The Battle Of Berlin: May 2nd 1945 – The End Of Nazi Berlin

At around 8:30am on May 2nd 1945 – the two Soviet army groups involved in the Battle of Berlin – the 1st Belorussian and the 1st Ukrainian – finally met at their interfront boundary on Savignyplatz. Two tank armies convened where the German Müncheberg Panzer Division had been holding ground before its attempted breakout the previous night.

This small square on Kantstrasse is still a vibrant part of the Charlottenburg district of west Berlin – an area that saw an influx of Russian refugees in the early 20th century. Some fleeing persecution, as eastern European jews – others literary exiles such as Boris Pasternak and Vladimir Nabokov. Members of the intellectual class of Russian that fled the country following the 1917 Bolshevik revolution who would settle in this neighbourhood – earning it the title of Charlottengrad due to its abundance of Russian speakers.

Now the soldiers of the Motherland were on the streets of the Nazi capital. Bringing with them the ideology that many in Charlottengrad had fled from. The Bolshevik Stalinist system that now connected distant Vladivostok to the Elbe. Most of the soldiers on the streets would be too young to remember anything before the Soviet Union. Many of them had lived the past 28 years under the paternal gaze of Comrade Stalin.

Now the flag of revolution was draped all the way across the European continent – from Moscow to Berlin – and the red banner flew high over the Reichstag.

Across the city – with Adolf Hitler dead and many of the city’s remaining defenders now attempting to navigate their way through the Soviet lines – the official announcement to surrender was being prepared.

The responsibility fell on General Helmuth Weidling, who had been in charge of the LVI Panzer Corps at the Seelow Heights before being sentenced to death in absentia and eventually resurrected to serve as the last Commander of the Berlin Defence Area on April 24th.