The Battle Of Berlin: April 16th 1945 – The Soviet Offensive Begins

“The enemy will be crushed along the shortest route to Berlin. The capital of Fascist Germany will be taken and the banner of victory planted over it.”

Soviet Marshal Georgy Zhukov
Commander of the 1st Belorussian Front

“So you have underestimated the enemy on the Berlin axis. I was thinking that you were already on the approaches to Berlin, but you’re still on the Seelow Heights. Things have started more successfully for Konev.”…”

Joseph Stalin
Addressing Soviet Marshal Georgy Zhukov on April 16th 1945

Berlin’s development from twin merchant settlements (Berlin and Cölln) to a medieval outpost in the ‘sandbox of the Holy Roman Empire’ and capital of one of Europe’s most powerful nations – Prussia – would see the city transformed in terms of trade, might, and prestige.

By the 20th century, its boundary would expand well beyond its medieval quarter to include the farmland and villages that previously dotted its periphery – with the Greater Berlin Act of 1920 providing the skeleton framework for the districts that still exist in the city today.

The topography of this once irrelevant settlement, however, has stayed largely the same. Extensive flatland, sandy soil, and a high water table.

Offering little in terms of natural defences.

In 1945, the “Gates of Berlin” were not so much situated on the fortified outskirts of this city of millions – that had grown dense and rich during its time as the capital of the Imperial Kingdom of Prussia and cold and mean as the heart of Nazi Germany – but almost 90 km to the east, along the rivers Oder and Neisse.

It was on the hilly terrain just to the west of these two rivers, and the fluvial terraces and floodplains surrounding them, that the decisive confrontation before Soviet forces managed to clear a path directly to the Nazi capital would be fought.