The Pittsburgh Press (April 23, 1945)
Fourth of Berlin seized – tanks in center of city
Reds outflank capital from north, capture citadel of Frankfurt
BULLETINS
LONDON, England – Marshal Stalin announced tonight that Marshal Ivan S. Konev’s First Ukrainian Army had broken into Berlin from the south.
STOCKHOLM, Sweden – The German-controlled Scandinavian Telegraph Bureau reported today that the Russians had captured Potsdam, suburb on the southwestern edge of Berlin.
In the heart of Berlin, according to Swiss reports, the Red Army was said to be fighting on Unter den Linden. Officially, the Russian communiqué put Soviet troops near the Alexander Station. Arrows show the directions of the Russian drives.
LONDON, England (UP) – Russian forces have smashed to within four miles of the heart of Berlin, Marshal Stalin announced today.
The Soviet leader also revealed that Red Army troops have outflanked the stricken capital on the north in a push through Oranienburg.
Southeast of the city, the bypassed Oder River citadel of Frankfurt was captured.
The Red Army held more than a fourth of the German capital.
Marshal Stalin broke his silence on the Battle of Berlin with an announcement that Marshal Gregory K. Zhukov had advanced a siege line deep into the city and captured the Birkenwerder, Pankow, Friedrichsfeld, Karlshorst and Koepenick districts.
Moscow broadcast Marshal Stalin’s special order of the day – his first on the great offensive – as the faltering German radio admitted that Russian armored spearheads were probing into the heart of Berlin from three directions and neutral dispatches said Soviet tanks were clanking along Unter den Linden.
The Nazis claimed that Adolf Hitler had taken personal command of the defense of Berlin.
Marshal Stalin’s order of the day, addressed to Marshal Zhukov, commander of the First White Russian Army, said:
The First White Russian Army, having gone over to the offensive from a bridgehead on the west bank of the Oder with the support of massed blows by artillery and the air force, broke the strongly fortified and deeply echeloned German defenses covering Berlin from the east and advanced 37 to 62 miles.
The Soviet assault forces broke into Berlin, Marshal Stalin said, after overrunning many of its key outposts, including Frankfurt. This city of 85,000 on the west bank of the Oder 33 miles east of Berlin had anchored the now-crumbled German defenses in the Oder Valley.
Storming into the city from the east, the siege army overran the city’s districts and drove through the rubble-strewn streets for Potsdamer Platz in the heart of the city. Neutral reports of the push to Unter den Linden indicated the Soviet vanguard was within a mile or so of the platz.
The captured districts ringed the entire northern and eastern side of Berlin. Among them was Hennigsdorf, 12 miles northwest of Potsdamer Platz.
A dispatch from Germany through Switzerland said “the Battle of Berlin is practically over.”
The Luxembourg radio reported without confirmation that Russian and American forces had met south of Berlin in the area of Torgau, on the Elbe. But dispatches from the U.S. Ninth and First Armies said the historic junction apparently had not been made.
A late Nazi broadcast said Soviet tanks were in the Mariendorf district, three miles south of Potsdamer Platz, and Lichterfelde, four miles southwest of the famous crossroads in the heart of Berlin, from which Unter den Linden is a mile or so distant.
Swedish reports quoted one of the last air passengers out of Berlin as saying the city was in a state of chaos and partial anarchy. In many districts, he said, civilians were hunting down Gestapo agents and dealing with them summarily.
A Moscow dispatch said Russian siege guns lined up hub to hub from the northwestern to the southern fringes of the city, together with hundreds of Stormovik assault planes, had “pulverized virtually the entire area toward the center of Berlin.”
White flags were flying in the center of Berlin, the Swiss radio said. Fierce battles were underway, the broadcast asserted.
Radio Luxembourg said the Russians also had captured the big Tempelhof Airdrome in southern Berlin.
A dispatch to the Soviet newspaper Pravda said two sergeants of the “Order of Glory” had carried the banner of Stalingrad from the Volga to Berlin and hoisted it in the most advance position in the capital.
“The red banner, on which was embroidered Lenin’s face looking westward, was unfurled in the trenches where amid the din and smoke of battle, soldiers knelt and kissed it,” the dispatch said.
Other Russian columns had three-quarters encircled Berlin. A German communiqué admitted they had reached the Havel River northwest of the city, where they presumably had the last escape routes to the west under artillery fire.
South of the capital, the enemy communiqué said, the Russians captured Koepenick, 9½ miles southeast of Potsdam Platz, the center of Berlin, but lost it to a German counterattack.
Close on Zossen
The Russians were also reported within a few miles of Zossen, former German supreme headquarters 11 miles south of Berlin.
Still farther south, Moscow said, other Russian units cut the main Berlin-Dresden highway and closed in on the suburbs of Dresden.
Don and Kuban Moscow Cossack cavalry were mopping up resistance in forests between Dresden and Dessau, now in U.S. First Army hands 80 miles to the northwest. At one point east of Leipzig, the Americans and Russians officially were 34 miles apart.
A Moscow dispatch this morning said only a “few miles” separated American and Russian spearheads in the general Dresden-Dessau section and a “historic junction is imminent.”
Soviet motorcycle patrols which often penetrate far behind the enemy lines already may have reached American-held territory, Moscow said.
Dispatches from Supreme Allied Headquarters also said it was “highly likely” that there already has been “considerable” patrol contact between the Americans and Russians.
Headquarters sources pointed out that patrol contact necessarily must precede an official junction in force. When the latter occurs, headquarters said, it will be announced jointly by Washington, Moscow and London.
City in flames
All of Northeast Berlin itself was a “solid mass of flames and smoke clouds,” Soviet front dispatches said.
Every able-bodied male from 15 to 65, including Hitler Youth, traffic police, letter carriers and factory workers, was said to have been thrown into the blazing battle.
A dispatch to the Moscow newspaper Pravda said only alternate battalions of some of the new recruits were armed.
“Our unarmed battalion was told to take weapons frum the wounded,” one prisoner told the Pravda correspondent. “But we didn’t see anything through the smoke and dust. Then the Russians came.”
Deflect flak guns
Anti-aircraft guns in the capital’s great defense system were deflected and used as anti-tank-guns.
Russian armored columns burst through the barricades and brought flaming buildings down around the German garrison with almost point-blank artillery fire.
They were advancing on a solid 25-mile front from the northeast corner of Berlin. Sixteen districts in the eastern and northeastern part of the city were captured yesterday alone.
Eighty square miles of Berlin’s 332-square-mile area were cleared. Scores of war plants, an auxiliary power station, a tramway depot und other strategic buildings were captured.
While the main Russian armies aimed at the heart of Berlin, reserves of Marshal Gregory K. Zhukov’s First White Russian Army Group swung northwest and southwest in a bid to encircle the capital and its defenders.
The arms of the pincers at last reports were 30 miles apart. German civilians were in panicky flight through the gap, neutral reports said. Some SS and regular army troops were also said to be joining the exodus.
Glienicke, 9½ miles north of Berlin, fell to Soviet troops on the northern arm of the pincers. On the south, the Red Army captured Schlieben, 37 miles from U.S. First Army troops at Wurzen, and Dahme, 10 miles farther north and 50 miles east of the Americans at Dessau.
34 miles apart
The Russians made their closest approach to the American lines, by official Soviet report, with the capture of Elsterwerda, 34 miles from Wurzen and 24 miles northwest of Dresden.
Torgau, where foreign reports said a Soviet-American junction had already been made, is 20 miles southwest of Schlieben and 23 miles northwest of Elsterwerda.
On the southern flank of the 45-mile-wide Soviet wedge being driven across the southern approaches to Berlin, the Russians captured Bischofswerda, 14 miles northeast of Dresden.
