The Red Army Surrounds Berlin

By April 1945, Soviet forces stood at the gates of Berlin. From the summer of 1944, Hitler's armies had suffered a series of cataclysmic defeats that had left them shattered and desperately trying to hold on in front of the capital of the Third Reich. But how the Soviets' been able to bring the once mighty German Army to the brink of total defeat, and did the Wehrmacht have one last throw of the dice to save the Nazi regime? In this episode, Dan is joined by Professor Evan Mawdsley, author of Thunder in the East: The Nazi-Soviet War 1941-1945 and former Professor of International History at the University of Glasgow. Evan helps Dan explore the stark differences in the narrative of World War II's final months across Western and Eastern Europe. They also discuss the key events from Operation Bagration in June 1944 to the Soviets' advance on Berlin in 1945 and how these tie in with the advance of the Western Allies. Also, could Stalin's strategic decisions have brought the war to an end sooner, and what did Hitler's last offensive in Hungary reveal about the dictator's priorities? Produced and edited by Dougal Patmore. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. We'd love to hear your feedback - you can take part in our podcast survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on. You can also email the podcast directly at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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• 0:00Dan Snow?

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• 2:06Dan Snow?

  Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. In the West, we often talk and share stories about the British, the Canadian, the American liberation of Western Europe. But in the east of the continent, and to the Russians in particular, that story of liberation is told very differently indeed. In the east, June 1944 is not primarily linked in people's minds with D-Day. It's remembered as being the start of one of the most enormous military offensives in history. The Soviet Operation Bagration would rip German army groups to pieces.

• 2:47Dan Snow?

  It would inflict the greatest defeat on the German army in its history. Bagramian swept German arms off Soviet soil. And as you know, Stalin wasn't prepared to stop there. The sequel was hardly as intense. And on this podcast, I'm going to look at the winter and the spring of 1945, 80 years on from those events. This is the story of how the Soviets ground their way towards Berlin, and how Hitler launched one last offensive, forgotten in the West, but telling, because it was an offensive not to protect Berlin, but Vienna,

• 3:29Dan Snow?

  showing in the last days of his life, his true loyalties to the city where he'd once lived, where he'd come of age as a young man. To help me with this job, I've got Evan Mawdsley. He was the Professor of International History at the University of Glasgow. He's written many books, including Thunder in the East: The Nazi-Soviet War, 1941 to 45. And his most recent book is Supremacy at Sea, all about victory in the Central Pacific. It's coming out paperback in May, please check it out. This is another episode in our D-Day to Berlin series, when we chart the course of the final months of the Second World War.

• 4:07Dan Snow?

  We've got more episodes coming up, but we're getting very, very close indeed to the furious capital of Berlin. Here's Evan Mawdsley, tell us how it happened. Enjoy.

• 4:30Speaker 05

  ...with one another again. And lift off, and the shuttle has cleared the tower.

• 4:39Dan Snow?

  Evan, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Can you give me a sense of just how monumental the catastrophe that overcame the German army on the Eastern Front was in the second half of 1944 from the launch of Operation Bagration?

• 4:56Speaker 06

  Yeah, thank you very much for inviting me to take part. Bagration is the starting point, I think, and it's good to think about that going through to Berlin. What actually happens there is this huge hole is blown in the German army with the destruction of Army Group Centre. Suddenly, really, things do completely collapse, and it's only the length of the retreat that enables the army to hold together until they fall back to the Vistula. So it's really a monumental defeat. The thing I would stress is that we often see it as a, well, there's a kind of arc which goes from Bagration to Berlin. It's a kind of continuous steamroller process. And the point I'd like to make really now is to say, well, it's not as simple as that,

• 5:38Speaker 06

  but it's 11 months between June 1944 and Operation Bagration, and May 1945, the fall of Berlin. It's quite a complicated process before it actually gets to that stage. So Bagration is certainly the key point because the Germans are rolling back.

• 5:56Dan Snow?

  Well, let's talk about that complicated process. I guess first of all, though, is this just a sign that the Germans are fundamentally broken? Or have the Soviets just come on so much in their fighting ability and their material advantages? Why is this last year of the war a story of pretty uniform German retreats rather than the seesawing on the Eastern Front that perhaps we see earlier in the war?

• 6:19Speaker 06

  I think, in a way, there's no turning back after Bagration. The thing about Bagration, by the way, which one might stress is that it's the point at which the Germans are kicked out of Russia. Until that stage, until June 1944, the Germans are still fighting inside Russia, so that suddenly changes. It's true that the Red Army by that time is really formidable in terms of numbers and in terms of... Of experience, there's a kind of Darwinian event going on where the incompetent officers and commanders have been weeded out and they've been replaced by much more capable people who are experienced with the war, but also in material terms, the Red Army is so much stronger. But there is a stage in which this is a to and fro. And what's going to happen

• 7:01Speaker 06

  at the Bergratjion is that the Germans can fall back basically to the Vistula River in the middle of Warsaw and there they can hold. They give up a lot of ground. They have to leave Russia. They lose the battle in Belarusia, but they they fall back across eastern Poland and they're able to hold on in Warsaw and on the Vistula. So to that extent, they are able to recover. And that's quite important. I suppose there is a to and a fro, because as you go forward, you run out of supplies and so on, you run out of lines of communication, and that's happening to the Russians as well. They've advanced several hundred miles from Belarusia to the Vistula, and then they're kind of stuck. And that's a problem for them. The other thing that happens to them is that a lot of opportunities suddenly open up once they reach Poland.

• 7:45Dan Snow?

  From the German point of view, so at the onset of winter 1944, dare they dream that perhaps they finally found a line perhaps on the Vistula River that they can hold? They think perhaps having Germany at their troops' backs might put some fight into them? Is there any sense that the Germans think this is a seriously defensible position?

• 8:03Speaker 06

  I think that is the case. It wasn't as stark as it might have seemed. Of course, what's happening at the same time is the Allies are advancing through France and then into Belgium and the Netherlands. So it's a two-front war in a way that it hasn't been before. So I suppose it might have seemed possible to have held East Prussia, to have held southern Poland, to have held Warsaw and the Vistula for some period of time. That wasn't something that they were getting desperate about. And in fact, the point to bear in mind, Dan, is that what happens after they get to the Vistula is that they stop, the Russians stop. And in August, Stalin actually calls a halt. He says that everyone is going to be on a strict defensive for a period of time while we consolidate our position

• 8:46Speaker 06

  and do other things. Other things involves going south. Into Romania, Hungary and Bulgaria. But the drive directly west to Berlin comes to an end at that stage. And it doesn't pick up again until January of nineteen forty five, when the Russians launched the Vistula Oda operation. So, yes, I think the Germans could have been reasonably, it isn't as dark to them as it actually became.

• 9:12Dan Snow?

  With our Western bias, we talk about D-Day, the Battle for Normandy a lot. How do the losses, how do the blows inflicted upon the Wehrmacht, upon Nazi Germany compare in the East and the West in this, in this summer and autumn fall of nineteen forty four? Is it possible to ask who was taking more of a toll on the German forces?

• 9:33Speaker 06

  Well, it was certainly the case that the Russians were taking a bigger toll on the German forces than the Western Allies were. In terms of casualties on the Allied side, they are much higher on the Eastern Front. I think it's important to bear in mind that there are parallels between the Eastern Front and the, and the Western Front. Because the invasion of Normandy in June coincides with the catastrophe of Operation Bagration. Much more costly for the Germans than Normandy is. Normandy doesn't last. I'm not in any way trying to trivialize what happened in Normandy. It's one of the most important campaigns of the war. And it is a kind of war-wearing campaign. But in terms of losses, Russian losses in the East are in the hundreds of thousands. Allied losses in Normandy are in the tens of thousands.

• 10:18Speaker 06

  And that's, I think, probably similar to what the German losses are. One difference is, is that a very large number of German divisions are destroyed in Belarus. Either they're trapped in a huge encirclement or they break up as they're retreating. Whereas the Germans are able to pull back out of France eventually. And to move back towards the Netherlands and Belgium, just to slow things down and to hope to get a line on the German border. So if you try to compare the two, it's substantially worse in Russia for the Germans than it is in the West.

• 10:51Dan Snow?

  When does Berlin become a sort of realistic target? I mean, when does Stalin think, right, we're going to push west and this time we're going to hit the capital of the Third Reich? Is it not till after Christmas and the beginning of 1945?

• 11:03Speaker 06

  They are still stuck on the Vistula, so that's not an immediate thing that they can do. But in October and November of 1944, the Russian High Command, the so-called Stavka, begins laying out a plan for a Berlin operation. And they are thinking of an operation which is going to take place early in 1945. This would involve the kind of central armies of the Russian forces. Stalin takes direct control of that operation, this being planned. This drive to Berlin, which has always been a central feature of Russian planning and also Russian propaganda, is something that Stalin wants to take direct responsibility for.

• 11:47Speaker 06

  And so Stalin and the Stavka create this striking force of the three most strongest formations within the Red Army, three army groups. The army groups are called in Russia, fronts, fronti. Creates three army groups under Stalin's overall command. Stalin's in Moscow, he does everything by telegraph or teleprinter. He doesn't go out to the front lines, but he's certainly overseeing things. And the core figure in this is Marshal Zhukov, who's the commander of the first Belarusian Army Group, with two other marshals, Marshal Rakasovski and Marshal Koniev, so on his northern and southern flanks. This is the striking force which is being aimed at Berlin.

• 12:30Speaker 06

  The operation as planned is supposed to begin in January and it's supposed to last about seven or eight weeks with a two-stage operation. It will end in February with the capture of Berlin before the beginning of the kind of rainy season, what's called, the Russians call it, the rasputitsa. You have like a spring fall when movement is much more difficult than it was in the winter or in the summer. And that's how the plan's laid out.

• 12:54Dan Snow?

  So what goes wrong, if you like, with Stalin's plan? Why is there not a hammer and sickle flying over Berlin by February?

• 13:00Speaker 06

  That's kind of the $64,000 question. There are a range of things that happen which interfere with things. One of them is that inevitably the German resistance is quite heavy, which slows things down. In fact, Zhukov is actually really more successful than I think he'd originally expected because within a matter of weeks, he's actually on the Oder River, which is maybe about 40 miles to the east of Berlin. But unfortunately, that's where he stops. He can't get beyond that. So you get this position at the beginning of February where the Russians are really very close to Berlin, but they're unable to push forward to do that. And the explanation for that, I mean, there are several explanations, but I think the

• 13:43Speaker 06

  one that probably is most important is that they get sidetracked, the Russians get sidetracked into operations in East Prussia without getting into the complications of geography. But basically, if you imagine there's a kind of central thrust which Zhukov is leading, which is going towards Berlin, and he's got an army under Rokossovsky to the north and another one on the Konj up to the south. The problem is that Stalin also wants to take East Prussia as well as Berlin. East Prussia is quite important to Stalin for other reasons. It's the most dangerous place in Germany as far as a threat to Russia is concerned. That was true both in 1941 and in 1914. And since the beginning of the war, Stalin has been insisting, the beginning of 1941,

• 14:26Speaker 06

  from that point on Stalin has always said that East Prussia has to be detached from Germany and it's got to be under some form of Russian control. Now, that's still the case under the USSR, under the Russian Federation. Königsberg, the centre of East Prussia. Kaliningrad is a Russian city. It's under Russian control. So that's also a priority for Stalin. And also, if you look at the kind of the layout, East Prussia is perched on the flank of the Russian army trying to move to Berlin. So there's always a danger that the forces in East Prussia will push down and cut the kind of spearheads of the Red Army off as they try to get to Berlin. So from Stalin's point of view, it's important to take East Prussia and to defeat

• 15:08Speaker 06

  that threat and also to achieve the kind of diplomatic situation that he wants where he can control East Prussia after the war. So the need to divert troops to do that, basically, Orykovsky, rather than going along the right flank of Zhukov, turns 90 degrees off the path to the west and drives north to the Baltic to cut off East Prussia. And it's a loss of that force which takes a real push out of the drive to Berlin in February. That's why on the order Zhukov is forced to stop. There's a pause.

• 15:41Dan Snow?

  A strange echo of Hitler's decision to attack north and south during the original Operation Barbarossa into the Soviet Union. Interesting stuff.

• 15:48Speaker 06

  It's also like what happened to the Russians in 1920 when they attacked Poland. The battle on the Vistula then was also being caught on the flanks by surprise. That was probably also in Stalin's mind. He was being cautious, although he was, they were going to win the war. They wanted to do it reasonably quickly and without embarrassment. So there was the danger there. But yes, I think there is a parallel with a war on this kind of huge scale, both in 1945 and also, as you suggest, in 1941.

• 16:18Dan Snow?

  Listen to Dan Snow's History. We're looking at the war in Eastern Europe 80 years ago. More coming up.

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• 18:57Dan Snow?

  Again, in the West, we can be a little bit naughty talking about the Battle of Bulge as Hitler's last offensive, but I learned that there wasn't offensive on the Eastern Front as well. And it strikes me in a slightly odd direction. Tell me about Hitler's decision-making in the spring of 1945.

• 19:11Speaker 06

  With our kind of Western view of what's happening in the war, and this is certainly true of the Americans, the view I think is that the Battle of the Bulge is the last gasp of the German army in December of 1944. But in fact, the last gasp of the German army was in March 1945, when some of the same forces that took part in the Battle of the Bulge also took part in an attack in Hungary. The 6 SS Panzer army is kind of one of the elite forces of the German army. And having pulled back from the Battle of the Bulge, it was then thrown into Hungary and took part in the battle there. Basically, the Russians kind of hoped that Hungary would change sides. Hungary was on the German

• 19:53Speaker 06

  side during the war, hoped that the Hungarians, like the Italians, would give in and that they could make progress on the southern part of the eastern front. But that didn't happen because the Hungarian government held together under Hitler, but it was overthrown by a more pro-fascist government. But in any event, there's a long campaign in Hungary, which nobody knows about, which is nevertheless very important, which goes on from October until maybe February 1945. And latterly, that campaign is about Budapest. One of the odd things about the war in the eastern front is there aren't many battles in cities. I mean, Stalingrad is an exception to that, and Berlin will be an exception later on. But Budapest is one of the few places where there's a long battle inside the city between

• 20:35Speaker 06

  the Russians and the Germans and Hungarians. And that battle is one which eventually is resolved in February 1945, when Budapest is captured by the Russians. But it's kind of like Warsaw on the Vistula. Budapest on the Danube is also a key to the whole transport system of Hungary, just as Warsaw in Poland was the center of the whole transport system of Poland and Central Europe. So for Hitler, it's quite important that he can counterattack and once again get control of Budapest. Hitler is a southerner. I think one should not lose track of that. We often blame the Third Reich on Prussian militarism, but Hitler was an Austrian, and he was very much a South German. So his heart wasn't

• 21:18Speaker 06

  really in fighting a battle in the north. I mean, he didn't really Care a great deal about aspects of Prussia, but he did care a lot about Austria and he did care a lot about Vienna. So the point about the loss of Budapest was that the next step for the Red Army would be advancing on and getting to Vienna, which is, you know, a place that the Hitler really valued. What he did was he launched this final attack to counterattack, to get back, to reconquer Vienna and get into a stronger position there. There are other reasons for that as well. One is that Hungary is one of the last Romanian German sources of oil. There are oil wells in Hungary and so that was important. So he was keen to do that.

• 22:00Speaker 06

  So what he does is he launches an attack from the west back towards Hungary. There's a big lake in in western Hungary called Lake Balaton. Lake Balaton is about fifty miles long. It's about twenty miles to the west of the Danube, to the west of Budapest. And so Hitler launches an attack from there at the beginning of March in the hope of overrunning the Russians. It's kind of like Kursk in nineteen forty-three. It's the same kind of attempt to overwhelm the Russians. This time it really doesn't work. The Russians are much stronger. It's now the rainy season, so the tanks get kind of mired down as they attack. The general there facing Marshal Tolbukin is very able and is able to stall the Germans.

• 22:40Speaker 06

  And within two weeks, this offensive, mainly by the Sixth SS Panzer Army, is stopped. And the Russians are able to resume the initiative. So within weeks, by the middle of April, they've got right across the western side of Hungary, reached Austria and moved into Vienna, about two weeks before Berlin falls. So it's an interesting episode. It could be argued that by sending elite troops to fight in Hungary, Hitler weakened the defenses of Berlin at a critical point. I don't think it was a crucial reason for the fall of Berlin, but certainly it made the Russians' tasks easier than it would have been otherwise.

• 23:17Dan Snow?

  And again, just to ask the question, why is this the vaunted Wehrmacht that we're so used to hearing people eulogize? They just can't seem to achieve the same effect on the battlefield they can a couple of years before. Is this because the British, Americans, the Soviets, they've got better kit, they know what's coming, they know how to deal with it, they've got air supremacy? What's the key Soviet ingredient here? How do they blunt the advance of the mighty Sixth Panzer Army?

• 23:41Speaker 06

  They're now fighting very strong Russian modernized forces. Well, one of the things about the Russians, by the way, which I think one can lose sight of is that they've always believed in what's called deep battle, which is armored thrusts deep into the enemy's rear lines to kind of paralyze the enemy forces. That involves using very heavy tank forces, using aircraft, using artillery. But they also have the advantage that the Russian army is now much more mobile than it was in 1942, 43. And that's partly explained by Lendle's American trucks. Certainly Zhukov himself thought that Studebaker was one of the key names to know about when you were trying to understand what happened on the eastern front. And that's kind of mobility was able to give the Red Army a kind of range that

• 24:25Speaker 06

  it had never had before. But I think beyond that, it's just the mass of Soviet forces is just so much stronger than what the Germans can put up in 45. The Germans really are in a much weaker position and they're fighting on two fronts as well. So what's happening in Hungary is kind of like what's happening in the Rhineland at the same time. You know, the German army there is also collapsing and the Germans are falling back towards the Rhine.

• 24:52Dan Snow?

  So Stalin redoubles his efforts to take Berlin in March, does he? He puts the Soviet offensive back on track after his foray to the north.

• 25:00Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think that's the next stage. And it's not connected to Ballaton particularly. It happens more or less the same time. But at the end of March, Stalin says, okay, that we've now reached a stage where we can launch an attack. That's partly because the rainy season is now over and things are better for the Red Army than before. But I think in the background, when the Allies are talking about what to do next, the general consensus in terms of discussions between the Allies is that the war is going to end in the middle of the summer. That it's not going to end immediately. There's going to be a lot of fighting involved before Germany is actually defeated. The German army still has some strength and it's possible the German armies will withdraw into the south. You know, they'll draw into the kind of mountain areas of southern Bavaria and Austria. And they'll

• 25:43Speaker 06

  hold out there for for a long period of time and they'll prolong the war. That was seen as a really serious danger. And whereas I think probably both the West and the Russians thought that Berlin was indefensible. It's it lies on flat territory, it's easier to encircle and so on. It's not the same as the kind of mountainous range to the south. Even so, they thought that Berlin might hold on for some time. Things changed that are both political and military. In a way, the political one is the more interesting, but it's also military. What happens is of Russian varsity, which is when the British army crosses the Rhine into Germany itself. It's also roughly the time when the Remagen Bridge over the Rhine is captured by the American army.

• 26:23Speaker 06

  So all of a sudden, the key defense of the Third Reich has collapsed with the loss of the Rhine Line. In fact, a very large army group under General Model is trapped in the Ruhr. It's the biggest pocket of the entire war. Stalin is worried that it's possible the Allies will get to Berlin first. And he thinks it's conceivable that the Allies, the Western Allies, British and the Americans, will do a deal with the Germans. There are negotiations going on in northern Italy, which involves the garrison there and the Western Allies. So Stalin worries that this is a possible danger where the Allies might be able to get to Berlin before the Red Army does.

• 27:03Speaker 06

  And I think that is very important as an incentive at the end of March, when he decides, well, we have to actually accelerate things and move forward. So on the second and third of April, Stalin hosts a conference in Moscow, which involves Stalin, it involves Zhukov. It involves the other two marshals in the east, Koniev and Rokossovsky. And they lay out a plan for a near immediate attack on Berlin. Now, that's harder than you might think, because both Rokossovsky and Koniev are fighting some way away from Berlin. Rokossovsky is on the Baltic, Koniev is in Salyzya.

• 27:41Speaker 06

  It takes about two weeks to get things together, but by the middle of April, they are finally able to launch the attack on Berlin. And within two weeks, they will succeed in overrunning the city.

• 27:55Dan Snow?

  Before you enter the city itself, how fierce was that fighting to sort of break into those German defensive positions? The Germans, I mean, Germans defending their capital, did they fight particularly hard for those positions?

• 28:08Speaker 06

  Most of the fighting doesn't take place in Berlin. It takes place in front of Berlin. It takes place as Red Army troops encircle Berlin. So the actual kind of chronology of events is that the offensive starts on the 60th of April. It's being launched primarily by Zhukov and his first Belarusian army group. That's the main kind of thrust of what's planned. In a couple of days, that offensive gets bogged down at a place called Zelov, which is just to the east of Berlin. It's not a kind of mountain range, but it is relatively hilly ground where the Germans do make something of a stand. Things become kind of confused. Zhukov blames Stalin for this, that, you know, they had too many troops to squeeze through

• 28:52Speaker 06

  too narrow a gap. In any event, that does sort of sort itself out after a couple of days. While that's going on, Stalin decides to also let Konyev loose on Berlin at the same time. So he gives Konyev a directive not to go into Bohemia, which would be a possibility, but instead to encircle Berlin from the sort of southeast, to move around to southwest and then get behind Berlin. And he gives Zhukov a similar directive. So in a sense, what he's set up is a race between Konyev and Zhukov to encircle Berlin. But what they do is that rather than blasting through the middle of Berlin, there are four tank armies, two with Zhukov, two with Konyev, and they loop around Berlin and they meet

• 29:36Speaker 06

  to the west of Berlin and they cut the city off. And when that happens, the war is over. Fundamentally, you know, Berlin is lost. There is no chance of the city holding out. But it's that operation to smash through the German front line and then to encircle Berlin is what causes the casualties. By the time they get into Berlin, things, they're so chaotic that there's no way the Germans can put up any kind of resistance inside the city. By the way, it's interesting that the fighting in East Prussia Was in fact almost twice as costly in terms of lies for the Red Army as was the battle for Berlin. So it wasn't actually the biggest part of the struggle for Germany. Another thing is interesting to bear in mind is that Allied losses in Germany and

• 30:17Speaker 06

  the West were quite light by the time all this is going on. By the time the Americans get over the Rhine at Remagen, there's only broken back resistance in Germany and the Russians only lose about 10,000 men, actually in Germany itself, in the fighting there.

• 30:33Dan Snow?

  Speaking of those Americans, though, if they had been prepared to take much higher casualties and pursue the same sort of callous attitude towards casualties as Stalin, could they have reached Berlin first? I mean, was there an option, do you think? Or is there simple geography at play here?

• 30:48Speaker 06

  Yes, I think that's one of the big questions which came up at the time and I think came up later on was, was this a great missed opportunity? It would have to be the American Army because the British Army is further north. The Army would have got to Berlin would have had to be an American Army. If the American Army had got there first, it would have psychologically and politically have had quite a big effect. And I think Stalin knew that. But I think, as you suggest, it's really an issue of geography, that when all this is taking place, sort of from the middle of February, Russians have only been 40 miles away from Berlin. When the Western armies are still on the, to the west of the Rhine, the Russians have always been very close. So it's hard to think that, under any circumstances,

• 31:32Speaker 06

  it would have been possible for the Americans to get there first. Another fact that might be involved, at least in Stalin's mind, is that you might have a situation where the Germans wouldn't resist, that in fact Germany would collapse and let the Americans through into Berlin in order to get a more favorable peace than they were from the Russians. They probably had a strong sense that they would be treated better in the immediate short term by being defeated by the Americans or the British than they would by being defeated by the Russians. So the Russians would have faced different resistance. Aside from being callous and brutal, the Germans also were callous and brutal, but they had a sense maybe that the Western Allies would be the easier ones to come to terms with.

• 32:15Speaker 06

  Well, you might just bear in mind is again this question of the Alpine redoubt. It's one of the reasons why Eisenhower was reluctant to go into Berlin because he thought, well, we can't get to Berlin anyway. And the real danger is prolonged resistance by the Germans fighting in the south. So that should be our priority. And finally, the thing that I think also we can't lose sight of is that under the zonal agreement about the war, which is made in 1944, Germany is divided into three zones of occupation and Berlin is within the Russian zone. So whatever happened, Berlin was always going to be in an area that was not Berlin itself, but the surrounding area around Berlin would have been under Russian control.

• 33:00Dan Snow?

  As the Soviets advanced, would it felt like liberation as we understand it again? Or am I just conditioned by allied propaganda? But there's a sense in places like France and Holland that troops are welcome. There was almost a festive atmosphere. As the Red Army rolled across both areas of Europe occupied by the Nazis and then onto German soil itself, how did they act towards the local population?

• 33:23Speaker 06

  Did the local population find themselves liberated? I think at one level not. I mean, we could talk about Poland for an hour, you know, and discuss whether in fact the Poles felt themselves being liberated by the Russians. Some Poles probably did. I think certainly Polish nationalists did not. And so for a whole lot of reasons, they weren't happy with the Russians occupying Poland. Hungary is different. Hungary is actually had had an authoritarian dictatorship under Admiral Horcy. And then during the war, it had an awful fascist government laterally, you know, the 400,000 Jews are killed in 1944, 45, coming from Hungary and going to Auschwitz. I don't think the Hungarian nationalists would have felt liberated by the Red Army. I think Jews probably did.

• 34:05Speaker 06

  I think that for people who were oppressed, mightily oppressed by the Germans, I think they certainly felt that the Russia armies played a liberating role, probably also.

• 34:15Speaker 06

  You know, in France and in Italy, there were quite strong communist parties. And from their point of view, the Russian advance is a kind of a struggle of liberation. That's important. I mean, this is politically quite contentious. The Russian word for liberation is osvobozhdenie. Certainly, a major part of the Russian self-image is that we liberated Eastern Europe. That was an enormous contribution to the outside world, and it was a major source of support in Eastern Europe. Certainly was used to justify control over Eastern Europe until 1989, 1990. So it's part of history. Clearly, the Russian armies did not behave in an impeccable way. We all know about, you know, mass rapes and looting and so on.

• 34:58Speaker 06

  Not the frontline troops, but the troops behind them were responsible for all kinds of activities. So I think that's a factor. But I think also, again, it's very current because one of the rationale behind the current Russian government is nationalism and the history of the Second World War. And the key event in that history of the Second World War is the role the Red Army plays in Eastern Europe in Germany in 1944, 45, which is seen as a liberating struggle and was in fact liberating. It did in fact drive something much worse out of Central Europe. But I think, you know, again, these things are always more complicated than one might think. And certainly, do the people who were Eastern Europe feel themselves liberated by the Red Army? And the answer probably is yes and no, not so much.

• 35:42Speaker 06

  I mean, remember also that there's a Stalingrad underground station in Paris, which is a kind of memory of that time when the Red Army is seen as being the great force which destroys the German army. I think to some extent, that's true. I can understand how one can value the role of the Red Army in the defeat of Nazi Germany, but still have questions about the role of the Red Army in the liberation, how much that was a liberation of Eastern Europe and of Germany.

• 36:09Dan Snow?

  Well, Evan Mawdsley, thank you so much for coming on this 80th anniversary and talking us through it all.

• 36:16Speaker 06

  Excellent. Thank you very much.

• 36:22Dan Snow?

  Thank you very much to Professor Evan Morsey for that brilliant overview. Be sure to tune in next Friday when the continuation of our D-Day to Berlin series, we reach a climactic battle in the Second World War in Europe. The brutal, bitter, street-by-street fight for the capital of the Third Reich, Berlin. To make sure you don't miss that, or any other episodes of Dan Snow's History, there's plenty of other good ones around as well. Just hit following your podcast play and it'll drop into your library automatically. Goodbye for now.

• 37:03Speaker 07

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• 38:09Dan Snow?

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