On April 20, Hitler's birthday, Soviet artillery of the 1st Belorussian Front began to shell the centre of Berlin and did not stop until the city surrendered. After the war the Soviets pointed out that the weight of explosives delivered by their artillery during the battle, was greater than the tonnage dropped by the Western Allied bombers on the city. 1st Belorussian Front advanced towards the east and north-east of the City.

On April 21 the 2nd Guards Army advanced nearly 50 kms north of Berlin and then attacked southwest of Werneuchen. Other Soviet units reached the outer defence ring. The Soviet plan was to encircle Berlin first and then envelop the IX Army.

On April 22 at his afternoon situation conference Hitler fell into a tearful rage when he realised that his plans of the day before were not going to be realised. He declared that the war was lost, he blamed the generals and announced that he would stay on in Berlin until the end and then kill himself. In an attempt to coax Hitler out of his rage, General Alfred Jodl speculated that the XII Army which was facing the Americans could move to Berlin because the Americans already on the Elbe river were unlikely to move further east. Hitler immediately grasped the idea and within hours General Walther Wenck was ordered to disengage the Americans and move the XII Army north-east to support Berlin. It was then realised that if the IX Army moved west it could link up with the XII Army. In the evening Heinrici was given permission to make the link up.

Away from the map room in the Berlin Fuhrerbunker with its fantasy attacks of phantom divisions, the Soviets were getting on with winning the war. The 2nd Belorussian Front had established a bridgehead on the east bank of the Oder over 15 kms deep and was heavily engaged with the III Panzer Army. The IX Army had lost Cottbus and was being pressed from the east. A Soviet tank spearhead was on the river Havel to the east of Berlin and another had at one point penetrated the inner defensive ring of Berlin.

On April 23 the Soviet 1st Belorussian Front and 1st Ukrainian Fronts continued to tighten the encirclement, including severing the last link that the German IX Army had with the city. Elements of the 1st Ukrainian Front continue to move to the west and they start to engage the German XII Army moving towards Berlin. Hitler appointed General Helmuth Weidling defence commandant of Berlin. By April 24 elements of the 1st Belorussian Front and 1st Ukrainian Fronts had completed the encirclement of the city.

The next day on April 25 the 2nd Belorussian Front broke through III Panzer Army's line around the bridgehead south of Stettin and crossed the Rando Swamp. They were now free to move west towards the British 21st Army Group and north towards the Baltic port of Stralsund. The Soviet 58th Guards Division of the 5th Guards Army made contact with the US 69th Infantry Division of the First Army near Torgau, Germany on the Elbe River.

The battle of Berlin
The forces available for the city's defense included several severely depleted Army and Waffen-SS divisions, supplemented by the police, the Hitler Youth, and the Volkssturm.

To the west the XX Infantry Division, to the north the IX Parachute Division, to the north-east Panzer Division Müncheberg, XI SS Panzergrenadier Division Nordland were to the south-east,(east of Tempelhof Airport) and XVIII Panzergrenadier Division, the reserve, were in the central district.

Berlin's fate was sealed, but the resistance continued. The Soviet advance to the city centre was along these main axes: from the south-east, along the Frankfurter Allee (ending and stopped at the Alexanderplatz); from the south along Sonnen Allee ending north of the Belle Alliance Platz, from the south ending near the Potsdamer Platz and from the north ending near the Reichstag. The Reichstag, the Moltke bridge, Alexanderplatz, and the Havel bridges at Spandau were the places were the fighting was heaviest, with house-to-house and hand-to-hand combat. The foreign contingents of the SS fought particularly hard, because they were ideologically motivated and they believed that they would not live if captured.

On April 28 Heinrici rejected Hitler's command to hold Berlin at all costs, so he was relieved of his command and replaced by General Kurt Student the next day.

On April 30, as the Soviet forces fought their way into the centre of Berlin, Adolf Hitler married Eva Braun and then committed suicide by taking cyanide and shooting himself. General Weidling, defence commandant of Berlin, surrendered the city to the Soviets on May 2.

The battle ended after a week of heavy fighting because the Germans ran out of men and material. The German supply dumps were located outside the outer defence line (the Inner Ring) and were captured quite early in the battle by the Soviets. In the battle for the city the Soviets lost about 2,000 armoured vehicles, in good part due to an effective shoulder-firing rocket known as a Panzerfaust, mass numbers of which were supplied to German civilians, though countermeasures such as armor and wire skirts were being deployed. The Germans had only a few tanks.

In many areas of the city, vengeful Soviet troops (usually rear echelon units) looted, raped many women and murdered some civilians for several weeks. Initially this behaviour was tolerated by many Red Army officers, but as the invasion turned into occupation the army authorities and the NKVD quickly put a stop to it. In 1945, some 4,000 Soviet officers were tried for crimes against civilians. The Soviets sustained 20-25,000 dead in the city and 81,000 for the entire operation. Another 280,000 were reported wounded or sick during the operational period. The Germans sustained as many as 450,000 killed, wounded or missing, civilians included.

Following Hitler's wishes in his last will and testament, on his death Admiral Karl Dönitz became the new Reichspräsident and Joseph Goebbels the new Reichskanzler. However Goebbels' suicide on May 1, 1945 left the new head of state to orchestrate negotiations of national surrender on his own. All German armed forces surrendered unconditionally to the Allies on 8 May 1945. The war in Europe was over, and with it went the Third Reich. Hitler's "thousand-year Reich" had lasted for twelve years at a cost of 50 million deaths across Europe.

Cards

- 3 sets of cards: 1 for the Front line, 1 for the City defences and 1 for the Soviet Armies.
- I would like to thank Ludovic Lassalle who help me to design these cards.

Rules (2 players)

- Original English rules by Lloyd Krassner from his web site.

Specific links

- A chronology of World War II and specically in 1945
- The bomb plot against Hitler on the 20th July 1944 (in French)
- The movie about the last days of Hitler: Downfall
- Memoirs of Soviet soldiers: I remember
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