The Pittsburgh Press (May 2, 1945)
REDS CAPTURE BERLIN
Stalin tells of victory in Nazi capital
120,000 Nazis taken below German city
BULLETINS
LONDON, England (UP) – The Red Army captured Berlin today.
Marshal Stalin announced the Red Army’s greatest victory of the war, in a triumphant order of the day broadcast from Moscow.
Berlin fell after 12 days of siege.
The first reports from Moscow did not indicate whether the Soviets found evidence – positive or negative – of the accuracy of the Nazi report that Adolf Hitler had died in battle.
LONDON, England (UP) – The Red Army captured the great Baltic port of Rostock today in a drive within 30 miles of the Allied armies sweeping eastward along the Baltic. The German radio said that the 12-day siege of Berlin was nearly over.
LONDON, England (UP) – Marshal Stalin announced tonight that Red Armies had captured more than 120,000 German prisoners in the liquidation of a pocket southeast of Berlin.
Inside Berlin, Russian forces were storming the ramparts of the Reich Chancellery, where the Nazis said Adolf Hitler died yesterday, and where evidence of the accuracy of the report might be found.
United Press writer Henry Shapiro reported from Moscow that the Soviet siege forces were now fighting for German strongpoints on the Wilhelmstrasse, Unter den Linden and Alexander Platz. Only “small remnants” of the Berlin garrison were defying the “greatest concentration of fire and metal to which any single objective has been subjected in this war,” he said.
About 8,000 of the ragtag band of mauled SS troops, women’s “death battalions” and Volkssturmers (home guards) – were killed yesterday in the heart of Berlin, Soviet reports said.
Plunging through a choking pall of smoke and flame thrown up by the ceaseless cannonading, the first Soviet assault waves stormed in from three sides to within 200 yards of the Chancellery building against maniacal enemy resistance.
An equally furious battle swirled through Berlin’s famed Tiergarten, a few hundred yards to the west, where the rest of the Nazi garrison was being cut to pieces by attacks from all directions.
The trapped Germans, apparently told by their leaders that Hitler had fallen at his command post in the Chancellery, showed no signs of quitting. They fought back with a hopeless fury behind thick stone walls and inside deep cellars, taking a bloody toll for every yard of lost ground.
But Moscow dispatches and somber enemy broadcasts made it clear that the battle of Berlin was roaring into its final hours.
The Russians captured another 100 city blocks in Berlin yesterday.
The main German force locked in the Chancellery and a cluster of adjoining streets to the east appeared to be well supplied with arms and ammunition, tanks and self-propelled guns that made the Russian onslaught a slow and costly slugging match.
Russian forces swung out north and northwest of Berlin on a 110-mile front in a new drive to link up with the British Second Army and finish off the Nazi’s northern redoubt.
Capture port
They captured the Baltic port of Stralsund and took Gnoien and Waren farther to the south, the latter town only 82 miles east of the British bridgehead across the Elbe River.
The German High Command said the whirlwind sweep of Marshal Konstantin K. Rokossovsky’s Second White Russian Army had carried to the area of Rostock, the last major Baltic port short of the neck of the Danish peninsula.
The Russians also struck out westward toward a new linkup with U.S. Ninth Army troops along the Elbe, capturing Alt-Ruppin, 27 miles northwest of Berlin and 33 miles away from the U.S. lines, and Brandenburg, capital of Brandenburg Province.
Clean up pocket
Far to the southeast, the Second and Fourth Ukrainian Armies finally joined forces in the disputed corridor on the Polish-Czechoslovak border, clearing out practically all of the enemy-held pocket there.
The Fourth Ukrainians, advancing south and west along a 60-mile front, captured the Polish cities of Bogumin and Frysztat and the Slovak towns of Skoczow, Cadca and Veika Bvtca, virtually encircling the industrial center of Teschen.
They also seized Plevnik, six miles southwest of Velka Bytca, and pushed on to join up with the Second Ukrainian Army in the Puchov sector eight miles to the south.
The Second Ukrainian Army took Puchov after wheeling back to slash 28 miles through the Nazi defenses east of Brno.