The Battle for Berlin in World War Two

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• 1. Germany 1945
• 2. Beevor's research
• 3. Stalin and his allies
• 4. Battle of Halbe
• 5. Russians in Berlin
• 6. Fall of the capital
• 7. Nuclear legacy
• 8. Find out more
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Beevor's research

Beevor's task was awesome. There were tens of thousands of unexplored documents in the Russian archives relevant to the Battle of Berlin. Would the new material shed light on controversial issues such as the alleged mass rape of German women by Red Army soldiers?

Why did Stalin sacrifice the lives of tens of thousands of his soldiers in order to be in Berlin before the Americans? After all, he was already committed to sharing the city with his Western allies after the war.

Our first filming trip to Germany took us to the river Oder, 60 miles east of Berlin. In April 1945, over two years after the German defeat at Stalingrad, the Oder and its tributary, the Neisse, had become the front line between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Two and a half million Red Army troops, 6000 tanks and over 40,000 artillery pieces were deployed for the final onslaught against the German capital.

'The German resolve to fight was largely due to fear of Russian retributions.'

In contrast, the German armed forces, the Wehrmacht, was a shadow of its former self. But its 300,000 German troops were determined to hold out against the vastly superior Red Army. The German resolve to fight was largely due to fear of Russian retributions. Since 1941, Nazi forces had laid waste to large parts of the Soviet Union. More than 23 million Soviet soldiers and civilians had died. Fuelled by Nazi propaganda, the Germans were terrified of what would happen if Berlin fell into Soviet hands.

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