Berliner citizens crawled out of their basements a few days after the end of the Battle of Berlin and moved to safer neighborhoods on May 7, 1945. On the way there, the streets were littered with the bodies of those killed in the Battle of Berlin. We escaped by avoiding the bodies.
On April 16, 1945, the Soviet Red Army invaded Berlin from the east, and the last battle against the German Third Reich broke out. This was followed by a relentless search for Hitler's Führer, who was hiding in an underground bunker. As the Soviet troops invaded and swept through the city, the old men and boys who were covering the German troops suffered heavy casualties in a desperate and futile battle that lasted about two weeks until May 2, 1945. The Soviets far outnumbered the Germans, with the Soviets having about 2,500,000 more soldiers, about 7,500 more aircraft, and about 6,250 more tanks. The Germans had about 1,000,000 soldiers, about 2,200 aircraft, and about 1,500 tanks.
Berlin used to be the most beautiful and technologically modern of all the European capitals. The city of Berlin was in ruins, the streets filled with rubble, tanks were almost useless, and much of the fighting was white-knuckle fighting and building-to-building sweeps. German women were targeted for mass rape, businesses and stores were looted, and citizens were murdered in the rubble streets. Dead horse corpses were carved up for meat. The German Third Reich professed to protect life for the people, but Nazi Germany betrayed it. Instead, it denied reality and ran an imaginary army on a map to defend its dream city of Berlin, touting that one day it would build a huge German empire under the new name Germania. But it was impossible to deny the reality for long. In connection with Hitler's last will and political testament, after marrying his longtime mistress Eva Braun, he committed suicide with her in the bunker beneath the Chancellery. Their bodies were incinerated inside the Führer's residence. In the last lie after his death, Nazi German radio reported the final lie that Hitler had been killed in action.
When Berlin was occupied on May 2, 1945, the battle entailed enormous casualties on both sides. The Germans were officially clamoring for revenge for the endless atrocities of the Soviet army. German soldiers on the Eastern Front were prepared to die in battle, with little chance of survival in captivity if they surrendered to the Soviets. About 81,000 Soviet soldiers were killed, and another 280,000 were wounded in action. About 92,000 German soldiers were killed and another 220,000 were wounded. The city of Berlin was reduced to rubble and about 22,000 German civilians were killed. Approximately 11 million people were murdered in Nazi concentration camps, and more than 60 million people were killed worldwide in the war against the Axis powers before peace was finally achieved.
