Military leaders sought to direct this fury into the battle against the Wehrmacht but waited until they were fully prepared before launching the attack. Marshal Zhukov would have preferred to hold off the final assault on Berlin until Rokossovsky’s army group could join in, but he later wrote that the “military-political situation”—which is to say, the supposed duplicity of the Allies—made postponement impossible.47 Meanwhile Konev’s First Ukrainian Army Group approached from the less heavily fortified south. Stalin played on the rivalry of his two ambitious marshals and left it undecided which of them would take Berlin. He erased the line on the map separating the two at a point well short of the city, thus forcing the marshals to compete with each other to take it. Konev’s forces would be joined by Rokossovsky’s as soon as they were available.48
As strategist, Stalin preferred massive attacks that combined an army group that linked up with others to overwhelm the enemy. The lesson in the art of war that he never learned was that victory should be sought at the lowest cost in lives.49 For the push to Vienna that opened on March 16, he had three-quarters of a million troops and for Berlin 2.5 million. They had 6,250 tanks and self-propelled guns, 3,200 multiple rocket launchers, 41,600 artillery pieces, and 7,500 aircraft. Zhukov himself had around half of this force at his disposal. But he overestimated his numerical advantage over the Germans, who moreover had detected the time and place of the attack.50
By the time Zhukov’s offensive began, before dawn on April 16, the Germans had pulled back many troops from forward positions. The Red Army blasted away with everything and then switched on 140 searchlights, which did not blind the defenders as expected. Instead, the illumination of the smoke and dust made it impossible for the attackers to see ahead, and as the waves of infantry went over the top, they piled into one another. The first day of battle is caustically described by one historian as “comic opera played by five armies on a 20-mile stage.”51
Hundreds of tanks ordered into action during the day only added to the mad tangle. They could not move freely on the flooded plain and had to travel the few roads and bridges where they were easy targets. In spite of firing over a million artillery shells, and notwithstanding endless bombing attacks from the air, Zhukov found German defenses largely intact on the Seelow Heights. Even though the German generals on the ground had held back the attack the first day, they knew the situation would deteriorate, as they had already thrown all their reserves into the fray.
Stalin, in telephone contact with the front, criticized mistakes and browbeat Zhukov, who in turn drove on with disregard for casualties. It took two full days of heavy fighting to break through the Seelow Heights, costing the lives of at least 30,000 Red Army men. The wounded lay neglected on the battlefield for hours.52 For Stalin and his military leaders, what made conquering Berlin so vital was its political significance, a point underlined in the memoirs of the key participants.
Konev’s route from the southeast moved speedily along one of the first autobahns. He had to breach several lines of defense and two rivers, the Neisse and the Spree. When reporting his progress on April 17, Stalin told him to turn his tanks to encircle Berlin. Four days later Konev’s units captured the headquarters of the German Army (OKH) at Zossen and were close to Potsdam. For all that, any hope that the Red Army might be able to take Berlin on Lenin’s birthday (April 22) was out of the question.
On April 25 units of the Red Army’s 58th Guards Rifle Division linked up with the U.S. First Army’s 69th Infantry Division at Torgau and several other places along the Elbe River. The American and Soviet troops were overjoyed, and the same day Berlin was completely encircled. Marshal Rokossovsky’s Second Byelorussian Army Group finally came in from the north, pinning down the last enemy troops and ending any German hope of counterattacking Konev or Zhukov. Stalin mentioned on the radio the meeting of the troops from both sides, but he did not share their solidarity.
To bring some order to the chaos, he had reset the demarcation lines on April 22. Zhukov’s and Konev’s troops were already inflicting “friendly fire” casualties on each other. Stalin decided that Zhukov’s soldiers would have the privilege of taking the Reichstag, the last symbol of power in the city, and they succeeded on April 30. When General V. I. Kuznetsov called Zhukov to report that the red flag was atop the building, German troops were still fighting in the upper floors and in the cellars. They surrendered only late on May 1. So much for the Allies thinking that sanity would prevail in Berlin and that there would be no need to wage war throughout the entire country.53
The battle as a whole, from April 16 to May 8, cost the Red Army 78,291 dead and 274,184 wounded. It seems certain that many of these casualties were needless and that the numbers could have been reduced with a more measured attack. The same was true for the Austrian-Vienna operation that ended on April 15. It cost the Soviets 32,846 dead and 106,969 wounded.54 In the middle of the bloodbath, Stalin was in direct contact with the front, getting intelligence officers to find certain political figures, in order to begin arranging the postwar political setup.55
Contrary to Hitler’s prediction that the Allies would fall apart, Americans and Soviets greeted each other in celebration.56 By midnight on April 29, any chance that German troops could rescue Berlin was erased. At one P.M. the next day, Hitler had lunch with his wife and his secretaries, briefly bade farewell to those still in the bunker, and then went to his rooms, where he and his wife committed suicide.57
Zhukov phoned Stalin’s dacha and had him awakened to tell him of Hitler’s death. The dictator muttered: “That’s the end of the scoundrel [Doigralsya podlets]. What a pity we couldn’t take him alive.” He told Zhukov to demand unconditional surrender and went back to bed to be rested for the annual May 1 celebrations.58 There he announced what had happened and even mentioned that Hitler “made advances to the Allies in order to cause dissension.” The war criminals would be punished and reparations paid, he said, even as he insisted that the Soviets were not against the German people as a whole. He swore that the invading forces would not “molest” the peaceful population, but such a statement was belied by what was happening on the ground.59
When Stalin learned that German generals had agreed to sign the unconditional surrender papers, not in Berlin in the presence of Red Army commanders but in the small French city of Rheims, he was infuriated. He phoned Zhukov and ordered him to Berlin for another ceremony, there to represent the supreme command of the Soviet forces, along with appointed Allied leaders. The document was finally signed at 12:43 A.M., May 9, 1945. That would be the Victory Day celebrated in the Soviet Union, not May 8—considered V-E Day in much of the rest of the world.60
Stalin broadcast the news to his people at eight P.M. Moscow time. The statement was brief and carefully calibrated. Interestingly, he portrayed the German-Soviet war not as a conflict of ideologies, Nazism versus Communism, but as part of the age-old “struggle of the Slavic peoples” against German invaders. Knowing that the world was listening, he did not say a word about Communism. The people were understandably proud, for only three years before, Hitler had threatened them with annihilation or slavery. Stalin and Communists everywhere saw the Soviet victory as a validation of the Soviet system. He now said that he did not want vengeance and would not “dismember or destroy” Germany. “Comrades,” he said, “the period of war in Europe is over. The period of peaceful development has begun.”61