The conventional wisdom that the German capital was destroyed to the ground during its assault by Soviet troops is absolutely untrue.
The well-known footage of military newsreels, in which Soviet soldiers are fighting on Berlin streets among solid ruins, certainly create in many viewers, especially young people, who, as a rule, are not inclined to delve into the details of long-standing historical events, the impression that the capital of the Third Reich has become to a pile of smoking debris precisely as a result of the merciless Soviet assault.
In addition, Western propaganda, which breathes unevenly towards modern Russia, gladly picks up this topic. Do not feed it with bread, just let me talk about the "pity-free Russians", who are not dear to anything in the world and whose "barbaric nature" will never be understood by a finely organized and delicately educated Western man.
In fact, things are not quite so, or rather, not at all so. Without belittling the scale and fierceness of hostilities during the Berlin operation, I consider it necessary to draw your attention to some important details.
The German capital surrendered very quickly for a city of this size and importance. There are two main reasons for this: the really irrepressible victorious impulse of our army and the complete loss of the will to resist on the part of the Germans, who by April 1945 realized the inevitability of their complete defeat in the war.
Although the operation itself took place from April 16 to May 8, 1945, the fighting in the city itself lasted much less. In reality - from April 21 to May 2, when the Berlin garrison surrendered. That is about a week and a half.
In such a short time, the almighty Red Army could not have destroyed such a huge city to the ground. Even if she wanted to. Moreover, the battles in urban areas had the specificity that there was practically no front line as such. The troops, their own and the enemy, were mixed to such an extent that sometimes the positions of both German and Soviet units were located in the same house. In such conditions, the Soviet command was forced to sharply limit the combat use of bomber aircraft and heavy artillery against urban targets, which could lead to serious losses of its own troops. And this, in turn, further reduced the material damage that was caused to Berlin during the Soviet offensive.
And, nevertheless, the city was almost completely destroyed. How can this seeming paradox be explained? Any Berliner of that time could explain it without the slightest difficulty. Because the destruction of the capital of the Third Reich took place in front of him for a number of years and the Soviet assault played a far from the main role in this.
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The main reason for the actual death of Berlin was the so-called "carpet bombing" carried out by the Anglo-American aviation throughout the war. For those who are not in the know, let me explain: this expression has nothing to do with knocking out carpets. But to knock out entire cities from life together with their entire population is the most direct thing.
The military-political leadership of Great Britain, a country whose territory was minimally affected by enemy strikes, and the US government, a country whose territory, apart from Pearl Harbor, did not reach a single enemy shell at all, for some reason decided that in the war all is fair with Hitler. Even the most barbaric. And they began to methodically burn down German cities, making no difference between military factories and residential areas, hospitals, schools, maternity hospitals.
The Soviet Union, which suffered monstrous losses from the German aggression and which had the full moral right to repay the Germans in the same coin, did not commit such atrocities against German cities and population. And the Anglo-Saxons went! And with amazing ease. Which, generally speaking, says a lot. Including the fact that even now they are unlikely to stop at any crime to achieve their goals. As for Berlin specifically, its methodical transformation into rubble began already in 1943.
“This year Berlin has undergone terrible changes: the Tiergarten district was completely destroyed, the Charlottenburg castle, Unter den Linden avenue, the memorial church on Kurfürstendamm … the Copernicus and Treptow quarters lay in ruins. The transport network of the city was badly damaged”.
However, the truly total destruction of Berlin from the air began only in 1945. When, after the Yalta Conference of the Allies, it became finally clear that the German capital would be included in the Soviet zone of occupation. It was then that the order was given for the complete destruction of not only Berlin by the Anglo-American aviation, but in general all German cities that were to come under the control of the Soviet Union. It was then, in February 1945, that the city of Dresden was practically wiped off the face of the earth, in which about two hundred thousand people died in one day. Mostly civilians, refugees and allied prisoners of war.
The most immoral and criminal thing is that the bombings of the first months of 1945 had no military significance. Hitlerite Germany was on the verge of dying. And the destruction of its cities was from a military point of view absolutely pointless. It was blatant mass murder, the only rational purpose of which was to inflict maximum harm on the part of the United States and Great Britain to their formal Soviet ally, who should have gotten nothing but ruins. And only the rapid advance of the Red Army and the end of the war that came soon saved the rest of East Germany from complete destruction from the air.
But in Berlin, our "valiant" allies managed to bomb out in full.
“Everything that came before this faded on February 3, 1945, when, under the cover of 785 P-51 Mustang fighters, 950“flying fortresses”appeared over Berlin. The air armada dumped 2,298 tons of bombs on city blocks, plowing the Tempelhof and Schöneberg areas, as well as the city center. According to "average" estimates, the number of victims among the population on that day was in the thousands: figures are called up to 25,000 killed.
On February 26, 1945, the horror repeated itself on an even larger scale - 781 B-17 and 285 B-24 dropped 2,796 tons of bombs on the city, practically without losses on their part. Of course, this was not the end: while practicing new tactics, on March 18, March 24, April 20, the Americans repeated raids over and over again, in which up to 1200 bombers participated at a time. The city below them turned into ruins, and the exact death toll was not possible to establish. According to rough estimates, it was about 50,000 people."
That is why, when the Soviet troops approached the German capital, they saw in front of them the "city of former houses", as its surviving inhabitants bitterly joked at that time. And while the storming of the city certainly did not add to its beauty and architectural splendor, the historical truth is that the destruction of Berlin was mainly the work of the Anglo-American bomber aircraft, not the Red Army. Moreover, this destruction at its main stage, in February-March 1945, no longer had an anti-German meaning, but an anti-Soviet one. The "allies" thus took revenge on Stalin for the fact that his army was the first to reach Berlin and liberate half of Europe.
It only remains to recall that the Anglo-Saxons did this kind of nasty things to us at a time when relations between the USSR and its Western "partners", at least officially, were at the highest allied level, when it seemed that nothing could darken them in the future. Now imagine what these geopolitical predators are capable of in relation to Russia today, when even in official speeches they assess relations with it as "worse than ever."
Author: Yuri Selivanov