April 1945 in Berlin: The Final Month of the Third Reich

When Heinrich Himmler was appointed to command the army group defending Berlin in January 1945, his operations officer described briefing him as "talking about colors with a blind man." Himmler couldn't read a map scale, worked five hours a day due to chronic stomach problems, and once sent a lone battalion 30 kilometers into no man's land because he confused centimeters on the map with actual distance on the ground. It was one of the most catastrophic personnel decisions of the entire war, and it set the stage for the bloodiest urban battle in European history.

Today's guest is Prit Buttar, author of Berlin: Endgame 1945. We discuss how the Red Army's brilliant January advance to the Oder created an illusion of easy victory that led to the catastrophic assault on the Seelow Heights, where Zhukov ignored his own generals' warnings and threw two tank armies into terrain too cramped for armor. We look at the Panzerfaust, a cheap weapon that turned every civilian with ten minutes of training into a tank killer and accounted for two thirds of Soviet armor losses in some sectors. We also examine how Churchill ordered his planners to draw up Operation Unthinkable, a plan to rearm German POWs and attack the Soviets on July 1, 1945. The Battle of Berlin was not really fought for strategic reasons at all but for the personal glory of Stalin and his marshals, making it arguably the most cynically wasteful battle of the entire war.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.