The Pittsburgh Press (May 1, 1945)
Berlin gasps in last throes before death
Russian flag waves over main buildings
LONDON, England (UP) – A Moscow broadcast said today that the Russians expected the Red Army to announce tonight the capture of Berlin, where the Hammer and Sickle already flew triumphant over the Reichstag and a dozen other administrative buildings.
Russian and German reports alike indicated an imminent decision amidst the blood-soaked rubble of Berlin, where the Red Army was hewing out its greatest symbolic victory of the war.
Insist Hitler in Berlin
The German High Command joined the chorus of Nazi claims that Adolf Hitler was in Berlin. Its communiqué said that “in the heart of Berlin the gallant garrison, gathered closely around the Fuehrer, is defending itself against superior Soviet forces.” If Hitler were there, he appeared doomed to certain death or capture by the Russians.
All Moscow broadcasts and dispatches reflected confident expectation that Marshal Stalin would cap Moscow’s first glittering May Day celebration of the war with an announcement that Berlin had fallen.
Reports lagging well behind the course of the struggle in the heart of Berlin said the Russians had battled onto Unter den Linden against faltering resistance. The Russian flag had been hoisted over the Reichstag, the main post office and the Interior Ministry.
The battle raged within a stone’s throw of Hitler’s one-time ornate Reich Chancellery, and the Tiergarten, where the Nazis were reported to have established a fort for a last-ditch stand.
Victory in air
Victory was already in the air over the Red Square in Moscow, where 100,000 Red Army men paraded before Marshal Stalin and Russia’s top military and political leaders.
Moscow dispatches said Soviet assault units broke through in Berlin to the vicinity of the Brandenburg Gate, and that storm units were converging on the Wilhelmstrasse, Friedrichstrasse and Unter den Linden from the east, north and south.
Germans in frenzy
Red Star, the Russian Army organ, said the night sky was as dazzling as the midday sun over Berlin, with flames from thousands of Katusha rocket guns enveloping the whole German-held area.
Red Star said:
The Germans frenziedly did their utmost to defend the last strongholds of resistance.
On the banks of the Spree, two mighty forces locked in combat for several hours. Passage appeared impossible. Live men replaced the dead ones, the wounded remained in their places. Finally the passage was forced. On narrow bridges and in rowboats, tommy gunners and sappers swarmed across and stormed the Reichstag.
The Ministry of the Interior, where only a few weeks ago Gestapo Chief Heinrich Himmler maintained an office, was in Soviet hands.
Paratroops used
Another fierce battle raged in the Tiergarten, Berlin’s central park, just west of Unter den Linden. It was from an underground fortress beneath the Tiergarten that the German command – reported headed by Hitler himself – was directing the fanatic Berlin garrison of SS troops, Hitler Youth and “women’s death battalions.”
The London Daily Express said the Russians were reinforcing their assault forces with paratroops dropped from planes.
The First White Russian and First Ukrainian Armies were spurred on by a May Day Order of the Day by Premier Marshal Stalin calling on them to “deal the death blow to the Fascist beast.”
Red Armies killed one million German officers and men and captured another 800,000 in their 325-mile march from the Vistula to burning Berlin in the last four months, Stalin said.
‘Germany’s doom sealed’
He said:
The world war unleashed by the German imperialists is drawing to a close. The collapse of Hitlerite Germany is a matter of the nearest future… The last storm of the Hitlerite den is on.
Germany’s doom was sealed, he said, by the junction of Russian and American forces south of Berlin. The Reich now is “completely isolated and stands alone, not to count her ally Japan,” he said.
Stalin did not elaborate on this reference to Japan, whose friendship treaty with Russia he denounced last month.
Huge Nazi losses
During the Russian march from the Vistula, Stalin said, Red Armies captured or destroyed 6,000 enemy aircraft, up to 12,000 tanks and self-propelled guns, more than 23,000 field guns and “enormous quantities of other armaments and equipment.”
He ridiculed “absurd tales” that the United Nations wished to exterminate the German people.
He said:
The United Nations will destroy Fascism and German militarism, will severely punish criminals, and will compel the Germans to compensate the damage they caused to other countries.
But the United Nations do not molest and will not molest Germany’s peaceful population if it honestly fulfills demands of Allied military authorities.
Other advances
North of Berlin, the Russians advanced west on a 90-mile front. The Second White Russian Army broke through to the Baltic at Greifswald, 64 miles northwest of Stettin, in a 20-mile advance. Isolated by the thrust were the Swinemuende naval base at the entrance to Stettin Bay and the German V-bomb experimental station at Peenemuende.
The Second Army also drove to within 40 miles of American positions on the Elbe River around Wittenberg.
In the south, the Fourth Ukrainian Army forced the Moravian Gap and captured the Czechoslovak steel and manufacturing center of Moravska-Ostrava, the last important German-held point in the Silesian Basin.
