2.3 million Soviet troops converged on Hitler's capital from three sides. In his underground bunker, Hitler promoted generals to command armies that no longer existed and planned counterattacks with divisions that had ceased to exist.
By April 1945, Soviet forces had fought from Stalingrad to the outskirts of Berlin — 1,500 miles in 26 months. Three Soviet Fronts, totaling 2.3 million troops with 6,250 tanks, closed in on Germany's capital from the east and south. Inside Berlin, roughly 45,000 regular soldiers, plus 40,000 Volkssturm militia and thousands of Hitler Youth boys, prepared to defend a ruined city against the largest army ever assembled for a single battle.
Hitler refused to leave his underground Führerbunker. In daily conferences, he moved phantom divisions across maps, issued orders to armies that had ceased to exist, and raged at generals who tried to tell him the reality of the situation. When informed that SS General Felix Steiner's army couldn't attack because it had been destroyed, Hitler collapsed in tears. Those present later recalled it as the moment they knew the war was lost.
The battle for Berlin began with the assault on the Seelow Heights east of the city on April 16 — a dense network of German defensive positions that Marshal Zhukov attacked frontally, losing 30,000 men in three days of brutal fighting. Marshal Konev's forces to the south broke through faster, setting up a race between the two Soviet commanders to be first into Berlin — Stalin had deliberately pitted them against each other.
Soviet troops fought street by street, building by building through a city that had already been reduced to rubble by two years of Allied bombing. German defenders — including children as young as 12 in the Hitler Youth — contested every block. Soviet soldiers, many of whom had seen their own cities burned and families killed, showed little mercy. The Battle of Berlin was accompanied by mass atrocities against German civilians.
On April 30, with Soviet troops less than a mile from his bunker, Adolf Hitler shot himself. His companion Eva Braun took cyanide beside him. Their bodies were burned in the garden above. Two days later, on May 2, Berlin's garrison commander General Helmuth Weidling surrendered the city. The war in Europe effectively ended — the formal surrender followed on May 8.
Soviet casualties in the Berlin operation were staggering even in victory: 81,000 killed and 280,000 wounded in the final assault on the city. German losses were roughly 92,000-100,000 killed and 480,000 captured. The raising of the Soviet flag over the Reichstag — photographed by Yevgeny Khaldei — became the iconic image of the war's end in Europe, as recognizable as the flag raising at Iwo Jima.