Fall of Berlin – 1945, The Fall of Berlin, or just Berlin (Russian: Берлин) is a Soviet documentary film about the Battle of Berlin, titled in Russian Битва за Берлин 1945 г., literally The Battle for Berlin – 1945. The film was directed by Yuli Raizman and Yelizaveta Svilova.
The film begins with an animated map of Eastern Europe with Soviet soldier double exposed on the bottom. The narrator lists the names of the rivers that the Red Army crosses as they march west: Volga, Don, Desna, Dnieper, Bug, Dvina, Neman, Vistula, and finally, Oder. The Soviet arrival at the Oder river is shown, along with the broken bridges across it. The undeterred men of the Red Army are shown as they cross the river while under German fire. The use of missile artillery by the Soviet forces is showcased.
After the Oder is crossed, the assault on Berlin itself begins. Footage of the actual battle is shown, as the Red Army fights German troops, street by street and building by building. This is interspersed with shots of Nazi propaganda films showing parades in the same areas, providing a sense of irony. A dramatic sequence follows a detachment of the Red Army in the assault on the Reichstag, which ends with the famous photograph, raising the Red Flag over the Reichstag.
When the Soviet troops entered Berlin, they began to push forward to the Reichstag. There were soldiers from every available battalion, with flame throwers, rifles, sniper rifles, automatic weapons, like the PPSh-41, and others. There were over 40 Soviet T-34 tanks that were pushing the German soldiers back. The battle for Berlin was one of the longest battles for a city in the years 1900–2000.
Shortly before the Russian troops entered Berlin, Hitler was ready to make a half-peace with England and the US, giving away Berlin to them. He said: "I'd rather give Berlin to the Americans or the English, only to prevent Russian forces from taking it over!", but he thought of this too late. Shortly after that the Russians approached and attacked Berlin. On 8 May 1945, the flag of the USSR replaced the Nazi German flag in Berlin. This was the end of World War II in Europe.
The Battle of Berlin, designated as the Berlin Strategic Offensive Operation by the Soviet Union, and also known as the Fall of Berlin, was one of the last major offensives of the European theatre of World War II.
The Polish First Army was an army unit of the Polish Armed Forces in the East. It was formed in the Soviet Union in 1944, from the previously existing Polish I Corps in the Soviet Union, as part of the People's Army of Poland (LWP). The First Army fought westward, subordinated to the Soviet 1st Belorussian Front, during the offensive against Nazi Germany that led to the capture of Warsaw in January 1945, and the capture of Berlin in May 1945.
Yevgeny Ananyevich Khaldei was a Soviet Red Army naval officer and photographer. He is best known for his World War II photograph of a Soviet soldier raising a flag over the Reichstag in Berlin, the capital of the vanquished Nazi Germany, at the end of the war.
Gotthard Fedor August Heinrici was a German general during World War II. Heinrici is considered to have been the premier defensive expert of the Wehrmacht. His final command was Army Group Vistula, formed from the remnants of Army Group A and Army Group Center to defend Berlin from the Soviet armies advancing from the Vistula River.
The Race to Berlin was a competition between Soviet Marshals Georgy Zhukov and Ivan Konev to be the first to enter Berlin during the final months of World War II in Europe.
The Battle of the Seelow Heights was part of the Berlin Strategic Offensive Operation. A pitched battle, it was one of the last assaults on large entrenched defensive positions of the Second World War. It was fought over three days, from 16–19 April 1945. Close to 1,000,000 Soviet soldiers of the 1st Belorussian Front, commanded by Marshal Georgy Zhukov, attacked the position known as the "Gates of Berlin". They were opposed by about 110,000 soldiers of the German 9th Army, commanded by General Theodor Busse, as part of the Army Group Vistula.
The Battle of Königsberg, also known as the Königsberg offensive, was one of the last operations of the East Prussian offensive during World War II. In four days of urban warfare, Soviet forces of the 1st Baltic Front and the 3rd Belorussian Front captured the city of Königsberg, present day Kaliningrad, Russia. The siege started in late January 1945 when the Soviets initially surrounded the city. Heavy fighting took place for control of overland connection between Königsberg and the port of Pillau, however by March 1945 Königsberg was hundreds of kilometres behind the main front line in the eastern front. The battle ended when the German garrison surrendered to the Soviets on 9 April after a three-day assault made their position untenable.
The Soviet Banner of Victory was the banner raised by Red Army soldiers on the Reichstag building in Berlin on 1 May 1945, the day after Adolf Hitler committed suicide. It was raised by three Soviet soldiers: Alexei Berest, Mikhail Yegorov, and Meliton Kantaria.
The Soviet War Memorial is a war memorial and military cemetery in Berlin's Treptower Park. It was built to the design of the Soviet architect Yakov Belopolsky to commemorate 7,000 of the 80,000 Red Army soldiers who fell in the Battle of Berlin in April–May 1945. It opened four years after the end of World War II in Europe, on 8 May 1949. The Memorial served as the central war memorial of East Germany.
Raqymjan Qoshqarbaev was the first soldier to raise the Soviet Flag at the Reichstag building in Berlin, having placed the flag by a staircase in the opera hall after sneaking into the building. After nightfall Qoshqarbaev and several of his comrades raised the flag on the roof. However, because they had raised the flag in the night when it was too dark to take a photo, none of them were part of the iconic photo of Soviet soldiers raising the flag on 2 May. After the raising of the flag on 30 April it was shot down by German snipers shortly before the Wehrmacht briefly retook control of the building. However, by 2 May the Soviets retook control of the building and raised the flag again, bringing photographer Yevgeny Khaldei with them to capture a reenactment of the historic moment.
The National Committee for a Free Germany was an anti-fascist political and military organisation formed in the Soviet Union during World War II, composed mostly of German defectors from the ranks of German prisoners of war and also of members of the Communist Party of Germany who moved to the Soviet Union after the Nazi seizure of power. Although it initially conducted primarily propaganda and psychological warfare activities, later it formed small military units known as Combat Units and Partisan Units which were sent to the Wehrmacht rear areas where they combined propaganda with collecting intelligence, performing military reconnaissance, sabotage and combat against the Wehrmacht, and to East Prussia, where they attempted to launch a popular guerilla movement. Towards the end of the war its volunteers were sent at the front where they participated in combat with the Nazis. The creation of the organisation formed the Movement for a Free Germany, the anti-Nazi German movement in countries beyond Germany, including the occupied Greece (AKFD) and France (KFDW).
The battle in Berlin was an end phase of the Battle of Berlin. While the Battle of Berlin encompassed the attack by three Soviet fronts to capture not only Berlin but the territory of Germany east of the River Elbe still under German control, the battle in Berlin details the fighting and German capitulation that took place within the city.
The Budapest offensive was the general attack by Soviet and Romanian armies against Hungary and their Axis allies from Nazi Germany. The offensive lasted from 29 October 1944 until the fall of Budapest on 13 February 1945. This was one of the most difficult and complicated offensives that the Soviet Army carried out in Central Europe. It resulted in a decisive victory for the USSR, as it greatly sped up the ending of World War II in Europe.
Konstantin Apollonovich Koroteyev was a Soviet Army colonel general and a Hero of the Soviet Union.
The 150th Guards Motor Rifle Idritsa-Berlin Order of Kutuzov Division of the Russian Ground Forces is a motorized rifle division that was re-instituted in 2016. It is part of the 8th Guards Combined Arms Army, which was reformed in 2017, in the Southern Military District.
The Battle of Poznań during World War II in 1945 was an assault by the Soviet Union's Red Army that had as its objective the elimination of the Nazi German garrison in the stronghold city of Poznań (Posen) in occupied Poland. The defeat of the German garrison required a month-long reduction of fortified positions, urban combat, and a final assault on the city's citadel by the Red Army, complete with medieval touches.
As Allied troops entered and occupied German territory during the later stages of World War II, mass rapes of women took place both in connection with combat operations and during the subsequent occupation of Germany by soldiers from all advancing Allied armies, although a majority of scholars agree that the records show that a majority of the rapes were committed by Soviet occupation troops. The wartime rapes were followed by decades of silence.
Raising a Flag over the Reichstag is a World War II photograph, taken during the Battle of Berlin on 2 May 1945. It depicts a Soviet soldier raising the flag of the Soviet Union over the Reichstag. The photograph was reprinted in thousands of publications and came to be regarded around the world as one of the most significant and recognizable images of World War II. Owing to the secrecy of Soviet media, the identities of the men in the picture were often disputed, as was that of the photographer, Yevgeny Khaldei. It became a symbol of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany.
The Fall of Berlin is a 1950 Soviet war and propaganda film, in two parts separated in the manner of a serial. It was produced by Mosfilm Studio and directed by Mikheil Chiaureli, with a script written by Pyotr Pavlenko and a musical score composed by Dmitri Shostakovich. Portraying the history of the Second World War with a focus on a highly positive depiction of the role Soviet leader Joseph Stalin played in the events, it is considered one of the most important manifestations of Stalin's cult of personality, and a noted example of Soviet realism. After De-Stalinization, the film was banned in the Eastern Bloc for several decades.
Imagery promoting the Soviet Union has been a prominent aspect of the Russo-Ukrainian War, especially since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Both Russia and Russian separatist forces in Ukraine have used Soviet symbols as a means of expressing their antipathy to Ukraine and to Ukrainian decommunization policies. For Russia, in particular, these displays are also part of a broader campaign to de-legitimize Ukrainian statehood and justify annexations of the country's territory, as was the case with Crimea in March 2014 and with southeastern Ukraine in September 2022.
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