Speaker #0Beyond Barbarossa, Episode 101. Welcome to Beyond Barbarossa, the first English-language podcast in the world to focus on the Eastern Front of World War II. I'm Scott Burry, podcasting from the Red Beard Studio on the unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg people. also called Ottawa, Canada. This is episode 101, After the Fall of Berlin. Once again, I've had to change podcast hosts, but I hope that you won't notice a difference other than these few sentences of explanation. You can still listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and most other podcasting apps. Please let me know if you do notice a difference. Send an email to scott at beyondbarbarossa.ca or through most social media, Scott the Writer or Scott Burry Author. Before I go on, please click or tap that follow or subscribe button. And remember, you can get ad-free episodes early and with images and maps by supporting the podcast through Patreon. Just go to patreon.com slash beyondbarbarossa and sign up at any level you want. Now, on to the show. Last episode was number 100. Thank you, thank you. David Sumner from the Europe at War podcast joined for a look at the Battle of Berlin and the experience of the people there, not just the leaders and soldiers, but the civilians trapped by the fighting. The episode ended with the raising of the Soviet red banner over the Reichstag, the German parliament building, and the surrender of German forces in Berlin on 2nd May. But... the fighting didn't end with the death of the leaders and the surrender of the capital. As David Sumner pointed out, there was sporadic fighting in the city after the surrender, and the end of the war in Europe and the surrender of all German forces only happened a week later, on 8 May, VE Day, Victory in Europe Day. To be precise, Field Marshal Alfred Jodl, Chief of the Operations Staff of the Wehrmacht High Command, was flown to Rhin, France. site of the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force, or SHAFE, General Dwight Eisenhower's command center as the Supreme Commander of the Western Allied Forces, that is, the American, British, French, Canadian, attached Polish, and other non-Soviet forces in Europe. At 1.41 a.m. on 7 May 1945, Field Marshal Yudel signed an Act of Military Surrender, also called the Instrument of Surrender. It was countersigned by Eisenhower for the Allies, and the Soviet military liaison, General Ivan Suslaporov, initialed it for the USSR. The surrender called for all fighting to cease at 23.01 Berlin time, or one minute past 11 p.m., which was one minute past midnight on the 9th of May in Moscow. But this surrender in France, in the West, enraged Stalin. He demanded that the surrender be signed in Berlin, or another surrender be signed in Berlin, and be taken by the Red Army. After all, they had done most of the fighting and suffered the most in Europe by far. Also, as of the morning of the 7th, the remainder of German Army Group North was still trapped on the Courland Peninsula and hadn't given up. And Ferdinand Schörner's Army Group Centre was still fighting against the Red Army. in Czechoslovakia. Let's rewind a bit and look at that. On 1st May, as the Red Army squeezed Berlin like a python choking a rat, the Stavka, Soviet high command, which essentially means Stalin, ordered the 1st, 2nd, and 4th Ukrainian fronts to attack Prague by 7th May. Remember, this order came out on 1st May before the Soviets knew that Hitler was dead and you before the Germans surrendered. This order meant, among other things, that the honour of capturing Berlin would fall to Zhukov and his First Belorussian Front, and not to Marshal Ivan Konev's First Ukrainian Front, which had been racing Zhukov's forces to capture the Reichstag. So on the 4th of May, Konev's First Ukrainian Front headed south toward Czechoslovakia and Prague. Their route would take them up the Elbe and Vltava rivers, the Moldau in German, through the Orda Mountains, And on the way, they would have to capture Dresden. Easy peasy, right? On 5th May, the 3rd U.S. Army, led by General George Patton, I think you've probably heard of him, reached the city of Pilsen in German Pilsen. Yes, where the beer comes from in western Czechoslovakia. See maps 1A and B, which are based on today's borders of the Czech Republic, or Czechia. One shows you where the cities are, and the other the various armed forces there in May 1945, and I couldn't find one that combined those two things. So, there you go. So, the various armed forces, American, German, and Soviet, in western Czechoslovakia in early May 1945. Now, as I said, by that point, Patton's Third Army had entered Czechoslovakia and captured Bolzano, but Patton was ordered to stop there. According to most historians, both UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin wanted Prague, seeing Czechoslovakia as strategic in a future conflict or maybe at least tension between East and West. Yes, I think they both knew what was coming. Churchill asked the Americans to advance and capture Prague before the Soviets did, and apparently the Czech people wanted that too. But... Despite Churchill's urging for the Americans to get to Prague, they refused. General George Marshall, chief of staff of the U.S. Army, told Supreme Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower that he would be, quote, loathe to hazard American lives for purely political purposes, end quote, in moving on Prague. In other words, let the Czechs deal with the Soviets as best they can. According to historian Antony Beevor, the American leaders still feel that the U.S. is a good place to be. failed to grasp the fact that the German army was desperate to surrender to them while resisting the Red Army at all costs. Franz von Papa, who had enabled Hitler to come to power in 1933, had told his American interrogators in the third week of April that Germans were afraid that all males would be taken into slavery in the Soviet Union. End quote. They weren't far off. With the American and Soviet forces getting closer together. Remember, they had met on 25 April at Torgau on the Elba River. General Omar Bradley, commander of the 12th Army Group, met with Soviet Marshal Ivan Konev, commander of the 1st Ukrainian Front. There, Bradley gave Konev a map detailing the location of every American division under his command. Konev did not reciprocate. Again, according to Anthony Bevor, Bradley received no information on Soviet dispositions in return. Only an unmistakable warning that the Americans should not attempt to meddle in Czechoslovakia. End quote. Even so, the Czechoslovakian people held on to hope. Hearing about the Americans getting closer, the people of Prague broke out into spontaneous street demonstrations against the German occupiers on 4th May. According to historian Evan Mosley in Thunder in the East, the Nazi-Soviet War 1941-1945, these demonstrations, quote, pre-empted the plans of the more organized Czechoslovak underground. End quote. Citizens of Prague began hoisting their national flag, vandalizing German signs, tearing down German flags, and even killing German soldiers. In response, the German garrison in the city began firing into crowds of citizens. In a reflection of the Warsaw Uprising the previous summer, Czech citizens began setting up barricades across the streets, field hospitals to treat the wounded, and began to run food and supplies to fighters. By the end of 5th May, the insurgents held most of the city on the east side of the Vltava River, including key infrastructure like the telephone exchange, radio station, most train stations, and 10 out of 12 bridges over the river. Remember, Prague is the site of the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, head of the SD and architect of the so-called Final Solution of the Jewish Question in 1942. The German forces, though, in this area... in Prague and facing the advancing Soviet fronts. That was a strong force. The remnants of Army Group Center still had some 600,000 men. commanded by Field Marshal Ferdinand Schörner. With the Red Army too far away to intervene, for the moment at least, their response to the uprising was, according to Anthony Bevor, quote, almost as savage as the suppression which followed the Warsaw uprising, end quote, suggesting summary executions on a mass scale and raising of civilian neighborhoods. Schörner pulled Waffen SS units from the front lines and sent them into Prague to put down the uprising. They brought in tanks. armoured personnel carriers and artillery. At this point the Russian Liberation Army or ROA in Russian Kron stationed in Prague at this point joined the uprising. This was a group of ethnic Russian collaborators with the Nazis led by Andrei Vlasov, a Russian Major General who had helped defend Moscow in 1941 but defected to the Germans after being captured in 1942. The people of Prague responded in kind, and there were mass reprisals, including executions of ethnic German civilians. On 6 May, the 1st Ukrainian Front attacked southward. This attack involved the 3rd and 4th Guards Tank Armies, the two forces that had been so successful in their drive to Berlin from the south, getting there faster than Zhukov's forces, mainly because of Kornilov's more precise tactical approach, in contrast to Zhukov's brutal and costly in lives. Full frontal assault. Anyway, along with the two guards' tank armies were the 13th Army and the 5th Guard's combined arms armies. And, altogether, they advanced south toward Dresden. Meanwhile, the 6th Army, also part of the 1st Ukrainian Front, accepted the surrender of 40,000 surviving German troops in Breslau or Voslav. On 7th May, Konev's forces captured Misin, which is a town north of Dresden. Then the 3rd and 4th Guards Tank Armies, along with the 2nd Polish Army, attacked Dresden itself. That same day, the Czechs pushed the remaining German forces out of the Prague Old Town Square. And that was the day that Jodl signed the terms of surrender in Wien. But the ceasefire was not to take effect until the next day. So there was a grace period for the Nazi forces to keep killing people. That's how Field Marshal Schroener saw it anyway. He also said that the ceasefire did not apply to German soldiers fighting against the Red Army, nor against Czech so-called insurgents. In other words, boys, keep on killing. The SS stepped up its offensive, blasting through the Prague citizens' barricades with tanks and artillery. Meanwhile, the people of the city heard about that surrender in the Rhin. This caused some confusion because the Germans kept killing. The Russian forces... that were fighting alongside them started to flee west to surrender to the Americans and not the Soviets. On the 8th of May, the U.S. 5th Corps secured Karlovy Vary, also known in German as Karlsbad, in Czechoslovakia. This is the place where the famous sulfurous springs are supposed to be so good for your health. For centuries, people have taken the waters in this famous spa town to treat everything from indigestion to ulcers to diabetes. Should you? Consult a doctor, a real one, not Dr. Google or some online influencer. And not me, either. Anyway, back to the war. Once the Americans got to Karlsbad or Karlovy Vary, and I've shared some of my pictures from there back in 2017, the Americans received orders to cease offensive operations. Germany had surrendered unconditionally. On that day, 8th of May, while the war is officially over, the 3rd and 4th Guards Tank Armies, led by Colonel General Popo Vybelko and Colonel General Dmitry Levishenko, respectively, entered the Czech capital. The Czech National Council, the organized resistance in Prague, agreed to a ceasefire with the Wehrmacht in the capital in order to avoid the kind of destruction that Warsaw had suffered. They allowed the German troops to withdraw westward. At sunrise on 9th May, units from the 2nd and 4th Ukrainian fronts began arriving in the surrounding area and pushed the remaining German troops from Prague by 10 in the morning. The Red Army called this the, quote, easiest victory of the war, end quote, as they lost only 10 men killed. That night, they pushed the remainder of German Army Group Center into a pocket east of Prague, so they weren't getting out west. The Germans continued to resist the Red Army for two more days, dreading to receive the treatment they had given the people of the USSR for the past four years. On 10 May, two days after the official end of hostilities, The 1st and 2nd Ukrainian fronts met the Americans around Karlovy Vary, the agreed demarcation line between the two Allied forces. What about the German troops and civilians trying to escape to the west and surrender to the Americans? I'm glad you asked. These soldiers and civilians reached an area near that demarcation line. The Americans refused to accept the surrender of any German soldiers there, sending them back to their own lines. This is according to the Yalta Agreement. Czechoslovak partisans also blocked any further movement west, so the commander of this remaining group of German forces, SS-Gruppenführer Karl Friedrich von Pückler-Burkows, ordered that defensive lines be set up. On 11 May, the partisans attacked in what became known as the Battle of Slivice. The German smash had pushed them back, but then the Red Army's 104th Guards Rifle Division arrived on the scene. They bombarded the Germans with heavy artillery and rockets, supported by American fire. And as usual, after the bombardment, the troops attacked. By 3 a.m. on the 12th, the Germans surrendered. Commander Pukler-Burkos and his senior officers shot themselves, and the Czech partisans rounded up and executed any Waffen-SS troops that had tried to escape into the forest. As for their Russian Liberation Army, it had switched sides again, as I mentioned. joined the Wehrmacht in their attempt to reach the Americans and surrender to them. But its commander, Andrei Vlasov, had not agreed with joining the uprising in the first place. When he attempted to flee with his units westwards, the Americans rejected his surrender. Then on 12 May, a captain from the Russian Liberation Army approached a lieutenant colonel from the Soviet 25th Tank Corps near Pilsen. He pointed at a car and said that Vlasov was in it. The tank corps quickly caught up with the car and found Vlasov trying to hide under blankets. They dragged him out, took him to Konev's headquarters in Dresden, and from there he was flown to Moscow. He was interrogated, or actually really tortured, for a year in the infamous Ljubljana prison, tried on 30 July 1946, and hanged on 1 August. But let's get back to Czechoslovakia in May 1945. On the 13th and 14th, the Soviets rounded up the rest of the Russian Liberation Army. Those are about 20,000 men, sent them to prison camps, specially prepared for them by Soviet military intelligence. The German forces in Czechoslovakia in late April and May 1945, the remainder of Army Group Center, was the last significant intact military formation of Germany. And now that the shooting war was over, Czechoslovakia was free. Well, sort of. There were still tens of thousands of foreign troops on its soil, and the presence of three fronts of the Red Army would have huge, long-lasting implications. But let's not get ahead of the story. Let's take a short break, and we'll come back to find out what was happening in Berlin.
Speaker #0Welcome to part two of episode 101, Beyond Barbarossa. Meanwhile, back in Berlin. I have to admit, I omitted something important last episode about the final battle of Berlin. I didn't mention the casualties. So, here we go. In the last two weeks of fighting for the German capital, 16 April to 2 May. 81,116 German soldiers and officers from all the many units, the Wehrmacht, Kriegsmarine, Luftwaffe, police and others were dead or missing. And another 280,251 were sick or wounded. 125,000 German civilians also died in the conflict. On the Soviet side, the two-week battle led to as many as 925,000 casualties. No one is certain because of the... typically incomplete Soviet records. There were at least 92,000 to 100,000 men dead, more than 220,000 wounded and sick, and close to a half million captured. If they survived captivity, they were presumably released after Germany's surrender. However, if you were a Red Army soldier who became a German POW, being released was not necessarily a good thing. Many of the former POWs were accused of disobeying the orders of not when stepped back and were tried for treason. Many were executed by the NKVD as soon as they returned to Soviet zones of control. Many others were sent to forced labor or penal military units and denied veteran status and benefits. But all that is a subject for a future episode. The fighting in Berlin ended on 2nd May, but there was no peace. Even before the official end of hostilities at 11.01pm on 8th May, the Red Army began celebrating. To quote Antony Bivors, the fall of Berlin 1945. News spread fast in Berlin. Young women soldiers wasted no time in washing their clothes, while Red Army soldiers went on a frenzied hunt for alcohol. SMERSH, Soviet Military Intelligence, officers shouted to get ready for a party. And then began an orgy of looting, destruction, and rape. Anthony Brewer continues, Most of a general's loot consisted of presents from subordinate commanders who quickly grabbed the best items for their superiors when a schloss, or fine house, was taken. Ordinary soldiers and junior officers also treated Berlin's homes like a store where everything was free. You've probably heard that on arrival in Germany, Red Army soldiers were astonished at the wealth in comparison to their own homes. You had so much, why did you need to take from us, was the common refrain. Some of these men took fine clothing for wives, or, in the case of unmarried women soldiers, for their own trousseaux. Men took tools, even in one case, panes of glass, and tried to send them home by military post. Many wrapped up bread and other food to send to their families. Watches were particularly promised, and I would not be surprised if there was not a single German-handled wristwatch left by June 1945. That frenzied hunt for alcohol that Bivor mentioned was far too successful. During the victory celebrations, hundreds or thousands of German women were raped, many repeatedly. One reported being raped by 23 Red Army soldiers, one after the other. and the violence did not end after that first night. VIVOR cites estimates of 95,000 to 130,000 cases of rape in Berlin alone, and 10,000 died as a result, mostly by suicide. There are also tens of thousands of cases of assaults of other kinds and murders. In the aftermath of the Second World War, at least two million German women were raped. The statistics were worst in the areas occupied by the Red Army, East Prussia, Pomerania, Silesia, and Brandenburg. As is typical with sexual assault, the reported cases are less than the actual incidents. As David Sumner said last episode, German men returning home were often too ashamed of their inability to prevent these assaults happening. to their mothers, their wives, girlfriends, and daughters, and they didn't want to hear about it. German society suppressed this part of the history for decades, as did the Soviets. Antony Brevor wrote in the introduction to his book, The Fall of Berlin, when a preview was cited in the Daily Telegraph in January 2002, the Russian ambassador to the UK accused him of lies, slander, and blasphemy against the Red Army. At the time, in 1945, and up to the present, really, the Soviets denied that mass rape was happening, insisting that the Red Army was the most moral and upstanding in the world. Even so, by August, Marshal Zhukov had to issue tough regulations to reduce what he called robbery, physical violence, and scandalous events. Pretty mild language. At one point, a report to the High Command in Moscow you stated that the spike in cases of venereal disease in the Red Army was the result of German intelligence deliberately infecting women in order to weaken Red Army soldiers. The revelation of the mass rapes as late as the next century, so as late as 2002, distracted the Russians and the Germans from what Bevor describes as the great scoop of his book The Fall of Berlin, which had nothing to do with the mass rapes. A friendly archivist in the State Archive of the Russian Federation had slipped us some unreleased documents which were still classified as secret. They revealed that in April 1945, Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin's head of the secret police, was sending in his NKVD rifle divisions to seal off Dahlem, the southwestern suburb of Berlin, and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, where all the German atomic research was carried out. Beria knew from his spies in the Manhattan Project that the Americans were working towards a nuclear device, and Russian scientists were desperately trying to catch up in what was called Operation Borodino, the Soviet attempt to create an atomic bomb, overseen by Beria himself. Dahlem was in the southwest corner of Berlin, the point closest to the American bridgehead over the River Elbe, and within easy striking distance of the Nazi capital. Suddenly, Stalin's insistence that Marshals Kovanov and Zhukov surround Berlin first before striking inwards became clear. The Americans must not be allowed to get to Dalin first. This goal was apparently unknown to Zhukov himself at the time. Now, that was in the introduction to Bivouac's book. He revealed a scoop in the second last chapter. Quote, Stalin saw the capture of Berlin as the Soviet Union's rightful reward, but the yield was disappointing and the waste terrible. The bulk of Nazi gold reserves had been moved westwards. The main objective was to strip Germany of all its laboratories, workshops and factories. Even the NKVD, or runner of the KGB, in Moscow provided a shopping list of items wanted from police forensic laboratories. The Soviet atomic program, Operation Borodino, had the very highest priority of all, but considerable efforts were also made to track down V-2 rocket scientists, Siemens engineers, and any other skilled technicians who could help the Soviet armaments industry catch up with the United States. End quote. But they were disappointed there, too. The Red Army destroyed more equipment and whole factories than they shipped back to Russia. The aftermath in Berlin and across Germany, and indeed all of Europe, is the subject of many, many books, films, and podcasts. So we'll have to get into that. starting with our next episode. We're now looking at the clock. I see it's time to sign off. So thank you for listening to this episode, number 101 of Beyond Barbarossa, the first English-language podcast to focus on telling the full story of the Eastern Front of the Second World War. You can find maps and historical photos on the webpage for this episode, as usual. The link is in the show notes, but you can also get to it just by going to beyondbarbarossa.ca and clicking on... episodes. By the way, what do you think of the new look for the website? I'd love to hear your reaction. I also want to give a shout out to all who support the podcast through Patreon. William L. Hall, Gavin Edwards, Elliot Goldman, PFE, Craig Duncan, Ed Morley, Claude Jansen, Sydney Tobias, Bruce, Stafford, Laurie Minter, Kevin Roy Jackson, Robert McKinney, T.E. Kilenda, and S.M. Calley. Thank you all. Your support means very much. And until all Ukrainian people can return home safely, your financial support goes to charities that help Ukrainian refugees. Before you go, make sure you hit that follow or subscribe button if you haven't done so already. And if you have a second, please give us a rating on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen. That really helps spread the word to others interested in history. Would you like to add something? Ask a question, make a comment, suggestion, or correction. I'd love to hear from you. Email scott at beyondbarbarossa.ca or message me through the Facebook Beyond Barbarossa page. You can also find me, Scott Burry, author, or Scott the writer, on Facebook, Blue Sky, Instagram, and TikTok. Yes, TikTok. Original music is composed and recorded by Nicholas Burry. I'm Scott Burry. Until next time, keep your paddles in the water. Slava Ukrina, Viva Canada
