The Fall of Berlin 1945 by Beevor

Antony Beevor (2003). The Fall of Berlin 1945. Penguin Publishing.

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Summary­

• Goebbels declared that ‘whoever possesses Berlin possesses Germany’. Stalin, on the other hand, undoubtedly knew the rest of Marx’s quote: ‘And whoever controls Germany, controls Europe.’

• Russian leadership felt that on military grounds that to seize the capital of the Reich would deal the greatest psychological blow to German resistance and shorten the war.

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—Strategy of Advance—

Germany

• It had been Bismarck’s firm belief that Germany should avoid war with Russia at all costs.

• The most frequently asked question by the Germans was whether the Americans would get to Berlin in time to save them.

• The German Army’s main problems were shortages of ammunition and shortages of fuel for their vehicles.

• Sarin and Tabun nerve gas from the Wehrmacht chemical weapons research centre in the massive citadel at Spandau had been distributed. ‘Verzweiflungswaffen’ — ’the weapons of despair‘.

• The loss of the mines as well as the steelworks and factories was probably a greater blow for German production than all the Allied bombing of the Ruhr industrial region over the last two years.

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UK

• Churchill argued that the Americans and British ‘should shake hands with the Russians as far to the east as possible’.

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USA

• The American leaders still failed to grasp the fact that the German Army was desperate to surrender to them while resisting the Red Army at all costs.

• Eisenhower, as supreme commander, continued to insist that it was not his job to look towards the post-war world. His task was to finish the war effectively with as few casualties as possible. He felt that the British were allowing post-war politics to rule military strategy.

• The basic problem, which Brooke did not fully acknowledge, was that the Americans at that stage simply did not view Europe in strategic terms. They had a simple and limited objective: to win the war against Germany quickly, with as few casualties as possible, and then concentrate on Japan.

• Ike simply could not accept Churchill’s point that Berlin, while it remained under the German flag, was bound to be ‘the most decisive point in Germany’. Ike obstinately believed that the Leipzig — Dresden axis, splitting Germany in two, was more important, and he was convinced that Stalin thought so too.

• Eisenhower weighted his attack southwards partly because he was convinced that Hitler would withdraw his armies to Bavaria and north-western Austria for a last-ditch defence of an Alpenfestung, or Alpine Fortress.

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USSR

• Stalin, in contrast to Hitler, was essentially a practitioner of political rather than racial genocide.

• At the beginning of the Soviet Advance into Germany, the Red Army had 6.7 million men along a front which stretched from the Baltic to the Adriatic.

• A key target for the Soviets was the Reichsbank in Berlin which accounted for 2,389 kg in gold, 12 tons of Ag coin and millions in banknotes from countries which had been occupied by the Axis.

• The main Soviet objective was to strip Germany of all its laboratories, workshops and factories. Even the NKVD in Moscow provided a shopping list of items wanted from police forensic laboratories. The Soviet atomic programme, Operation Borodino, had the very highest priority of all, but considerable efforts were also made to track down V-2 rocket scientists, Siemens engineers and any other skilled technicians who could help the Soviet armaments industry catch up with the US. Only a few, such as Professor Jung and his team who refused to help on nerve gas, managed to resist Soviet pressure. Most of the others enjoyed comparatively privileged conditions and the right to bring their families with them to the Soviet Union.

• Soviet point units were sometimes advancing by 60-70 km a day.

• The Soviet plan was to launch the final offensive on Berlin on 16 April and to take Berlin on 22 April, Lenin’s birthday.

• Soviet troops were furious to find a standard of living among peasant farmers far higher than anything that they had ever imagined. This provoked outrage at the idea that Germans, who had already been living so well, should have invaded the Soviet Union to loot and destroy.

• Operation Borodino: Soviet nuclear research program. The Soviet program’s main handicap was a lack of U, of which no deposits had been identified yet in the Soviet Union. The main reserves in Europe lay in Saxony and Czechoslovakia, under Nazi control.

• On Beria’s instructions, the Soviet Purchasing Committee in the US asked the American War Production Board to sell it eight tons of U-oxide. After consultation with Major General Groves, the head of the Manhattan Project, the US government authorized purely token supplies, mainly in the hope of finding out what the Soviet Union was up to. U deposits were discovered in Kazakhstan in 1945, but still in insufficient quantities. Stalin's and Beria’s greatest hope of getting the project moving ahead rapidly therefore lay in seizing German supplies of U before the Western Allies got to them. Beria had discovered from Soviet scientists who had worked there that the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics in Dahlem, a SW suburb of Berlin, was the centre of German atomic research. Work was carried out there in a lead-lined bunker known as the ‘Virus House’, a codename designed to discourage outside interest. Next to this bunker stood the Blitzturm, or ‘tower of lightning’, which housed a cyclotron capable of creating 1.5 million volts. Beria, however, did not know that most of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute’s scientists, equipment and material, including seven tons of U-oxide, had been evacuated to Haigerloch in the Black Forest.

• General Serov, the NKVD chief in Berlin, was ordered to concentrate on securing the U deposits in Czechoslovakia and, above all, in Saxony, south of Dresden.

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Poland

• In WWII, the Poles lost >20% of their population.

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Yalta (Feb, 1945)

• FDR: Announced without warning that US forces would not remain in Europe for more than two years after Germany’s surrender. Churchill was privately appalled. This would only encourage Stalin to be more obdurate, and a war-ravaged Europe might well be too weak to resist Communist unrest.

• Churchill: A fully independent Poland, the very reason for which Great Britain had gone to war in September 1939, was a question of honour. Churchill felt strongly that until Stalin’s post-war intentions in central Europe were clear and that the West had to grab every card available for bargaining with him. Recent reports of what was happening in Poland, with mass arrests of prominent figures who might not support Soviet rule, strongly suggested that Stalin had no intention of allowing an independent government to develop.

• Stalin: Poland presents the gravest of strategic problems for the Soviet Union. Throughout history, Poland had served as a corridor for enemies coming to attack Russia. The Soviet Union would accept nothing less than a totally subservient Poland as a buffer zone.

• Eisenhower: Like FDR, the chiefs of staff and other senior officials — failed to look ahead and completely misread Stalin’s character. Eisenhower’s view that Berlin itself was ‘no longer a particularly important objective’ demonstrated an astonishing naivety.

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Fall of Berlin

• By late Jan, 1945, Nazi authorities calculate that ‘around 4 million people from the evacuated areas’ were heading for Berlin. This was clearly an underestimate. The figure rose to 7 million within a fortnight and to 8.35 million by 19 Feb. At the end of Jan, between 40,000-50,000 refugees were arriving in Berlin daily, mainly by train. By 10 March, the estimated running total of German refugees from the eastern provinces rose to 11 million people.

• Both Hitler and Goebbels, the Reich Commissar for Defence of the capital, he wrote later, refused to give any ‘thought to defending the city until it was much too late. Thus, the city’s defence was characterized only by a mass of improvisations.’

• In defense of Berlin, every soldier, sailor and airman who could be scraped together would be thrown into battle and any commander who held back his men faced execution within five hours.

• ‘Boys, you’ve got to go in once more,’ Wenck told them. ‘It’s not about Berlin any more, it’s not about the Reich any more.’ Their task was to save people from the fighting and the Russians.

• Weidling found that he was supposed to defend Berlin from 1.5 million Soviet troops with around 45,000 Wehrmacht and SS troops, including his own corps, and just over 40,000 Volkssturm.

• Civilians found themselves crushed by the violent intransigence of both sides.

• Surrender meant being worked to death in Siberian labour camps as a ‘Stalinpferd’, a ‘Stalin horse’. ‘We no longer fought for Hitler, or for National Socialism, or for the Third Reich,’ wrote an Alsatian veteran of the Grossdeutschland Division, ‘or even for our fiancées or mothers or families trapped in bomb-ravaged towns. We fought from simple fear... We fought for ourselves, so that we wouldn’t die in holes filled with mud and snow; we fought like rats.

• New general orders were issued that any German male who does not report for frontline service will be shot on the spot.

• Only Zhukov and Konev and a few of their closest colleagues knew that the strategy of the whole Berlin operation was designed to surround the city first in order to warn off the Americans and British.

• General Kazakov had 8,983 artillery pieces, with up to 270 guns per kilometre on the breakthrough sectors, which meant a field gun every four metres, including 152mm and 203mm howitzers, heavy mortars and regiments of katyusha rocket launchers. The 1st Belorussian Front had a stockpile of over 7 million shells, of which 1,236,000 rounds were fired on the first day. This artillery overkill and the overwhelming superiority of his forces had tempted Zhukov into underestimating the scale of the obstacle facing them. Between mid-April to 2 May, the Russians fired 1.8 million shells in the assault on the city.

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Rape of Berlin

• Many were simply not prepared for the shock of Russian revenge. Nuns, young girls, old women, pregnant women and mothers who had just given birth were all raped without pity.

• Soviet soldiers treated German women much more as sexual spoils of war than as substitutes for the Wehrmacht on which to vent their rage.

• By the time the Red Army reached Berlin three months later, its soldiers tended to regard German women more as a casual right of conquest than a target of hate.

• The Soviet leadership, rather late in the day, had finally realized that the horror inspired by the Red Army’s onslaught on the civilian population was increasing enemy resistance and would complicate the post-war Soviet occupation of Germany.

• ‘Red Army soldiers don’t believe in “individual liaisons” with German women,’ wrote the playwright Zakhar Agranenko in his diary when serving as an officer of marine infantry in East Prussia. ‘Nine, ten, twelve men at a time — they rape them on a collective basis.’

• The subject has been so repressed in Russia that even today veterans refuse to acknowledge what really happened during the onslaught on German territory. They will admit to hearing of a few excesses, and then dismiss the subject as an inevitable result of war.

• ‘The number of extraordinary events is growing,’ the political department reported in its usual vocabulary of euphemisms.

• This has been described as the effect of the ’impersonal violence of war itself’ and a compulsion to treat women as ‘substitutes for the defeat of an enemy’.

• The basic point is that, in war, undisciplined soldiers without fear of retribution can rapidly revert to a primitive male sexuality. The difference between the incoherent violence in East Prussia and the notion of carnal booty in Berlin underlines the fact that there can be no all-embracing definition of the crime. On the other hand, it tends to suggest that there is a dark area of male sexuality which can emerge all too easily, especially in war, when there are no social and disciplinary restraints. Much also depends on the military culture of a particular national army. As the Red Army example shows, the practice of collective rape can even become a form of bonding process.

• Estimates from the two main Berlin hospitals ranged from 95,000 to 130,000 rape victims. One doctor deduced that out of approximately 100,000 women raped in Berlin, some 10,000 died as a result, mostly from suicide. The death rate was thought to be much higher among the 1.4 million who had suffered in East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia. Altogether at least 2 million German women are thought to have been raped, and a substantial minority, if not a majority, appear to have suffered multiple rape. A friend of Ursula von Kardorff and the Soviet spy Schulze-Boysen was raped by ‘twenty-three soldiers one after the other’. She had to be stitched up in hospital afterwards.

• Many think that the Red Army was given two weeks to plunder and rape in Berlin before discipline was exerted, but it was not nearly so simple as that. On 3 August, three months after the surrender in Berlin, Zhukov had to issue even tougher regulations to control ‘robbery’, ‘physical violence’ and ’scandalous events‘. All the Soviet propaganda about ’liberation from the fascist clique’ was starting to backfire, especially when the wives and daughters of German Communists were treated as badly as everyone else. ‘Such deeds and unsanctioned behaviour,’ the order stated, ‘are compromising us very badly in the eyes of German anti-fascists, particularly now that the war is over, and greatly assist fascist campaigns against the Red Army and the Soviet government.’

• Commanders were blamed for allowing their men to wander off unsupervised. ‘Unsanctioned absences’ had to cease. Sergeants and corporals were to check that their men were present every morning and every evening. Soldiers were to be issued with identity cards. Troops were not to leave Berlin without movement orders. In fact, the order contained a list of measures which any western army would have considered as normal even in barracks at home.

• The definition of rape had become blurred into sexual coercion. A gun or physical violence became unnecessary when women faced starvation. This could be described as the third stage in the evolution of rape in Germany in 1945. The fourth was a strange form of cohabitation in which many Soviet officers settled in with German ‘occupation wives’ who replaced the Soviet ’campaign wife‘.

• Wherever the truth lay between rape and prostitution, these pacts to obtain food and protection had thrown women back to a primitive, almost primeval state.

• There was a complete ban from the Soviet authorities, represented in this case by General Vladimir Semyonov, on mentioning the three subjects about which Germans wanted to hear. These ’taboo themes’ were ‘rape, the fate of [German] prisoners of war and the Oder — Neisse line’ — which meant the loss of Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia to Poland.

• Most women and girls were marched off to the Soviet Union for forced labour ‘in forests, peat bogs and canals for 15-16 hours a day’. A little over half of them died in the following two years. Of the survivors, just under half had been raped. When they were returned to the Soviet occupied zone of Germany in April 1947, most had to be sent immediately to hospitals because they were suffering from tuberculosis and venereal disease.

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—Post War—

Germany

• SHAEF’s joint intelligence committee attributed it (German post-war morality) to ‘a perverted moral sense’. ‘These generals,’ stated a report based on over 300 interviews, ‘approve of every act which “succeeds”. Success is right. What does not succeed is wrong. It was, for example, wrong to persecute the Jews before the war since that set the Anglo-Americans against Germany. It would have been right to postpone the anti-Jewish campaign and begin it after Germany had won the war. It was wrong to bomb England in 1940. If they had refrained, Great Britain, so they believe, would have joined Hitler in the war against Russia. It was wrong to treat Russian and Polish [prisoners of war] like cattle since now they will treat Germans in the same way. It was wrong to declare war against the USA and Russia because they were together stronger than Germany. These are not isolated statements by pro-Nazi generals. They represent the prevalent thoughts among nearly all these men. That it is morally wrong to exterminate a race or massacre prisoners hardly ever occurs to them. The only horror they feel for German crimes is that they themselves may, by some monstrous injustice, be considered by the Allies to be implicated.

• The German officers who had signed demobilization papers for all their men so that they could avoid prison camp had wasted their time. Anybody in any sort of uniform, even firemen and railwaymen, were rounded up for the first columns to be marched eastwards.

• The political and military leaders of the Third Reich refused to accept responsibility for their actions. American and British interrogators were flabbergasted by senior Wehrmacht officers expressing an injured innocence that the Western Allies should have so misunderstood them. They were prepared to acknowledge ‘mistakes’, but not crimes. Any crimes were committed by the Nazis and the SS.

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USSR

• Of the 80 Red Army generals captured by the Wehrmacht, only 37 survived until released by the Red Army. Eleven of them were then arrested by SMERSH and sentenced by tribunals of NKVD forces. ‘By 1 Dec, 1946, 5.5 million people had returned to the USSR, of which 1,833,567 had been prisoners of war.’ Over 1.5 million members of the Red Army captured by the Germans were sent either to the Gulag (339,000 of them), or to labour battalions in Siberia and the far north, which was hardly better. Civilians taken by force to Germany were ‘potential enemies of the state’ to be kept under NKVD watch. They were also forbidden to go within 100 km of Moscow, Leningrad and Kiev, and their families remained suspect. Even as recently as 1998, declaration forms for joining a research institute in Russia still contained a section demanding whether any member of the applicant’s family had been in an ’enemy prison camp’.

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Misc Quotes

“(During the Russian advance on Berlin in May, 1945): She thought of Leonidas 300 Spartans at Thermopylae, about whom they had heard so much at school. ‘Maybe here and there 300 German soldiers would behave in the same way: 3 million would not. The greater the crowd, The less the chance for schoolbook heroism. By nature, we women don’t appreciate it much either. We’re sensible, practical, opportunistic. We prefer men alive.'“

“Nelsonian tactic of refusing to acknowledge most signals.”

“‘The all-too-prevalent American theory’ that individual friendships can determine national policy.”

“Gitler durak!: Hitler’s a blockhead!”

“We will never surrender. We may go down, but we will take a world with us.”-Hitler.

‘To be an officer,’ another German lieutenant wrote to his fiancée, ‘means always having to swing back and forth like a pendulum between a Knight’s Cross, a birchwood cross and a court martial.’

“An ordinary (Soviet) soldier in a rifle division provided a summary in his diary of the changing moods of his comrades. ‘First state: soldier with no chiefs around. He is a grumbler. He threatens and shows off. He is keen to pocket something or grab someone in a stupid argument. One can see from this irritability that the soldier’s life is hard for him. Second state: soldier in the presence of chiefs: submissive and inarticulate. Readily agrees with what he is told. Easily believes promises. Blossoms when praised and is eager to admire the strictness of officers whom he makes fun of behind their backs. Third state: working together or in battle: here he is a hero. He won’t leave his comrade in danger. He dies quietly, as if it is still part of his work.”

“In the case of the Nazi hierarchy it is often hard to tell where irresponsibility ended and inhumanity began.”

“Martin Bormann, although not of his own volition, was the only major Nazi Party leader to have faced the bullets of the Bolshevik enemy. All the others - Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler and Goring - took their own lives.”

‘Engaged in the propaganda of bourgeois humanism, of pity for the enemy.’

Die Stunde Null: The lowest imaginable moment of their lives (On German women).

“(I had the) impression ‘that a blind man was speaking about colour‘.”-Eismann on Hitler’s Military Strategy.

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Chronology

• 1945: U deposits are discovered by the USSR in Kazakhstan.-Fall of Berlin by Beevor.

• 8 May, 1945: VE Day; the end of WWII in Europe.

• 30 April, 1945: Hitler and his partner Eva Braun commit suicide. Their corpses are found 5 days later (5 May). Goering, Goebbels, Himmler and Bormann all visualized themselves as the Führer’s successor.-Fall of Berlin by Beevor.

• 25 April, 1945: US soldiers from the 69th division and Soviet forces from the 58th Guards Rifle Division under Major General Vladimir Rusakov meet at Torgau on the Elbe, merging the Western and Eastern Fronts and cutting Germany in half.-Fall of Berlin by Beevor.

• 12 April, 1945: Death of US President FDR.-Fall of Berlin by Beevor.

• Feb, 1945: The Yalta Conference is held in Crimea to decide the post-war map of Central Europe; Churchill and Eden were most concerned about the independence of Poland while FDR’s main priority was the establishment of the UN for the post-war world.-Fall of Berlin by Beevor.

• 30 Jan, 1945: Hitler makes his last broadcast, marking 12 years of Nazi government.-Fall of Berlin by Beevor.

• Jan- 7 May, 1945: The Berlin Operation; the Soviets advance into Germany collapsing the Eastern Front and taking Berlin. Soviet casualties were extremely high, ~78,291 killed and ~274,184 wounded.-Fall of Berlin by Beevor.

  • Early, 7 May, 1945: German Surrender; Germany under General Jodl, on behalf of Dönitz and the OKW surrender to the Allies under IKE and Soviet General Susloparov, the chief Soviet liaison officer with SHAEF, at IKEs HQ at Rheims.-Fall of Berlin by Beevor.

  • 6 May, 1945: Surrender of Breslau, the capital of Silesia, after its appalling three-month siege (13 Feb- 6 May).- Fall of Berlin by Beevor.

  • 16 Apr- 2 May, 1945: The Battle of Berlin

    • 0600, 2 May, 1945: Surrender of Berlin; German LVI Panzer Corps under Weidling surrenders to General Chuikov (who had commanded the defense of Stalingrad).-Fall of Berlin by Beevor.

    • Early Morning, 2 May, 1945: Detonation of the S-Bahn tunnel under the Landwehr Canal near Trebbiner Strasse leads to the flooding of 25 km of S-Bahn and U-Bahn tunnels kills thousands of civilians.-Fall of Berlin by Beevor.

    • 1500, 1 May, 1945: Surrender of the Spandau Garrison; Among those to surrender were Colonel Jung and Lieutenant Colonel Koch who were in fact Professor Dr Gerhard Jung and Dr Edgar Koch, the leading scientists in the development of Sarin and Tabun nerve agents.-Fall of Berlin by Beevor.

    • 1015, 1 May, 1945: The 1st Belorussian Front unleashes massed artillery and Katyusha Launchers of the 3rd & 5th Shock Armies and the 8th Guard on Berlin after Goebbels refuses to surrender.-Fall of Berlin by Beevor.

    • 24 Apr- 1 May, 1945: Battle of Halbe (Kesselschlacht von Halbe); The Red Army under Zhukov defeats the German Ninth Army under General Busse leaving Berlin undefended.-Fall of Berlin by Beevor.

    • 0620, 24 April, 1945: The bombardment of the Teltow Canal begins.-Fall of Berlin by Beevor.

    • 0940, 18 April, 1945: Soviet Armored groups break through at Diedersdorf.-Fall of Berlin by Beevor.

    • 16 Apr, 1945: Zhukov’s 1st Belorussian Front and Konev’s 1st Ukrainian Front attack Berlin.-Fall of Berlin by Beevor.

    • 16 Apr, 1945: The Hospital ship Goya, packed with 7,000 refugees fleeing East Prussia and Pomerania, is sunk by a Soviet Submarine. Only 165 people were saved.-Fall of Berlin by Beevor.

  • 11-12 April, 1945: US Forces reach Magdeburg, Germany. The next day they crossed the Elbe south of Dessau. Plans were drawn up on the projection that they could reach Berlin within forty-eight hours.-Fall of Berlin by Beevor.

  • 19 March, 1945: Hitler orders the ‘Nero’ or ‘Scorched-Earth Order.’ Everything which might be of use to the enemy should be destroyed on withdrawal.-Fall of Berlin by Beevor.

  • 16 Feb, 1945: The Pomeranian offensive (aka the Stargard tank battle) begins under Wenck’s direction. Over 1,200 tanks had been allocated, but the trains to transport them were lacking. Even an under-strength panzer division needed 50 trains to move its men and vehicles. Far more serious was the shortage of ammunition and fuel, of which there were enough for only three days of operations.-Fall of Berlin by Beevor.

  • 13 Feb, 1945: Soviet forces take Budapest.-Fall of Berlin by Beevor.

  • 6 Feb, 1945: Soviet Forces enter Germany and issue an order to ‘mobilize all Germans fit for work from 17 to 50 years of age and to form labour battalions of 1,000 to 1,200 men each, and send them to Belorussia and the Ukraine to repair war damage’.-Fall of Berlin by Beevor.

  • 30 Jan, 1945: Sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff; Germany’s largest sea-cruise liner, which had been designed to take 2,000 passengers, left with between 6,600- 9,000 people aboard. That night, escorted by a single motor torpedo boat, it was stalked by a Soviet submarine of the Baltic Fleet. Captain A. I. Marinesco fired three torpedoes. All hit their target. Exhausted refugees, shaken from their sleep, panicked. There was a desperate rush to reach the lifeboats. Many were cut off below as the icy sea rushed in: the air temperature outside was -18 Celsius. The lifeboats which had been launched were upset by desperate refugees leaping from the ship’s side. The ship sank in less than an hour. Between 5,300- 7,400 people lost their lives. The 1,300 survivors were rescued by vessels, led by the heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper. It was the greatest maritime disaster in history.-Fall of Berlin by Beevor.

  • 27 Jan, 1945: Nehring crosses the Oder.-Fall of Berlin by Beevor.

  • 27 Jan, 1945: Auschwitz and its network of camps is discovered by Konev’s 60th Army. The Soviet Union suppressed all news of Auschwitz until 8 May, when the war had finished.-Fall of Berlin by Beevor.

  • 21 Jan, 1945: Operation Hannibal; a German mass evacuation of refugees using four large ships.-Fall of Berlin by Beevor.

  • 14 Jan, 1945: Rokossovsky’s Soviet forces attack East Prussia from the River Narew bridgeheads and Zhukov’s 1st Belorussian Front went into action on its two bridgeheads on the Vistula at Magnuszew and Pulawy.-Fall of Berlin by Beevor.

  • 13 Jan, 1945: The Soviet assault on East Prussia began with General Chernyakhovsky 3rd Belorussian Front.-Fall of Berlin by Beevor.

  • 5am (Moscow), 12 Jan, 1945: The Vistula-Oder Offensive begins when Konev' 1st Ukrainian Front attacks out of the Sandomierz bridgehead.-Fall of Berlin by Beevor.

  • Jan, 1945: The Soviet Push to Berlin begins with 2.5 million men, 41,600 guns and mortars, 6,250 tanks and self-propelled guns, and 7500 aircraft.-Fall of Berlin by Beevor.

• 16 Dec, 1944- 25 Jan, 1945: The Battle of the Bulge in The Ardennes; Belgium, Luxembourg, and Germany.

  • 31 Dec, 1944-25 Jan, 1945: Operation North Wind, the last major German offensive of WWII on the Western Front. The operation was the main subsidiary action to prolong the Ardennes offensive by destroying allied air forces and turned out to be a catastrophe for the Luftwaffe. Goring, in a grand gesture of characteristic irresponsibility, committed almost 1,000 planes to attack ground targets on the Western Front. This attempt to impress Hitler led to the final destruction of the Luftwaffe as an effective force. It gave the Allies total air supremacy.-Fall of Berlin by Beevor.

• 5 Sept, 1944: Soviet Gulags release 1,030,494 criminals to the Red Army.-Fall of Berlin by Beevor.

• Aug, 1942: The Battle of Stalingrad.-Fall of Berlin by Beevor.

• May, 1942: Stalin meets with Beria and leading Soviet Atomic Physicists to discuss Atomic Weapons.-Fall of Berlin by Beevor.

• 23 Aug, 1939: The German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact (aka the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact, Germany Soviet Treaty of Nonaggression, Hitler-Stalin Pact, Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact) is signed.-Fall of Berlin by Beevor.

• 9 Oct, 1760: 7 Years War; Russian and Austrian Armies occupy Berlin.-Fall of Berlin by Beevor.

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