I was recently reading about the Soviet war memorial in Berlin and how it was erected immediately after the battle of Berlin to show the sacrifice of 80000 Russian soldiers who died taking the city. That number seems huge to me. 80000 men dieing in a single battle is something Americans never experienced (I don’t think). Are these soldiers buried somewhere? And why do most Americans never hear about the sheer magnitude of the eastern front in terms of killed/wounded. Ususally there is so much focus on dday and not the huge eastern battles.
I don’t know about the battle in particular but this is a good video about the death toll of WWII:
The Wikipedia page seems to bear out the number, but what is called the Battle of Berlin did not only consist of taking the city of Berlin but began at the Oder and Neisse (roughly where today’s border between Germany and Poland is). A lot, probably most of the casualties by both sides would have been incurred between the Oder and Berlin city limits.
There are actually three such memorials in Berlin. Two are in East Berlin (one in Pankow and one in Treptower Park) and one in West Berlin (in the park immediately adjacent to the Brandenburg Gate).
Over 13,000 of them are buried at the monument in Pankow, another 5000 in Treptower Park, and another 2000 at the West Berlin monument.
I’ve watched that video several times, but I never cease to think “Holy Sh*t” when watching the Russian tally grow.
I wonder what the environmental impact of 13,000 rotting corpses is?
Very rich soil?
I think that’s the generally accepted figure. Like other people pointed out, this operation being discussed isn’t just in directly taking the city, it’s the total casualties for a large scale operation involving roughly one million defenders and two and a half million attackers. The Russians wanted to capture Berlin quickly because they felt the Allies wouldn’t stick to the territorial agreements if they didn’t hold the land, and the Germans fought mostly to the death because of a combination of Hitler’s orders and the knowledge that they had murdered a lot of Russians who surrendered and expected the same in return. Trying to fight quickly in a built up city against an enemy who won’t surrender is one of the easiest ways to end up with a huge butcher’s bill.
Zhukov was a horrible general. He made a ton of bad decisions in the last weeks of the war.
For example: he never properly assessed the difficulty of attacking the Seelow Heights on the Oder. His didn’t really understand how high they were until it was too late.
And he did a ton of idiotic things. E.g., he brought in searchlights to “blind” the defenders but instead it just made things worse for his own troops. He also refused to listen to the advice of his generals and shell the daylights out of the second line of defenses and instead shelled the first line which were mainly empty since the Germans knew that this is what he always did.
Perhaps 30k Red Army troops died during that attack. And this is against worn out, devastated and at times 3rd rate troops with little ammunition and no reserves.
He rushed to Berlin for “glory”. At times creating friendly fire issues with Konev’s troops. Tanks were often pushed forward without infantry support and so the losses there were horrific.
Everything was a rush and stupidly planned. E.g., large number of losses in taking the burned out, insignificant Reichstag. They didn’t think about targeting the Reich Chancellery area until near the very end. And that area actually mattered.
Berlin itself was defended by about 80k troops, of which at most 40k were real soldiers. They had few supplies (which of course kept on the outskirts of the city). The Russians threw over a million troops at them and it still took almost two weeks to subdue them.
Around the time of the fall of the Soviet Union, some people started coming up with numbers in the 200k Red Army dead in taking Berlin. So 80k isn’t hard to believe at all.
Oh, another thing. Because of the rush job and the mass of troops involved the treatment of the Red Army wounded was horrible even by Soviet war time standards. No time to stop and help them, keep moving. A large fraction of their deaths were preventable.
It was a slaughterhouse. Keep in mind there were also tens of thousands of civilians killed, many buried in rubble. People who visited weeks afterwards remarked on the stench of death.
What did Zhukov get for his glory? A year later he was given a minor posting, then harassed by the NKVD, given even worse postings, made into practically a non-entity.
So all those thousands of dead people really helped his career, right?
Just to note on sources for Soviet personnel losses, the Wikipedia page quotes Kirosheev’s “Soviet Casualties and Combat Losses in the Twentieth Century” of 1997. Other researchers in post-Soviet period have differed somewhat from Kirosheev, but the differences were mainly higher death totals in other studies for Soviet POW’s and/or deaths of partisans/civilians treated as POW’s, partisans in general, men conscripted and killed early in the war before ever officially appearing on the Army’s rolls, etc. IOW, the differences were in categories which were probably not significant in the Battle of Berlin.
So 80,000 killed is probably about what it was. Subject to the point about the ‘battle’ being a whole campaign not physically limited to the Berlin city limits.
I have, and do, as well. I can’t remember who he was, but an historian summed up the European war as being won by, “American steel, British bravery, and Soviet blood.”
The scale of World War 2 is almost incomprehensible in our 21st century world. By the end, for example, the Soviets had 5 million active soldiers, most of them marching relentlessly westwards.
I always heard it as “British intelligence, American steel, and Soviet blood.”
That agrees with my reading material lately.
It was more than just a matter of rushing in for glory. Stalin was obsessed with taking Berlin before the Americans and British. He wanted the scientists and technology, but he also wanted Hitler. Orders for the rush to Berlin came from the very top.
I think all orders came from the top.
Harsh :). Zhukov wasn’t a horrible general - he was actually reasonably decent. Despite a tendency towards self-inflation his overall record is about as good as allied generals got, really.
He did indeed try to bludgeon his way through the Seelow Heights, but to some extent that was simply due to a massive superiority in men/material and the fact that Stalin was very actively playing him against Konev. Stalin until quite late left who was to actually take Berlin vague and transformed it into a competitive race( and those who didn’t play the compete game got left by the wayside ). While he was racing towards Berlin for glory, so was Konev until near the end when Zhukov was finally awarded the prize. Finally he was up against a defensive specialist in Gotthard Heinrici who positioned himself about as well as you could of.
He probably did take 3:1 casualties punching through the SH and the real credit for breaking that front might go to Konev( and discredit to Schorner, perhaps), but overall the losses in the full campaign were probably closer to even( granted he and Konev were indeed facing a mixture of quality and scratch units ). Not one of his shining moments, but he was an industrial general in a system that used manpower as a blunt solution to a lot of problems - something historically consistent for Russia, really. In the end all that mattered to the likes of Stalin is that he won.
Sadly for Zhukov, success=“threat” to Stalin. So it went in the Stalinist Soviet Union.
The source of the quote is generally considered to have come from Joseph Stalin.
How it is translated changes the nuance and there are a couple of variations but the “standard” version nominates the contributions as time, money and blood.
Harry Hopkins (1890-1946),President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s personal emissary to both Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin reported that Stalin had summarized the contributions of the major allies to the Second World War, declaring that ‘The British gave time, the Americans gave money, and the Russians gave blood.’
I understand they had penal battalions to march through minefields.
I think there’s a difference between Democratic “Orders from the Top” and Totalitarian “Orders from the Top”. From what I read FDR only forced through two military orders during WW2 that his military commanders disagreed with, while Hitler and Stalin were infamous for forcing through things none of his military commanders wanted. In a democracy military leaders have some leeway to push back, while under an iron fisted ruler you might never bring up any objection no matter how minor.