s'' The forces available to General Weidling for the city's defence included roughly 45,000 soldiers in several severely depleted
Heer and
Waffen-SS divisions. These divisions were supplemented by the
Berlin Police force,
boys in the compulsory
Hitlerjugend, and the
Volkssturm. Many of the 40,000 elderly men of the
Volkssturm had been in the army as young men and some were veterans of
World War I. Hitler appointed SS-
Brigadeführer Wilhelm Mohnke the Battle Commander for the central government district that included the
Reich Chancellery and
Führerbunker. He had over 2,000 men under his command. Weidling organised the defences into eight sectors designated 'A' through to 'H' each one commanded by a colonel or a general, but most had no combat experience. To the west of the city was the
20th Infantry Division. To the north of the city was the
9th Parachute Division. To the north-east of the city was the
Panzer Division Müncheberg. To the south-east of the city and to the east of
Tempelhof Airport was the
11th SS Panzergrenadier Division Nordland. The reserve,
18th Panzergrenadier Division, was in Berlin's central district. On 23 April,
Berzarin's
5th Shock Army and
Katukov's
1st Guards Tank Army assaulted Berlin from the south-east and, after overcoming a counter-attack by the German
LVI Panzer Corps, reached the
Berlin S-Bahn ring railway on the north side of the
Teltow Canal by the evening of 24 April. During the same period, of all the German forces ordered to reinforce the inner defences of the city by Hitler, only a small contingent of
French SS volunteers under the command of SS-
Brigadeführer Gustav Krukenberg arrived in Berlin. During 25 April, Krukenberg was appointed as the commander of Defence Sector C, the sector under the most pressure from the Soviet assault on the city. On 26 April,
Chuikov's
8th Guards Army and the 1st Guards Tank Army fought their way through the southern suburbs and attacked Tempelhof Airport, just inside the S-Bahn defensive ring, where they met stiff resistance from the
Müncheberg Division. But by 27 April, the two understrength divisions (
Müncheberg and
Nordland) that were defending the south-east, now facing five Soviet armies—from east to west, the 5th Shock Army, the 8th Guards Army, the 1st Guards Tank Army and
Rybalko's 3rd Guards Tank Army (part of the 1st Ukrainian Front)—were forced back towards the centre, taking up new defensive positions around Hermannplatz. Krukenberg informed General
Hans Krebs,
Chief of the
General Staff of
Army high command that within 24 hours the
Nordland would have to fall back to the centre sector Z (for ). The Soviet advance to the city centre was along these main axes: from the south-east, along the Frankfurter Allee (ending and stopped at the
Alexanderplatz); from the south along
Sonnenallee ending north of the
Belle-Alliance-Platz, from the south ending near the
Potsdamer Platz and from the north ending near the
Reichstag. The Reichstag, the Moltke bridge, Alexanderplatz, and the Havel bridges at Spandau saw the heaviest fighting, with house-to-house and
hand-to-hand combat. The foreign contingents of the SS fought particularly hard, because they were ideologically motivated and they believed that they would not live if captured.
Battle for the Reichstag In the early hours of 29 April the Soviet
3rd Shock Army crossed the
Moltke Bridge and started to fan out into the surrounding streets and buildings. The initial assaults on buildings, including the
Ministry of the Interior, were hampered by the lack of supporting artillery. It was not until the damaged bridges were repaired that artillery could be moved up in support. At 4am, in the , Hitler signed his
last will and testament and, shortly afterwards, married
Eva Braun. At dawn the Soviets pressed on with their assault in the south-east. After very heavy fighting they managed to capture
Gestapo headquarters on
Prinz-Albrechtstrasse, but a
Waffen-SS counter-attack forced the Soviets to withdraw from the building. To the south-west the 8th Guards Army attacked north across the Landwehr canal into the Tiergarten. By the next day, 30 April, the Soviets had solved their bridging problems and with artillery support at 06:00 they launched an attack on the Reichstag, but because of German entrenchments and support from
12.8 cm FlaK 40 guns away on the roof of the
Zoo flak tower, close by
Berlin Zoo, it was not until that evening that the Soviets were able to enter the building. The Reichstag had not been in use since it had
burned in February 1933 and its interior resembled a rubble heap more than a government building. The German troops inside were heavily entrenched, and fierce room-to-room fighting ensued. At that point there was still a large contingent of German soldiers in the basement who launched counter-attacks against the Red Army. By 2 May 1945 the Red Army controlled the building entirely. The famous photo of the two soldiers planting the flag on the roof of the building is a re-enactment photo taken the day after the building was taken. To the Soviets the event as represented by the photo became symbolic of their victory demonstrating that the Battle of Berlin, as well as the Eastern Front hostilities as a whole, ended with the total Soviet victory. As the 756th Regiment's commander
Zinchenko had stated in his order to Battalion Commander
Neustroev "... the Supreme High Command ... and the entire Soviet People order you to erect the victory banner on the roof above Berlin".
Battle for the centre During the early hours of 30 April, Weidling informed Hitler in person that the defenders would probably exhaust their ammunition during the night. Hitler granted him permission to attempt a
breakout through the encircling Red Army lines. That afternoon, Hitler and Braun committed
suicide and their bodies were cremated not far from the bunker. In accordance with Hitler's last will and testament, Admiral
Karl Dönitz became the
President of the Reich () and Joseph Goebbels became the new
Chancellor of the Reich (). As the perimeter shrank and the surviving defenders fell back, they became concentrated into a small area in the city centre. By now there were about 10,000 German soldiers in the city centre, which was being assaulted from all sides. One of the other main thrusts was along Wilhelmstrasse on which the Air Ministry, built of
reinforced concrete, was pounded by large concentrations of Soviet artillery. The remaining German Tiger tanks of the
Hermann von Salza battalion took up positions in the east of the Tiergarten to defend the centre against
Kuznetsov's 3rd Shock Army (which although heavily engaged around the Reichstag was also flanking the area by advancing through the northern Tiergarten) and the 8th Guards Army advancing through the south of the Tiergarten. These Soviet forces had effectively cut the sausage-shaped area held by the Germans in half and made any escape attempt to the west for German troops in the centre much more difficult. During the early hours of 1 May, Krebs talked to General
Vasily Chuikov, commander of the
Soviet 8th Guards Army, informing him of Hitler's death and a willingness to negotiate a citywide surrender. They could not agree on terms because of Soviet insistence on unconditional surrender and Krebs' claim that he lacked authorisation to agree to that. Goebbels was against surrender. In the afternoon, Goebbels and his wife
killed their children and then themselves. Goebbels's death removed the last impediment which prevented Weidling from accepting the terms of unconditional surrender of his garrison, but he chose to delay the surrender until the next morning to allow the planned breakout to take place under the cover of darkness.
Breakout and surrender On the night of 1/2 May, most of the remnants of the Berlin garrison attempted to break out of the city centre via three directions. Only those that went west through the Tiergarten and crossed the
Charlottenbrücke (a bridge over the Havel) into
Spandau succeeded in breaching Soviet lines. A handful of those who survived the initial breakout made it to the lines of the Western Allies—most were either killed or captured by the Red Army's outer encirclement forces west of the city. Early in the morning of 2 May, the Soviets captured the Reich Chancellery. General Weidling surrendered with his staff at 6am. He was taken to see General Vasily Chuikov at 08:23, where Weidling ordered the city's defenders to surrender to the Soviets. The 350-strong garrison of the Zoo flak tower left the building. There was sporadic fighting in a few isolated buildings where some SS troops still refused to surrender, but the Soviets reduced such buildings to rubble.
Hitler's Nero Decree The city's food supplies had been largely destroyed on Hitler's orders. 128 of the 226 bridges had been blown up and 87 pumps rendered inoperative. "A quarter of the subway stations were under water, flooded on Hitler's orders. Thousands and thousands who had sought shelter in them had drowned when the SS had carried out the blowing up of the protective devices on the Landwehr Canal." A number of workers, on their own initiative, resisted or sabotaged the SS's plan to destroy the city's infrastructure; they successfully prevented the blowing up of the Klingenberg power station, the Johannisthal waterworks, and other pumping stations, railroad facilities, and bridges. ==Battle outside Berlin==