The Pittsburgh Press (April 22, 1945)
REDS BREAK INTO BERLIN
16 armies storm burning city
Soviet forces reported 4½ miles inside capital by German broadcast
Saturday, April 21, 1945
Another goal reached
Russian troops smashed into Berlin after driving to the city from the Oder River to the east and swinging up to outflank the Nazi capital from the south.
LONDON, England – Red Army troops are four and one-half miles inside Berlin, the German radio said tonight.
Earlier the Soviet High Command triumphantly announced the arrival of Russian troops at the rim of the city, climaxing a 990-mile advance in three years from the gates of Moscow.
Russian shells were whining and crashing into Unter den Linden, the enemy’s fading radio reported, and 16 Russian armies were surging around the city in a mighty assault.
Berlin was starving, burning and dying in the convulsions of one of the fiercest battles of all time.
Three tank spearheads were fighting toward the German capital’s Circular Boulevard as whole sections of the city flamed under intensive aerial bombardment and shelling.
Nazis now pinned inside city
The columns drove into Berlin’s city limits from Bernau, Wriezen and Kuestrin.
The immediate objective of the Soviets appeared to be to get onto the three main avenues terminating at the Circular Boulevard – the Greifswalder Strasse, Landsberger Avenue and the Frankfurter Strasse. Those three great streets converge at the Alexanderplatz.
Great fires raged as Russian artillery crushed fortifications with massed fire and lobbed shells into the center of the city.
German forces are now pinned inside Berlin with their westward and southward retreat lines virtually severed.
Unless the Germans surrender, what remains of Berlin will suffer the same fate as Budapest which was devastated, block by block, in savage street fighting.
An equally decisive battle was approaching a conclusion further south.
Soviet artillery was within shelling distance of Dresden in a semi-circular arc, stretching from the northeast to the east.
The advance of Soviet forces toward Dresden’s outskirts again reduced the width of the German escape corridor to Czechoslovakia and brought advanced Russian elements close to American forces west of the Elbe in the Chemnitz sector.
The Moscow communiqué reported bitter street fighting in the outer suburbs and there was nothing to indicate that the Russians would not have to fight every inch of the way into the heart of the bomb-shattered city.
Berlin Defense Chief Paul Joseph Goebbels ordered the able-bodied among the three million people remaining in the city to man the barricades and trenches and fight to death.
First shelling in 100 years
The unfit among the population went underground to escape the first shelling of Berlin in 100 years. The people were existing on communal feeding. There was no semblance of order left.
Last-minute refugees reaching Sweden said the German SS garrison was fleeing Berlin by a narrowing escape corridor to the southwest, leaving its defense to ill-trained peoples’ militiamen who were being slaughtered in the Russian avalanche.
Fighting into Berlin from the northeast, Russian forces drove into the Weissensee and Pankow districts of the greater city, the Germans said. Weissensee is three and three-fourths miles inside the city line and Pankow is four and one-third miles inside. Due north of Pankow, the city boundary extends eight miles.
The Soviet communiqué announced the capture of the suburb of Erkner, which is astride the municipal boundary and 15 miles from the exact center of Berlin.
The Russians had carried out a vast encircling movement covering 60 miles to virtually isolate Berlin from the south and reach within 11 miles of Potsdam, seat of the old imperial government southwest of the capital.
The Russian breakthrough south of the capital put the Red Army spearheads within 40 miles of the U.S. Ninth Army forces smashing east of the Elbe.
This mighty Russian thrust overran the historic German Army parade ground at Wuensdorf, 15 miles south of Berlin, and swept to Zossen, once the headquarters of the German High Command.
Escape line believed under fire
The two Allied fronts now interlocked with artillery fire of the two armies probably converging across the one circuitous railroad still open from Berlin to the German mountain redoubt in the south.
The Russian communique announced the capture of Bernau, three and one-half miles northeast of Berlin, and of Werneuchen, Strausberg, Altlandsberg, Buckow, Muencheberg and Herzfelde on the city’s immediate approaches.
South and southeast of Berlin, in the Dresden area, the Russians captured Calau, Luckau, Veuwelzow, Senftenberg, Vautewerk, Kamenz and Bautzen, all strongpoints of the German defense, the communiqué said.
Detailed accounts of the cataclysmic struggle, the greatest siege battle ever fought and one that could decide the war, came mostly from German news agencies which filed a running account of the fighting over the few short-range transmitters still functioning in the city.
The DNB commentator, Ernst Hammer, said 16 Soviet armies, including four tank armies, were now lunging against Berlin from the northeast, north and southeast and from the gaping breakthrough area on the south.
“Perhaps no battle on the Eastern Front has ever quite reached the pitch of ferocity with which the battle for Berlin is now raging,” Hammer said.
The outflanking break-through described as the “most critical” development of the battle started in the area of the fortress city of Cottbus 50 miles southeast of the Berlin city limits. From that point Soviet tank legions crashed northwestward 60 miles, overrunning one German barrier after another, the enemy reports said until they reached the Treuenbrietzen area. Here they were within 31 miles of U.S. forces in Dessau on the Elbe.
Fanning out against disorganized German resistance, the Russians widened the breach to nearly 40 miles and on their eastern flank reached Koenigswusterhausen, site of the big Deutschlandsender radio transmitter two miles south of the city limits, the Germans said.
A German broadcast said municipal transport had broken down in the city and that the population, unable to get to their regular jobs, had been ordered to the barricades and trenches. Barbed-wire was being strung across the bridges over the Landwehr Canal, which traverses the city.
The German radio reported that an enemy air fleet was over Berlin again tonight following heavy mass attacks by both Russian and RAF planes Friday night.
While Berlin rocked and tottered under Soviet war might, Soviet forces in Northern Austria drove north to the Moravian border and joined forces with a Soviet column which previously had penetrated Czechoslovak soil to the Brno area, the Soviet communiqué said. The junction was effected on a nine-mile front extending from the Dyje River to Schrattenberg, 35 miles northeast of Vienna. Valtice, 31 miles south-southeast of Brno, was captured by the Soviet column on the east.
