Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Hello and welcome to Conflicted, the history podcast where we talk about the struggles that shaped us, the hard questions that they pose, and why we should care about any of it. I'm your host, Zach Cornwell, and this is episode three, They Saw Red. Just a warning before we jump into this one, this episode is very, very dark. Easily the darkest of the season.
And if you have a weak stomach for accounts of sexual violence or have kids around, you may want to skip this one. However, I do include a warning before we reach that point in the story, so you'll know when it's coming. With that being said, let's begin. On a blue-skied morning in January 1945, a 19-year-old Soviet scout marches into a clearing. It is cold.
If he were to take his gloves off and press his bare hand to the metal barrel of his submachine gun, he'd pull it back, missing a few layers of skin. He crunches through the snow, towards an abandoned two-story homestead. The bright red brick and sturdy German architecture are a far cry from the ramshackle huts in his native Russia. He hears horses shuffling nervously in a large wooden barn. He sees fat cows staring back at him from the fields.
before he even steps foot in the house. He's realizing he's never seen this much wealth in his entire life. And when he pushes open the decorated oaken door, he finds an alien world inside. The first thing he notices is the warmth. The house is well constructed and provides relief from the bitter cold.
His eyes dart around, not knowing whether to settle on the polished wooden tables, the beautiful framed paintings, or the silverware sitting unguarded on the table. A fire crackles in the hearth. His boots track mud over the wooden floors as he flings over the pantry to find foods of every description, cheeses, salted meats. He even finds a bottle of dark amber alcohol. He takes a swig. It's brandy. He's never tasted brandy before.
By German standards, this is a fairly modest homestead. But the 19-year-old Russian infantryman has never seen opulence like this in his entire life. His feelings of wonder quickly congeal into resentment, and then anger, and then rage. He smashes the stacks of china in the cupboards, he drags a razor-sharp knife across the couch cushions, and he puts a bullet in one of the cows outside.
The crack of the gunshot prompts a muffled yelp from the barn, so he goes to investigate. Inside, hiding in a haystack, he finds the German landowner, his wife, their children, and several neighbors. A little ways off, the rumble of approaching Russian tanks can be heard. These Germans are terrified, and they should be. Let's back up just a little bit.
Scenes like the one I just described will play out countless times during the early months of 1945 as the Soviet Red Army marches west towards Berlin and the ultimate destruction of Nazi Germany. And the best way for me, and hopefully you, to process what they're about to do to the German people in areas like East Prussia in particular, is to think in terms of the true crime genre.
It's a pretty popular genre right now, and for this particular subject, I think it fits. We have a perp, we have a victim, we have a motive. We have the evidence, we have the witness statements, and we even have the confessions. But what if the perp isn't one man, but an entire army? And what if the victim isn't a single person, but an entire civilian population? And what if the system meant to hold everybody accountable just doesn't care?
In January 1945, the Third Reich is on the verge of collapse. They're under siege from not one but two sides, the Americans and British on their western border, and the colossal Soviet Union on their eastern front. Less than two years earlier, the German army, they're called the Wehrmacht, had the Russians on the ropes.
In the bombed-out city of Stalingrad, the Soviets fought tooth and nail in the famously horrific Russian winter to keep the last flame of strategic hope alive. And against all odds, they won. They had sent the Wehrmacht scampering back west, just like their ancestors had done to Napoleon a century and a half earlier. In 1945, the Soviet Union is led by Joseph Stalin. He's shrewd, he's callous, and he's calculating.
a true believer in the ideals of communism who rose to power in the decades following the revolution of 1918. Stalin wasn't his real name, though. He chose that name, Stalin, which literally means "man of steel."
By 1945, the Man of Steel's collectivist reforms and political purges had already resulted in the deaths and starvation of twice the amount of people the Nazis would manage to exterminate in the Holocaust. 12 million of Stalin's own people dead, with many more languishing in brutal work camps known as gulags, leading the Third Reich, an obscure figure by the name of Adolf Hitler. Maybe you've heard of him.
At this point, riddled with paranoia and rotting from Parkinson's, he was a shadow of the fiery demagogue that had whipped the German people up into a frenzy of Aryan supremacy in the 30s. But that didn't stop him from being the ultimate micromanager, at times insisting that granular orders among troops hundreds of miles away had to be personally approved by him before they could be carried out.
As a result, the Nazi high command was in chaos. Imagine a genocidal, racist version of the popular kids' table in Mean Girls. Each one vying for favor and engaged in petty backbiting, completely blind to the apocalyptic consequences they had brought upon their country. In the West, the Allied forces, led by General and future President Dwight Eisenhower, have pushed the Nazi war machine to the brink.
sucking up time, energy, manpower, and providing a perfect distraction for the Red Army as it gathers its forces on the precipice of Nazi territory. The Americans broke Germany's back, but it would be Russia who tore out its heart.
Did I hear you're shopping for a car? Because I've been at it for ages. Such a time suck, right? Not really. I bought it on Carvana. Super convenient. Oh, then comes all the financing, research. Am I right? Well, you can, but I got pre-qualified for a Carvana auto loan in like two minutes. Yeah, but then all the number crunching and terms, right? Nope. I saw real numbers as I shopped, found my dream car, and got it in a couple of days. Wait, like you already have it?
Yep. Oh. Go to Carvana.com to finance your car the convenient way. Here in the United States, we tend to look at World War II as a good versus evil conflict. The righteous forces of democracy versus the evil Nazis, which is a mostly reasonable perspective to have. I mean, no army conducts itself perfectly in wartime, but Americans can generally look back on our efforts in the war firmly perched on the moral high ground.
Now I'm going to put a Hiroshima-sized asterisk on that one, but that is a debate for a different episode. As I was researching this topic, the war on the Eastern Front in 1945 kind of reminds me of the scene in Jurassic Park where the massive T-Rex jumps in at the end to save Dr. Graham and the kids from the raptors. You know, both the T-Rex and the raptor are bad. They're both bad. The T-Rex just killed lots of guys like 30 minutes ago.
But those raptors, man, we really, really hate those raptors. And so we give the T-Rex a pass while completely ignoring the fact that he would have totally eaten those kids had they not ran away. And in my admittedly thin analogy, the raptors are the Nazis who are very bad. We hate them very, very much. And the Soviet Union is the big, scary T-Rex who, you know, maybe they're not so bad.
My point being, how are we supposed to approach and feel about a conflict that pits not good versus evil, or even neutral versus neutral, but bad versus worse? Do we grab the popcorn and cheer as they inflict suffering on each other? Or do we try and look past the political entities and try and see what's underneath?
A vast tapestry of complicated people often caught up in the tides of history over which they had very little control. Back in the East, the Red Army is swelling to terrifying proportions. Millions of men, thousands of tanks, artillery, and aircraft. This is a titanic force. And you often hear the Red Army compared to a steamroller. That's an analogy you'll hear a lot. You know, this slow-rolling behemoth that pancakes everything in its path
But when I think about it, I like to tweak the analogy just a little bit in my head. You know those YouTube videos where guys crush random objects with a big hydraulic press machine? The Red Army kind of reminds me of that machine. It doesn't matter what you put against it, that press is going to come down with slow, precise, unrelenting force. Nothing can stop it. All you can do is watch, and the outcome is inevitable.
The German Army High Command knows that this is coming. Heinz Guderian, a famous tank general and one of the innovators of Blitzkrieg warfare that helped Germany win so many of its early victories, is very concerned. He knows the Wehrmacht units in East Prussia are not strong enough to turn back the Red Army, and he begs Hitler to let him make the necessary preparations. But Hitler flat out refuses. He doesn't believe the accuracy of the numbers, or more likely he refuses to let himself believe them.
And to make matters worse for the German civilians in the path of the Red Army, the local Nazi administrators won't let them evacuate. To do so was to insinuate that the master race was not powerful enough to turn back the beasts from the East. To run was tantamount to treason. Of course, these Nazi officials, being the monstrous hypocrites that they were, quietly slipped away at the first reports of Soviet incursions.
So, facing the feeble Nazi resistance, the Red Army enters Germany's easternmost province, known as East Prussia. It's a wealthy, prosperous area on the Baltic Sea and the cultural heartland of the militaristic discipline that came to define Germany as a nation. The dream of a unified Germany began here and was brought to fruition in the late 1800s by Prussian aristocracy. So, Russian tanks start rolling into this area.
After years of suffering at the hands of the Wehrmacht and the SS, having their villages burned, their cities bombed, and their people butchered, the Soviets held back none of their smoldering anger, and they repaid that violence in kind. If you were a man in East Prussia, there was an incredibly high probability that you would be shot on sight, or sent to bust rocks in a gulag, in a prison camp. There was nothing you could say, or do, or a deal you could make, or a gift you could give,
The Russian retribution was here, and if you found yourself in its path, only luck could save you. About this time, back in Moscow, a man named Lavrentiy Beria is in his office reading reports. He's the head of Stalin's secret police, the NKVD. And you might know them by the name of what they would eventually become, the KGB. They are the eyes, the ears, and the punitive instrument of the Stalinist regime.
They're the Russian Gestapo, essentially. Beria, who, sidebar, is one of the great unsung monsters of history, more on that in a little bit, he begins to get reports of huge numbers of incidents euphemistically called, quote, immoral events. They were happening in East Prussia to German civilians, women civilians in particular. These immoral events were rapes, specifically gang rapes.
Now, this is the hard part of the episode, and I apologize in advance, but this epidemic of sexual violence is inextricably linked to the story. And if you're squeamish, this might be a good time for you to dip out. The Red Army soldiers killed and raped their way through East Prussia with stomach-turning efficiency. They were absolutely indiscriminate. Girls as young as 12 and women as old as 80 fell prey to these Russian soldiers.
One soldier turned playwright named Zakhar Agranenko attempted to sum it up tastefully. Quote, quote,
Women were locked in rooms and kept as sex slaves for days at a time. The abuse often occurred in front of family members, and anyone who protested or fought back was shot without hesitation. Many of these women beg to be killed afterwards. In one instance, a German woman asked for her rapist to shoot her after they were done. They couldn't believe it. They were incredulous. They said, quote, "Russian soldiers do not shoot women. Only German soldiers do that."
Such noble sentiments were of little comfort to their victims. Many women do kill themselves after being raped. Many husbands kill themselves. Every conceivable method is used. Poisoning. One account mentions a couple drinking battery acid together. Hanging, drowning, gunshot, you name it. The Russians are leaving a wake of blood. A trail of secondhand murder and death among their victims.
And the Soviet armies had large numbers of female soldiers serving in their ranks, but even they took no pity on the German women. One 21-year-old Soviet woman soldier said, quote, So why were the Soviet soldiers doing this? How do that many human beings participate in or condone such a large-scale violation of other human beings?
The natural assumption is revenge. Okay, sure, let's examine that. The depth of Soviet anger towards the Nazis for their crimes earlier in the war was very fresh and very intense. The Nazis did inflict horrible physical, psychological, and economic damage on the Russian people in the early years of the war. We tend to think of the Nazis' racial animus as being exclusively directed at the Jewish people of Europe, but their bigotry ran far, far deeper.
In the eyes of Hitler and his cronies, the Slavic peoples of Eastern Europe, the Russian, Polish, Ukrainians, Balkan peoples, and so forth, were just as expendable and racially inferior to the Aryan race as the Hebrews were. Hitler's vision was to clear out vast tracts of land in Eastern Europe that Germany could settle and grow into. He called it Liebenstraum, which means living space.
To make this living space habitable for good German settlers, they needed to reduce those local populations. And no one was better at that than Hitler's Schutzstaffel, the paramilitary force known as the SS. The trauma the Nazis inflicted on the Slavs, and in Russia proper once they got there, was immense. But while there was undoubtedly sexual misconduct, it was relatively rare compared to what the Soviets were doing to women in East Prussia.
So it's not like the Soviets could really claim they were playing eye for an eye here. There was something else going on. To even wrap our heads around this perfect storm of atrocity, we need to understand the world your average Russian soldier inhabited. Joseph Stalin's reforms had impoverished the rural areas of the Soviet Union to near or complete starvation. People were so hungry during the famines of the 30s that cannibalism was not uncommon, even among families.
So extreme poverty is the status quo. The Soviet Union also enacted a policy of severe sexual repression, censoring anything that had even a whiff of eroticism and deeming it harmful to the morale of the Soviet people.
This was rooted in the communist philosophical notion that indulging in your personal sexual desires ran contrary to the idea of being a selfless cog in the machine dedicated to the greater glory of Mother Russia. It sounds crazy and paradoxical, because it is. So by the time these soldiers armed with machine guns and given their first taste of real power and autonomy ever march into German territory,
They had been reduced to a borderline medieval understanding of sexuality. And yet still, there are more factors at work. A big one was alcohol. In East Prussia, the Soviet soldiers found booze in huge quantities. They looted every house for whatever they could find, and once they started drinking, discipline completely collapsed. It was a drunken free-for-all with little to no consequences.
Which leads us to the final factor. Prevailing Red Army culture both enabled and passively encouraged this stuff. The euphemism, quote, immoral event speaks for itself. In the instance a soldier was punished for his sexual misdeeds, it often wouldn't be for the act of rape, but of contracting a venereal disease and diminishing his own combat effectiveness. Lavrentiy Beria, the NKVD chief back in Moscow, said,
either shrugged off or suppressed any reports of these rapes. He was an infamous serial rapist himself. His hobby was detaining young girls without charges, coercing them into sex, and then having them disposed of like garbage. He did it to peasants, he did it to prisoners, aristocrats, even the occasional Russian actress. He was cloaked in frightening political power and wouldn't be stopped until a decade after the war, following Stalin's death.
So he certainly wasn't going to be any help in curbing the excesses of the men at the front. Some Russian soldiers were disgusted by the behavior of their comrades. There's a story of an officer who saw one of his lieutenants organizing men into a line behind a German woman. Her legs were tied spread-eagle. The officer pulled out his pistol and he shot the man in the chest, right then and there, and he broke up the mob. But good Samaritans like that were the exception, not the rule.
So once the Germans wake up to the realities of living under Soviet occupation, they run like hell. Word gets around about what the Russians do to civilians, and it sparks a massive refugee crisis. All of this terror is inflamed by Nazi propagandists who see the Russian war crimes as a potential tool to stiffen German resistance.
In temperatures as cold as negative 22 degrees, huge convoys of civilians trek west through the frozen countryside towards what they believe is the safety of the Reichland, constantly pursued by the rapid advance of the Russian tanks and closely followed by the Soviet infantry and their insatiable appetites. Babies freeze in the night, children go hungry, men and women are blindly searching for anything resembling safety, but no one is coming to save them.
By this time, the once vast reservoir of German fighting men has been thrown into the meat grinder by Hitler. Wasted in pointless offenses and squandered in bad strategic decisions, the Luftwaffe, the once fearsome air force that had nearly brought London to its knees, was gone. And by provoking the Russians, the Nazis had overplayed their hand and opened the door for an enemy they could never hope to defeat.
They were the architects of their own apocalypse. And numerically, they had no chance. And it would be German civilians who paid the price. At this point, it's important to start making the distinction between Germans and Nazi Germans. Those two terms are not interchangeable, especially at this late stage in the war when confidence in the Third Reich was wavering.
Obviously, there's a tremendous amount of overlap, and we cannot minimize that, but we shouldn't assume that Germany was universally cohered into a fugue state of bigotry and murderous racism. There were many who were just trying to live their lives, and many Germans were completely unaware, at least at this stage, of the true depth of incompetence, depravity, and evil that would come to define the Nazi government.
All these fleeing civilians cared about was surviving, but the Red Army had no intention of allowing that. German civilian convoys often could not outrun the lupine ferocity of the Soviets. They were strafed by fighter planes, blown apart by artillery shells, peppered with machine gun fire, crushed under tank tracks. Cossack cavalrymen from the eastern Russian steppes, armed with long, curved swords, could ride through the panicked civilian columns and just hack them to death.
There's an incident where a Russian submarine intercepts a fleeing cruise liner packed with 9,000 refugees, German refugees, and the submarine sinks it with torpedoes. Only about 1,000 people survive. The rest are swallowed up in icy Baltic waters. For comparison, about 1,503 people died when the Titanic sank in 1912. Back in Berlin, people are terrified. Tens of thousands of German refugees are arriving by train daily.
They're exhausted, frostbitten, emaciated. They've lost family members and their homes and their wealth, and now they're packed like cattle into train cars. Does that sound familiar? Anyone trying to leave Berlin or flee to another country has to secretly acquire forged documents and passports, not to mention evade the Nazi secret police and hope they aren't caught committing with a propaganda machine labeled treason. So in some kind of horrible, pointless, karmic retribution scenario,
Many of the horrors the Nazis had inflicted upon the Jewish people all over Europe were now being reflected back onto its own people. That irony was completely lost on Hitler and the Nazi high command. They were far from done sacrificing the German people on the pyre of their own vanity. What can you say? Nazis get a Nazi. So Hitler's bright idea is to create an organization called the Volkssturm.
This is a last ditch effort to raise Germany's manpower. The only men left not in uniform at this point are either very, very old, some of them are veterans of the First World War, or not men at all, just kids. And so the Hitler Youth achieves the ultimate purpose it was always intended for, an indoctrination machine to create cannon fodder for the Nazis. But all of this is a band-aid on a gunshot wound. Because there's also the matter of stuff. The Nazis are running out of stuff.
The Russians have captured some of their key arms production facilities. So they're running out of bullets. They're running out of shells, ammunition. And perhaps most importantly, they are running out of fuel. The Nazi war machine runs on gasoline. And that's been choked off by the Allies. They are losing their ability to fight, no matter how many little boys and grandpas they can hand a rifle to.
Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's propagandist extraordinaire, tries to keep the flame of hope alive for the German people with outlandish promises of amazing futuristic weapons that are just on the horizon. And if you can stay strong, boom, we'll have a breakthrough and we can push the Russians back. Meanwhile, the Red Army is moving fast. They're clocking up to 40 miles a day. And they have more than revenge fantasies filling their sails.
Stalin and his secret police chief Beria have a very particular reason for wanting Russian armies to get to Berlin as fast as humanly possible. In a word, uranium. See, before Russia became the juggernaut of nuclear power, we know it as today, they were lagging behind badly in the race to create a working atomic bomb.
The Americans were only a few months away from a total breakthrough, but Stalin knew that Germany's own atomic program had made progress too, and if they could get their hands on the research and the raw materials the Third Reich scientists had amassed, it would give them a leg up in the inevitable arms race following the end of the war. So he set Lavrentiy Beria, rapist-in-chief, to work, who began preparing highly trained units of NKVD security forces for
for the task of extracting those materials once Berlin fell. All of this reinforced the paramount importance of beating the other Allied army to Berlin. The British and Americans were making headway, but Stalin did not want them beating him to the German capital. Because Berlin was more than just a strategic prize. It was a symbol.
To the Russians, being able to say with pride that their armies had been the ones to strike back at the heart of the Nazis was a visceral emotional need. A measure of revenge and catharsis for all the pain and the hurt and the murder and the dishonor that the Germans had inflicted upon their homeland since the invasion back in 1941. This was extremely personal. In their eyes, the Americans had not suffered at all. Their civilians were safe at home a continent away.
They had no right to this. And the depth of the Red Army's revenge knew no bounds. As they moved through German territory, if they found an SS uniform in a house, they'd execute every single person inside, full stop. In Antony Bevor's book, The Fall of Berlin, which is an amazing read and was a huge, huge, huge, invaluable resource for the writing of this podcast,
He recounts an episode where a captured SS soldier who happened to play piano was forced to play for Russian soldiers for 16 straight hours. They told him the second he stopped playing, they would shoot him. He finally collapsed in fatigue, shaking and sobbing onto the keys, and the Russians were true to their word. They dragged him outside, and they put a bullet in his head. ♪
I'm Ken Harbaugh, host of Burn the Boats from Evergreen Podcasts. I interview political leaders and influencers, folks like award-winning journalist Soledad O'Brien and conservative columnist Bill Kristol about the choices they confront when failure is not an option. I won't agree with everyone I talk to, but I respect anyone who believes in something enough to risk everything for it. Because history belongs to those willing to burn the boats. Episodes are out every other week, wherever you get your podcasts.
Imagine for a second that there is an award show, like the Oscars, for crimes against humanity. It's the Razzies of history, chock full of genocidal star power. All the big names are there. You've got the Mongols, the Khmer Rouge, the ancient Assyrians. And if you have an award for worst performance in a merciless genocide category, Stalin's Russia could really give Nazi Germany a run for its money.
But every time I let my opinion tilt towards thinking Stalin is somehow worse, Nazi Germany just comes in with a virtuoso performance that really blows them out of the water. In their advance towards Berlin, the Red Army stumbles upon a place called the Danzig Anatomical Medical Institute. There, they find a particularly horrific science experiment the Nazis have been working on.
These resourceful scientists were trying to figure out just what to do with all of these dead bodies that were coming out of the concentration camps. Now, they couldn't burn all of them, but maybe they could, I don't know, do something with them. The Nazis had been trying to perfect a method of making leather and soap from the dead bodies on a mass scale. People all across Germany would have been unknowingly washing themselves with the dead bodies of the people their government had murdered.
It does not get much more twisted than that. For those of you keeping score, this is basically Tyler Durden's soap-making scheme from the movie Fight Club, but on a massive genocidal scale. As the Red Army washes over the conquered territories, the sexual violence continues. German women try employing a few cosmetic tricks to make them look less desirable to Russian soldiers.
They smear ash on their faces, they go long periods without bathing, they paint splotches on their faces to look diseased or sick, but it doesn't do much good. Because again, the Red Army's campaign of sexual violence was only superficially driven by physical desire. It was also being motivated by all those different factors that we talked about earlier. So the Red Army's stranglehold on Berlin tightens. They're ready to move in.
Stalin has lied to the Western Allies and minimized the strategic threat of the German capital to ensure that no American troops or journalists would be tempted to venture into the city during the Soviet attacks. Eisenhower misjudges the Man of Steel and backs off. Who knows how much suffering the people of Berlin could have been spared if the United States Army had arrived first.
In his massive concrete bunker beneath the city, Adolf Hitler is completely unwilling to consider a German future without him in it. He says, quote, "...if the war is lost, then the people will also be lost. It is not necessary to worry about their needs for elementary survival. On the contrary, it is best for us to destroy even these things, for the nation has been proved weak, and the future belongs to the strong people of the East."
Whoever remains after this battle is, in any case, only the inadequates, because the good ones will all be dead. His generals urge him to flee the city, but he refuses. If he's going down, he's going down in a blaze of glory, and the German people will provide the kindling. He waffles daily between defeatism and delusional zealotry. He orders doomed counteroffensive after doomed counteroffensive, but nothing works.
The Red Army is coming, and nothing stands between it and the three million people trapped inside the city. The men of the Red Army, complicit as they were in millions of murders and rapes, could also exhibit moments of tenderness and humanity towards the civilians caught in their path.
There are accounts of Russian soldiers offering food to scared German children, facilitating evacuations, and like that Soviet officer earlier in the story, defending women with deadly force from would-be rapists. Like countless soldiers in wartime before them, they had to find ways of coping with the nerve-fraying experience of combat. They were terrified of dying a thousand miles away from home in a muddy ditch, scared that no one would remember them or mourn their death,
And ironically, the closer they got to victory, the more intense the fear of dying becomes. To make it all this way, only to die on the precipice of victory would be a tragedy in their eyes. Stalin and his generals were not so sentimental. But many Russian soldiers decide to cope with their anxiety through a robust tradition of poetry and music.
with themes and lyrics that remind them of home. Songs about faithful wives waiting for their return were juxtaposed against meditations on the calming nature of real intimacy and female companionship on the front lines. One poet, a guy named Siminov, wrote the following, quote, They remember names for an hour. Memories here do not last long. Man says war and embraces a woman carelessly.
He is grateful to those who had so easily, without wanting to be called darling, replaced for him another who is far away. Here she was as compassionate as she could be to other women's loved ones, and warmed them in bad times with the generosity of her uncommitted body. And for those waiting to go into the attack, those who may never live to see love, they find it easier when they remember that yesterday,
At least someone's arms were around them. End quote. On the eve of the Red Army's assault, the Berlin Philharmonic gives an artistic performance of its own, a final symphony just before the Russian onslaught engulfs the city. Wagner's Götterdämmerung is among the pieces played at this performance. Now that title, meaning Twilight of the Gods, was a reference to Ragnarok, the end of the world in Norse mythology.
It would prove to be a very apt selection. Ragnarok has come. Stalin has three generals at the head of three armies surrounding Berlin. Naturally, a rivalry begins developing between them on who can deal the death blow to the German capital. They are chomping at the bit to make more headway and progress from their respective positions. And Stalin, always the manipulator, eggs on this rivalry.
In individual communications with these generals, he'll mention the progress or lack thereof of other generals playing them against one another to work them up into a jealous frenzy. The most famous and influential of these generals is a guy named Grand Marshal Georgy Zhukov. By Soviet standards, he is already a war hero, the architect of major breakthroughs back in the East and a key figure in turning the tide of the war. He is a legend.
His notoriety endures to this day. In fact, here in the States, there are actually beers named after him. He's kind of a thing. He's this towering Russian folk hero in popular memory, and this guy, Zhukov, wants to be the one to deal the death blow to Berlin. But he's been slowed down by a stubborn pocket of German resistance in an area called the Silo Heights. But eventually he grinds it down and assembles his men for the final assault.
The Red Army's artillery barrage of the city begins shortly afterward. Over a million shells are fired on the first day. The German experience of this attack is on a sensory level that I personally cannot fully get my head around. It's deafening. It makes eardrums bleed. And it's constant, and you never knew when a shell would land on your roof or in your kitchen. It was just a matter of luck.
It's the kind of experience that drove soldiers in the First World War to literal madness. So after this goes on for a little while, and the Russians feel they've softened the Germans up, it's time to send the ground troops in. Zhukov wants to make the most of this initial assault, so they devise a plan to disorient the German defenders. They array huge blinding spotlights, one every several meters, and point them directly towards the city with the intention of blinding the defenders.
So the Russians advance, but the spotlight idea backfires a little bit because the beams of light reflect off these huge clouds of smoke back into the eyes of the Red infantry. It was absolute chaos. And the exhausted German soldiers put up a decent fight, but they are soon overrun. Many surrender, more are shot. As the Red army advances into the city, they can't help but be eerily reminded of Stalingrad three years earlier.
In that battle, they had been the defenders, scrambling through rubble and waging a guerrilla war of attrition. And now the roles were reversed. Urban warfare is generally pretty terrible. It's messy, it's time-consuming, it's brutal. The advantage is very much on the side of whoever's defending, but the Russians developed some resourceful ways of dealing with the maze of buildings and alleyways that make them prime targets for attack.
One interesting technique is that they strap mattresses to the sides of their tanks to suppress grenade blasts. Another is they would tie oiled rags to the sides of their vehicles and set them on fire, which created the appearance that they'd already been hit by a rocket just to throw the Germans off guard. If a tank is already on fire, no reason to shoot at it.
As the Red Army moves in and this aperture tightens around the city, the civilians do whatever they can to survive. Infrastructure has totally collapsed. There's no electricity. The only light at night comes from the burning buildings or the boom of flares. Running water is scarce. Food is rationed out at designated locations. But the shelling is often so intense, people have to choose between being blown apart or starving to death.
Many Germans are living most of their waking hours in underground bunkers. They're packed so tight that many people can't even move and have to stand for 12 hours a day. They often fall asleep standing. But yet something both odd and yet totally understandable begins to happen. These people, scared, desperate, and longing to feel anything besides the ceaseless terror that their lives have become, begin to connect
There are reports of Germans in these bunkers finding strangers in the dark and just spontaneously having sex. Just desperate to feel anything resembling joy or relief. And it's hard to blame them, given what they were facing. They didn't know if the next rumble overhead would send 20 tons of concrete crashing down on their heads, or if Russians with machine guns and grenades would storm their bunker.
At least in that moment, they had their lives and their autonomy and their ability to choose what they felt in their final moments. Up above, the Russian generals are becoming careless. They are absolutely rabid in their push to crush the withering Volksturm resistance and capture their most key symbolic objective, the German parliament building called the Reichstag.
Friendly fire is very common. Russian artillery batteries hit their own troops by accident all the time, but the Red Army grinds on. They have seemingly infinite manpower, and they can afford these losses. So the Russians encircle the Reichstag, and a long, brutal fight occurs over the next several days. This is the Germans' last stand, and anyone left fighting at this point is either a zealot or has a zealot's gun pointed at their back.
But what these fanatical Nazis, fighting to the bitter end in the ruins of the Reichstag, don't know is that their leaders are already dead. Hitler shot himself in the head, his girlfriend Eva Braun did the same, Joseph Goebbels, his propaganda minister, and his wife committed suicide, and on their way out, they even poisoned their six children. And the rest of the Nazi high command is scattered to the winds.
A red hammer and sickle banner is raised high above the Reichstag. Nazi Germany is dead. But it is not over. Nazi leadership is gone, but it is the German people who are left behind to sort out the aftermath. And instead of waking up from this bad dream, they get pulled into a different kind of nightmare.
The Red Army has infested the smoking ruins of Berlin and for weeks will engage in victory celebrations. These celebrations take on the same horrible pattern that we've seen again and again and again during this episode. A German woman named Gerda Drews, who was 17 at the time, described her experience pretty succinctly. Quote, Then the Russians came. It wasn't good. They only knew how to say two things in German.
Give us your watches, and women, come with us." Numbers are always up for debate, but in the end it's estimated that hundreds of thousands of women are raped in Berlin during the Russian occupation, and as many as 10,000 die as a result of suicide. The women who do survive are marked for life. One said years later, "...I must repress a lot in order to be able to live."
Another lamented that her husband had been forced to watch what was done to her. Quote, But many German women find a strength within themselves to go on, a strength they didn't know was there, one that surpassed any blustering speech from the Fuhrer, one that went beyond fear-mongering propaganda from Goebbels.
one that keeps their eyes fixed on a future that they, and they alone, can make in the ruins of their shattered country. After they'd lost so much dignity and been dealt so much suffering, they find the will to move forward. One German woman said shortly after the fall of Berlin, quote, "...perhaps we women now face our hardest job in this war, to give understanding and comfort, support and courage."
to so many utterly defeated and desperate men. This has been Conflicted. Thanks for listening.
Hello everyone, my name is Tom Kearns and I host the Anglo-Saxon England podcast, where I cover the history and culture of England from the departure of the Romans in the 5th century to the Norman conquest in 1066. So far we've surveyed the collapse of Roman rule in Britain, the migration of the Anglo-Saxons and the history of Northumbria from its beginnings in the mists of legend to its destruction at the hands of Viking raiders in the 9th century. I hope you'll come and give it a go.