty, and moved his wife and six children into the underground shelter to share Hitler’s fate.

By evening, Hitler calmed himself and clung to yet another fantasy.

He ordered General Walter Wank’s 12th Army, positioned on the Elbe against the Americans, to disengage and march northeast to rescue Berlin.

It was impossible, but written orders were drawn up.

Many in Hitler’s circle seized the moment to abandon the capital, escaping south in Operation Saralio.

Secretaries, aids, and doctors fled by air to Bhis Garden, while others began burning Hitler’s personal papers.

Even as shells pounded the city above, the bunker below remained stocked with fine food and alcohol.

The mood turned to drunken resignation.

Discipline evaporated.

Everyone knew the war would end only with Hitler’s suicide.

On April 23rd, Soviet bombardment intensified.

The Red Army brought up colossal 600 mm siege guns and turned them on Berlin’s massive flack towers.

These concrete giants still sheltered thousands of civilians who had already lost their homes.

Amid the terror, a diarist noted the grim everyday horrors.

A deserter hanged from the end of a uban tunnel, his corpse twisted by boys for sport.

The same diurist scouring for coal stumbled upon soft-faced children under huge steel helmets so tiny and thin in uniforms far too large for them.

To her, this grotesque sight of children in oversized uniforms was nothing less than abuse.

Field marshal Wilhelm Kitle personally delivered Hitler’s written order to General Valter Wank, attack east and liberate Berlin.

Ven knew the command was madness.

His 12th Army was facing the Americans on the Ela, not the Soviets.

Yet he saw an opportunity.

If he struck east, he might connect with General Theodor Bus’s broken 9inth Army and lead both westward away from the Soviets toward American captivity.

Driving from unit to unit in his Kubalvagen, Ven told his men bluntly, “It’s not about Berlin anymore.

It’s not about the Reich anymore.

It’s about saving lives.

Back in Berlin, General Helmouth Vidling phoned the Furbunker to report his crumbling situation.

Instead of thanks, he was told he had been condemned to death in absentia for cowardice.

Furious, he drove to the bunker to defend his honor.

Hitler, impressed by his determination, changed his mind and placed him in charge of Berlin’s defense.

Fideling’s resources were pitiful.

The 9inth Parachute Division was shattered.

The freshly raised Muncherberg Panza Division was little more than training school cadetses.

The 20th Panza Grenaders were scarcely better.

Only the Nordland Division and remnants of the 18th Panza Grenaders had any real combat value.

Altogether he commanded perhaps 45,000 men reinforced by 40,000 fogm midshipman flown in by Admiral Dunits the giant flack towers and 2,000 fanatical SS men of Wilhelm Monk’s lichandata guarding the Reich Chancellery.

Berlin, a city of 2 million offered endless ruins, bunkers and barricades, but no trained soldiers to hold them.

Against him were two full Soviet army groups.

The only reinforcements that arrived were the French SS of Division Charlemagne, fighting with the desperation of men who knew capture meant death for treason.

The Charlemagne volunteers staggered into Spandow’s Olympic Stadium where they raided a Luftvafa supply dump and discovered cocoa laced with benzadrine.

The drugged drink gave them a last burst of energy to continue fighting.

As the Soviets closed in, prison gates swung open.

Thousands of captives were suddenly free.

Soviet PS back into service with rifles, foreign laborers desperate to get home, and even surviving Jews, some who had worked at the 1936 Olympics, others foreign nationals.

At a camp in Potdam, the SS Commandant, Lieutenant Colonel Dubberka, received orders to shoot his Jewish prisoners.

A spokesman confronted him, “The war is over.

If you save our lives, we will save yours.

” The prisoners drew up a document signed by them all, promising to testify in his favor.

Durka relented, opened the gates, and vanished.

When Soviet troops arrived, the women were raped regardless.

On the 24th, Kanye’s men fought their way across the Telto Canal.

Lacking bridging engineers, they commandeered anything that floated, even rowing skulls, to ferry men over.

To the north, Zhukov’s fifth shock army forced a crossing of the spree near Trepto Park.

Vidling tried to strike back, refueling tanks with Luftwuffer aviation fuel from Templehof.

He launched counterattacks.

King Tigers of Nordland Division rumbled forward and knocked out several Soviet JS heavy tanks.

In the course of 3 hours, the SS made six attacks, a Soviet divisional commander wrote, but each was repulsed.

By midday, panthers and self-propelled guns were burning, and the ground was littered with black uniformed corpses.

That evening, our division secured Trepto Park and reached the Esban Ring.

All day on the 24th, Soviet pressure mounted.

With each advance, looting and rape followed.

Civilian survivors recalled an orgy of violence that became one of the most infamous aspects of the battle.

The Third Shock Army advanced south, blasting through Berlin’s neighborhoods.

On one narrow sector, their fifth artillery breakthrough division, leveled 17 houses, killing 120 German defenders inside.

Soviet reports claimed FolkM and Hitler youth pretended to surrender with white flags, then fired on advancing troops.

German counterattacks collapsed into tragedy.

Three assault guns tried to check the Soviets, but a single reconnaissance soldier, Schuljen, destroyed the first with a captured Panerafoust, disabled the second and forced the third to withdraw.

He was decorated as a hero of the Soviet Union, only to be killed the next day by a terrorist in civilian clothes, almost certainly a Volkderm fighter in rags.

On April 25th, clear skies allowed Soviet aircraft to rake the city while their ground troops paused to resupply.

The Germans abandoned their last bridge head south of the Telto Canal.

At Templehof Airport, tanks clashed amid the wrecks of FW190 fighters while the Muncherberg division was bled white.

Nordland, reduced to barely a regiment, fought alongside the French of Charlemagne.

Anti-Nazi Berliners scrolled graffiti on the ruins.

SS traitors are prolonging the war.

SS patrols hunted the culprits through the rubble.

That night, French SS men and 100 Hitler youth faced a Soviet night assault on the Holland Bridge.

With panzerasts, machine gun teams, and sheer determination, they held the position for 48 hours.

An island of resistance in a sea of fire.

The German state itself disintegrated.

The foreign ministry told overseas embassies to stop reporting.

There was no one left to receive them.

Berlin radio fell silent.

The outside world saw another milestone.

On April 25th, Soviet and American troops shook hands at Toga on the Ela River.

Germany was split in two.

Hinrichi, seeing no hope, ordered his men to retreat westward.

For this, Hitler dismissed him.

By the time a replacement could be found, Army Group Vistula had ceased to exist.

On the 26th, the Soviets resumed their assault.

Widling’s weary soldiers fought and fell back again.

General Gustav Kruenberg of Nordland set up his headquarters in the shattered crawl opera house, sleeping in a throne salvaged from the royal box.

That night, a thunderstorm rolled over the burning city, quenching some of the flames.

Civilians once more queued for food, sometimes resuming places left vacant by the dead when shellfire shredded the lines.

Siege Hile was abandoned.

Neighbors now greeted each other with a single word, survive.

Women carried buckets of water through sniper fire.

Radio stations begged them to take up arms, though few did.

Looting was rampant.

Respectable Berliners stormed abandoned shops, bartering stolen goods for bread.

Those trapped behind Soviet lines faced plunder and assault.

Many of the worst crimes came not from frontline soldiers, but from second-wave troops, released PS who poured into Berlin in a frenzy of violence.

Women as young as 14 and as old as 60, were raped repeatedly.

One family, the answers, remained hidden in their cellar from April 24th to May 4th, too terrified to emerge after suffering brutal attacks.

This terror coupled with Gerbal’s shrill propaganda, the Panza bare newspaper promising salvation by Venk’s army kept resistance alive.

The Vafan SS continued to improvise defenses, placing riflemen in upper floors where Soviet tank guns could not reach and panzer crews in cellars and rubble.

Soviet tanks countered with machine gunners riding on their hulls to rake every window or by welding bedsp springs onto their armor to deflect panzer blasts.

Urban fighting became a nightmare.

Drawing on stalingrad, Soviet troops advanced house by house and room by room, blowing holes in walls to throw grenades into the next chamber.

Satchel charges, flamethrowers, and pickaxes tore open defenses.

For Berlin’s 2 million civilians, there was no mercy.

Families were driven from their cellers at gunpoint, their valuables seized, and women separated for rape.

Yet, even the attackers suffered.

Many Soviet officers were inexperienced, their men exhausted and careless.

Mortars exploded in their tubes from faulty fuses.

Soldiers unfamiliar with German weapons blew themselves up using captured grenades.

Progress was relentless, but every step came at a cost, and every mistake only added to the chaos.

The morning of April 26th began with another massive bombardment.

At Templehof, the Muncherberg division’s defense finally gave way.

The survivors retreating into the tear garden.

General Vasili Triov masked his eighth guard’s army on Bell Alliance Plats.

Named for the coalition that had once defeated Napoleon.

In a bitter twist, the defenders now facing him were French SS of division Charlemagne.

Tweikoff drove them back with a storm of Katusha rockets while General Widling and his exhausted staff smoked and drank coffee in the Bendler block, unable to tell day from night.

That evening, Vidling begged Hitler to authorize a breakout to spare further destruction.

Hitler refused.

“Your proposal is all right,” he said, “but I will not wander in the woods.

I will fall here at the head of my troops.

You will continue the defense.

” Outside, SSmen painted walls with slogans like Berlin remains German.

Soviet soldiers replied with graffiti of their own.

I’m already here.

Signed, Cedarov.

By now, resistance only invited annihilation.

A single Panzer strike on a Soviet tank could trigger a massive retaliatory bombardment on entire buildings.

The French SS even managed to convince Soviet captives that they were laborers pressed into uniform, escaping execution because the Red Army did not know about the SS blood tattoo.

Others simply deserted.

In the Olympic Stadium, Folkster commander Carl Ritter Fonhalt disbanded his unit.

Half of them armed with rifles chambered for Italian ammunition.

It was either that, he said, or throw stones at the Russians.

In the bunker, the atmosphere grew surreal.

Hitler had received a telegram from Guring in Bavaria suggesting he assume leadership.

Furious, Hitler declared it treason, dismissed Guring, and summoned General Robert Riton Grime to Berlin, flying in with pilot Hannah Reich.

Wounded on arrival, Grime was still promoted to field marshal, Hitler’s last.

Incredibly, Hitler then sent him back out with orders to rally the Luftvafer while his secretaries discussed suicide methods over dinner.

Miracles can still happen, Gerbal said of righteous feat.

On the 27th, delusion persisted.

General Hans Krebs reassured colleagues that the Americans might soon turn against the Soviets and relieve Berlin.

Some even believed it.

Meanwhile, the city center was fortified.

King Tigers of the 5003rd SS Heavy Tank Battalion dug in near Walter Monkey’s Liandata men.

Latvian SS held other key points.

Kruenberg established Nordland’s headquarters in an abandoned Uban train.

Donuts had sent midshipman who now dug foxholes outside the foreign ministry.

Ammunition consisted of little more than panzafouasts and captured weapons from across Europe.

The Soviets pushed in slowly, hindered by rubble and fierce house-to-house fighting.

Their vengeance was merciless.

In Darham, they stormed into a maternity clinic staffed by nuns, raping the women inside.

Complaints were met with snears.

It hasn’t done you any harm.

All our men are healthy.

Exhausted German soldiers drank from canals and seized bunkers from civilians, forcing families into the subway tunnels.

On April 28th, the third shock army advanced into the tear garden, its men now within sight of the victory column.

The German defense shrank to a strip just a few kilome wide.

Hitler youth fought for the bridges over the Harvel.

On top of the Berlin zoo’s flack tower, artillery chief Hans Oscar Volulman looked down on the smoking ruins of the city.

A scene which again and again shook one to the core, he wrote.

But now the Soviet juggernaut risked colliding with itself as Zhukov and Kv’s armies converged on the city center.

Stalin resolved the rivalry by awarding Zhukov the prize, the Richtag and Chancellory.

Inside the bunker, a new drama played out.

Himmler was reported negotiating with Sweden to surrender the Reich’s Western forces.

Hitler raged, blaming Herman Fageline, Ava Brown’s brother-in-law, and had him dragged in, court marshaled, and shot.

That same night, Walter Vagnner, a minor city official, was summoned from Folkderm duty to conduct Hitler’s marriage to Ava Brown.

After the midnight ceremony, Hitler dictated his last will and testament, blaming the Jews for Germany’s ruin.

He named Admiral Donitz as his successor.

Gerbles as chancellor.

Gerbles wrote his own will, pledging suicide for himself and his family.

Hours later, Vagnner was killed by Soviet shellfire on his way home.

Above ground, the Soviets hammered on.

Liquor stores were plundered, civilians brutalized.

Some women gave themselves to individual Red Army soldiers, hoping it might spare them from gang rape.

Meanwhile, SS squads shot anyone who dared hang white flags.

The stench of rotting corpses, charred flesh, and pulverized buildings spread across the city.

The Soviets prepared their final assault.

On April 28th, the 150th and 171st rifle divisions were ordered to seize the Riceag and the Chancellery by May 1st, the sacred day of communism.

At 6 p.

m.

, Germans tried to blow a key bridge over the spree.

The charges only sagged the structure.

Still possible.

Soviet infantry stormed across under artillery fire at pointlank range.

By midnight, as Hitler celebrated his wedding underground, the Red Army had secured its bridge head.

In the early hours of the 29th, they stormed the massive Ministry of the Interior known as Himmler’s House, battling SS guards floor by floor.

Sunday, April 29th, Borman wrote in his diary, “The second day which has started with a hurricane of fire.

” Inside the bunker, everyone now waited for Hitler to end it.

Outside, the Soviets battered Himmler’s house with howitzers at close range, advanced on Gestapo headquarters, and pressed deeper into the ruins.

Exhausted German defenders barely responded.

Folk Sterm and Hitler Youth melted away.

SS men still fought hard.

The French of Charlemagne knocking out scores of tanks.

One battalion commander said they fought with only one idea.

The communists must be stopped.

Others claimed they fought to leave a final antibbolic example for the future.

By April 30th, Berlin was in its death throws.

Triov’s eighth guard’s army stormed north across the land canal into the tear garden.

Some men swam the water under fire.

Others slipped through sewers to outflank the defenders.

At the Potama Bridge, the Soviets used a ruse.

They set oil soaked rags and smoke canisters on a T34.

Believing it destroyed, the Germans held their fire.

By the time they realized the trick, the Red Army was already across.

Inside the bunker, General Vidling told his staff it was time to consider a breakout.

But the morning brought a new Soviet onslaught.

At dawn, the 150th Rifle Division went forward against the Kaich.

the symbol Stalin demanded above all others.

A battalion commander, Captain Nostroof, peered through the smoke and asked, “What’s that gray building ahead?” His exasperated regimental commander snapped, “Nostroof, that’s the Reich.

” The building had been turned into a fortress by the Livestandata SS.

In front of it lay a collapsed tunnel filled with water, an improvised moat.

At 6:00 a.

m.

, the first Soviet assault company charged and was cut down by a hurricane of fire from the Rich Reichag and the Croll Opera House.

Soviet self-propelled guns and tanks thundered over the Malta Bridge, pounding the district.

By midm morning, the 150th reached the flooded trench, only to be rad by the flack bunkers at the zoo.

90 Soviet guns, including 203 mm howitzers, hammered the Hashtag until it shook.

Yet the building stood inside.

10,000 desperate defenders, SS sailors, Hitler youth, even foreign volunteers clung to their positions.

Starving French SS tore open the ration bag of a captured Ukrainian P and devoured the contents like animals.

That afternoon, above the ruins, the Reichtag echoed with gunfire.

Below, in the bunker, Adolf Hitler summoned his staff.

General Mona had told him bluntly the citadel could not last two more days.

At around 300 p.

m.

, Hitler and Ava Brown took poison and shot themselves.

Their bodies were carried upstairs, dowsted in petrol and set a light in the chancellory garden.

In the heart of Berlin, the Reich they had promised would last a thousand years was reduced to smoke in less than 12.

Gerbles immediately called Vidling to the chancellory.

He told him to arrange an armistice, but not to reveal Hitler’s death.

I was deeply shocked, Vidling later recalled.

So this was the end.

Still the battle raged on.

At the Reich, Soviet infantry fought room by room, floor by floor, against panzer fousts fired from balconies.

Casualties were staggering.

Grenades, flamethrowers, and submachine guns turned halls into slaughterhouses.

In the chaos, small Soviet groups tried to reach the roof.

One flag went up at 10:50 p.

m.

, pinned down under fire.

Others followed, each man desperate to claim the honor of planting the red banner.

The rice tug was still not fully secured.

But the Soviet symbol of victory was flying.

That night, Berlin burned, lit only by flames.

SS men hiding in the Hotel Continental were treated with contempt by women and children who saw them not as protectors, but as dangers.

Nurses in field hospitals quietly confiscated wounded soldiers weapons so the Red Army would not use them as an excuse to massacre the wards.

Late that night, General Krebs approached Triov under a flag of truce.

On April 30th, he admitted Adolf Hitler committed suicide.

Triov lied coolly.

We know.

Krebs pleaded for terms.

Stalin’s reply was blunt.

Unconditional surrender or Berlin would be blasted into dust.

At dawn on May 1st, Zhukov’s armies unleashed a hurricane of fire on the city center.

Explosions tore through the Uban tunnels.

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