The Battle Of Berlin: April 28th 1945 – Stalin Redraws The Battlelines

Early on April 28th, Luftwaffe ace pilot Lieutenant-Colonel Hans Rudel flew to Berlin in a Heinkel 111, aiming to land on the East-West Axis in the Tiergarten and the improvised air strip that had been constructed there adjacent to the Reichstag building.

Targeted by Soviet anti-aircraft fire, Rudel was told landing would be impossible and never arrived in the city. He did, however, get a view of the devastation from above:

“It was very difficult to recognise the features of the city because of enormous clouds of smoke and a thin layer of mist. The fires were so fierce in some places that we were dazzled by them and prevented from seeing anything. I had to concentrate on the shadows in order to see anything and was unable to pick out the East-West Axis. There were flames and cannon-fire everywhere. The spectacle was fantastic.”

What he would not have managed to see from above was the toll the battle had taken on the local inhabitants and defenders. Bodies sat rotting under the debris of collapsed buildings. Women would still queue for water at outside pumps, scattering at the sound of artillery barrages or rifle fire, before coming together again in a neat line like Napoleonic infantry.

Improvised military field hospitals, that could be mistaken for slaughterhouses, had been set up in different buildings of defence district Zitadelle to treat the wounded – with soldiers taken to the Hotel Adlon, SS men delivered to the Reich Chancellery cellars, while the main city artery of Unter den Linden came to look like an open hospital in the later days of the battle.

A bloody wound stuffed with rubble and corpses.

Beneath the swirling smoke and mist of the city, would also be tens of thousands of Red Army casualties – more than 80,000 Soviet soldiers would die before the battle was over. With three mass graves eventually established in Berlin as war memorials after the war – one in Pankow, Treptower Park, and another less than a mile from the Reichstag building.