The Pittsburgh Press (April 24, 1945)
REDS CUT THROUGH BERLIN
Fall of capital imminent
Encirclement of city reported – Nazis mass for battle to death
BULLETINS
LONDON, England – Front dispatches said Allied fliers sighted huge German motor columns moving eastward from the Elbe River toward Berlin today and destroyed at least 200 vehicles within 15 miles of the capital.
The German radio admitted today that Red flags are flying from civilian homes in Berlin. Nazi soldiers are tearing down the Soviet emblems, the broadcast said.
LONDON, England (UP) – Russian siege forces were reported late today to have driven into the Charlottenburg area of west-central Berlin, apparently after knifing clear through the heart of the devastated and tottering city.
“The imminent fall of Berlin,” a Moscow radio commentator said this evening, “will break the last vestiges of resistance, the last convulsive throes of the wounded monster.”
Unofficial advices reported that the siege ring had been closed around Berlin in a grand-scale encirclement maneuver by two Red armies, trapping any Nazi leaders who stayed to see the death of their capital.
In what Moscow called Berlin’s last hours, a United Press dispatch from the Soviet capital reported that the Red Army and the U.S. First Army had made the long-awaited junction from east and west some 60 miles south of the German capital. The report lacked official confirmation by an expected joint statement in Moscow, London and Washington on the subject.
The BBC reported that Marshal Gregory K. Zhukov’s First White Russian Army had broken into Charlottenburg, the sprawling area of Berlin lying directly west of the business area. Marshal Zhukov’s forces had been beating straight across the core of Berlin on a siege line between the northwest and southwest part of the city.
The report tallied with an earlier hint from Nazi sources that the hard-pressed defenders were falling back into the northwestern quarter of Berlin for their last stand.
Half of city seized
Two Russian armies were chopping through street barricades in the heart of the capital. Official reports, lagging far behind the blazing battle, said one-third to one-half of Berlin had been captured.
Street fighting of “fantastic fury” was reported by the Nazi-controlled Oslo radio. It said that the main weight of the struggle now centered in the northwestern section, which the Nazis appeared to have chosen for their last stand.
A German High Command admission that the Russians had reached Brandenburg, 22 miles west of Berlin, indicated that they were running rampant beyond the capital. It tended to support the encirclement report. A communiqué also said the Russians had thrust as far as the area south of Potsdam and beyond Koenigs Wusterhausen, at the southeastern edge of the city.
Report encirclement
Stockholm and French advices reported the encirclement of Berlin and the trapping of whatever members of the Nazi hierarchy remained to witness the death throes of their devastated capital. The Nazis said yesterday that Adolf Hitler was directing the defense of Berlin, but the report was tainted with propaganda possibilities.
Soviet front dispatches said the defenders of interior Berlin were beginning to show signs of cracking up. In one rubbish-heaped street 60 men surrendered. Hundreds of Russian and Ukrainian slave laborers were emerging from the ruins of the central district to welcome the Red Army.
City desolate waste
All accounts pictured Berlin as a desolate waste. The Russian Army organ Red Star published pictures showing Soviet tanks rolling through rubble-littered streets where not a soul was in sight.
“If this is typical of the rest of the city, Berlin is wrecked worse than Stalingrad and Warsaw,” a United Press dispatch describing the pictures said.
A correspondent for the Soviet government organ Izvestia said chaos and confusion were rife in the German-held part of Berlin, where the warlords maintained some semblance of discipline only by terrorism.
Raze stations
Red Star said the shells of hundreds of Russian guns had leveled the Stettin and Nord rail stations and demolished the Argus airplane engine and Heinkel aircraft plants on the Berlinerstrasse.
Gas plants were blazing, burned out panzers littered the broad avenues, and many streets were impassable, a Red Star correspondent said.
Marshal Zhukov’s tanks and motorized infantry broke across the circular railroad into inner Berlin from the north, east and south. They now were battering through the city, block by block, blasting out nests of SS Elite Guards and Volkssturm (home guard) remnants from cellars and hideouts in the ruins, while Soviet artillery demolished row after row of street barricades.
Hoist flag on Reichstag
Some 50 miles north of Berlin, the North German home radio service said, the Russians had broken across the lower Oder River in the area of Gartz, 16 miles south of Stettin, and established a bridgehead 12 miles long and about two miles deep.
The Luxembourg radio said that in Berlin, the Russian flag was already flying over the ruins of the Reichstag, and Potsdamer Platz. Anhalter Station and the Tiergarten were in Soviet hands.
Radio Luxembourg, regarded as the voice of Allied Supreme Headquarters, said the Americans and Russians had joined hands along a broad front near Torgau on the Elbe. The Russians reached the Elbe along a 39-mile front yesterday.
Work together
“American and Russian tanks and motorized columns are already working together,” the Luxembourg broadcast said.
A poll of high Soviet officers in Moscow revealed that they believed all German resistance north of Berlin and south of Dresden would be crushed in the next fortnight, leaving only the redoubt to be conquered.
Washington military observers estimated it would take the Allies about three weeks to clean up northern Germany except for holdout port cities and possibly six weeks to conquer the southern redoubt.
May drive in north
Within the next few days, two more Russian Army groups – the Second and Third White Russian – probably will smash across the Oder in the Stettin area and clear Western Pomerania and Mecklenburg for a junction with Marshal Sir Bernard L. Montgomery’s 21st Army Group Moscow said.
With the completion of these drives, the Battle of Europe will enter the mop-up stage.
The snapping shut of the last escape gap out of Berlin was reported both by the French Telegraph Agency, quoting the Luxembourg radio, and by the Stockholm Bureau of the London Daily Mail.
The Daily Mail said the encirclement was completed at Spandau in eastern Berlin. The Nazi radio last night said the Russians had reached Spandau but claimed there still was a four-mile gap open between that district and Neider Neundorf.
Issues two orders
The more cautious Soviet High Command, whose reports in recent days have trailed one to three days behind the actual fighting, placed the two arms of the pincers at Hennigsdorf and Marienfelde, 17 miles apart.
Premier Marshal Stalin, in two ringing orders of the day, revealed that his First White Russian and First Ukrainian Armies, already had cleared 21 metropolitan districts – 125 square miles – inside Berlin by yesterday.
The inner city’s main defense line, based on a railway embankment ringing in the city, was shattered, Marshal Stalin said, and Soviet troops captured gas works within two miles of Potsdamer Platz, Berlin’s Times Square.
A Soviet communiqué said that the Russians had intercepted a German radio order to artillery units to fire on their own infantry with shrapnel whenever they retreated.
Briefing given Soviet units before the battle left no doubt that the Russians were taking full measure of vengeance upon the arrogant SS in its own capital.
Stockholm dispatches said the entire government quarter between Unter den Linden and the Leipziger Station had been leveled by artillery fire and bombs.
Potsdam’s fall reported
Other European sources said the Red Army was battling along Unter den Linden and the Wilhelmstrasse and had reached the Stettiner Station. A London Daily Telegraph dispatch from Stockholm said the Russians were smashing through SS defenses near Alexanderplatz.
Another Stockholm dispatch, this one to The Daily Express, said Berlin’s southwestern suburb of Potsdam had been captured.
First to break into Berlin, Marshal Stalin revealed, was Marshal Zhukov’s First White Russian Army. While his main forces were smashing into the capital from the east and northeast, Marshal Zhukov’s southern wing toppled the anchor stronghold of Frankfurt, 33 miles east-southeast, and Cottbus, 53 miles southeast.
