What was the Battle of the Seelow Heights?
The Battle of the Seelow Heights was the opening battle of the Soviet assault on Berlin. From 16 April 1945 Marshal Georgy Zhukov's 1st Belorussian Front, with the 1st Polish Army, attacked the German 9th Army dug in on a ridge above the Oder marshes about 70 kilometers east of the capital. A night attack lit by searchlights went badly wrong, and it took until 19 or 20 April, depending on the source, and tens of thousands of lives to break through and open the road to Berlin.1
It was a frontal assault on a prepared ridge, launched in the dark across a marshy valley by an enormous mass of men and guns, and for three days it barely moved. The confusion of the first night, the jammed roads and the losses became the best-known story of the last campaign of the war in Europe.2
Background: the race for Berlin
After the Soviet winter offensive the Red Army stood at the end of January 1945 on the Oder and the Neisse, from Stettin to Görlitz, less than 80 kilometers from Berlin. Through February and March it fought for bridgeheads across the Oder. The fortress of Küstrin, which blocked the main road to the capital, held out until its garrison broke out at the end of March, and with that the bridgehead on the west bank was secure.3
The German capital was the declared goal of Stalin's leadership, and the Red Army was racing the Western Allies to reach it. Through the first two weeks of April the Soviets massed three fronts for the final blow. Ziemke counts 2.5 million men, 6,250 tanks, 7,500 aircraft and 41,600 guns and mortars, and LeMO and dzieje.pl give nearly the same figures.4
The plan gave the main role to Zhukov's 1st Belorussian Front, attacking straight for Berlin out of the Küstrin bridgehead. Marshal Ivan Konev's 1st Ukrainian Front was to cross the Neisse to the south, and Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky's 2nd Belorussian Front, which needed more time to deploy and would start several days late, was to strike across the lower Oder in the north.5 › Georgy Zhukov
The plan also set two Soviet marshals against each other. Britannica describes Zhukov and Konev racing for the glory of taking Berlin and willing to accept enormous casualties to win it, and Ziemke shows that the plan left Konev the option of swinging his tank armies north toward the city if the main thrust stalled. At Seelow, that is what happened.6
Armies and commanders
The greatest natural obstacle on Zhukov's road was the Seelow Heights, a ridge along the western edge of the Oderbruch, the flat, marshy valley of the Oder, about 70 kilometers east of Berlin. Reichsstraße 1, the main road to the capital, climbed it at Seelow. The waterlogged ground below ruled out fast armored thrusts, and minefields and machine-gun nests covered the slopes.7
The line was held by the German 9th Army of General Theodor Busse, put together from whatever units could be found, and the main defensive position had been organized by General Gotthard Heinrici, the commander of Army Group Vistula. The figures for the two sides vary with the frame. For the battle itself the Memorial Museums portal gives about 900,000 attackers against 200,000 defenders. For the whole Oder front LeMO counts about a million German soldiers with barely 800 tanks, many of them Volkssturm, police and improvised units; dzieje.pl gives about 760,000 men, 1,500 tanks and 2,200 aircraft, much of it grounded for want of fuel.8
The defenders were short of almost everything. LeMO and dzieje.pl both describe German forces suffering from a serious lack of ammunition and fuel, and Ziemke found that the artillery ammunition of Army Group Vistula stood at less than one basic load a few days before the attack. Fighting beside the Soviets, as part of Zhukov's front, was the 1st Polish Army.9
The battle in phases
16 April, the searchlights. The attack began before dawn with one of the heaviest artillery bombardments of the war. Then anti-aircraft searchlights were switched on to blind the defenders as the infantry went forward: 120 of them in the count of the Memorial Museums portal, 140 in the memorial's own catalogue, 143 according to Liberation Route Europe. The beams reflected off the smoke and dust and lit up and dazzled the attackers instead, and in the mud, smoke and darkness the infantry lost its way.10
16 April, the tanks. When the infantry stalled, the tank armies were sent in earlier than planned. With the German line still unbroken, their columns only jammed the roads of the bridgehead below the ridge and added to the chaos.11
17 and 18 April. The next two days brought fierce fighting in the marsh and on the slopes and little ground. Only on the 18th did the tide begin to turn, as Soviet armor broke into the German position south-west of Seelow and reached the main road beyond the town.12
Meanwhile in the south. Konev had a far easier start. On the same morning his 1st Ukrainian Front forced the Neisse, and its tank corps broke through the line of Field Marshal Ferdinand Schörner's Army Group Center, crossed the Spree around Spremberg and took Cottbus. With Zhukov stuck at Seelow, Konev's tank armies were turned north toward Berlin.13
Turning point: the breakthrough
The last German line gave way on 19 April in the accounts of Liberation Route Europe and Ziemke, after which the Soviet tanks pushed on toward Müncheberg. Dzieje.pl, the Seelow memorial and the Federal Agency for Civic Education put the breakthrough after four days of fighting, on 20 April; all agree that the Germans held for three full days.14
For three days Zhukov's immense army stood stalled at the foot of the heights.
The price was enormous. The Memorial Museums portal gives over 35,000 Soviet and 12,000 German dead between 16 and 20 April, and over 100,000 soldiers killed in the fighting for the Oder bridgeheads and the heights together. Dzieje.pl puts Soviet losses on the Seelow Heights at almost 40,000 killed and wounded and 900 tanks, more tanks than Heinrici's army group had on that sector.15
Aftermath: the road to Berlin
While Zhukov's armies were held at Seelow, Konev's 1st Ukrainian Front crossed the Neisse, broke through to the south and turned its tank armies toward the capital. Zhukov's front, by-passing Berlin to the north, put its first assault troops into the north-eastern outskirts on 20 April according to LeMO; dzieje.pl has it reaching the outskirts on 22 April. On 25 April the two Soviet pincers met north-west of Potsdam and the ring around Berlin was closed.16 › Battle of Halbe, 1945
The 9th Army that had held the heights never reached Berlin. Driven back to the south-east of the city, Busse's command, with soldiers, refugees and civilians, was cut off in the Spreewald forests around Halbe; Ziemke follows the encirclement in the army group's records, and Liberation Route Europe dates it to 22 April. Busse ordered a breakout to the west toward General Walther Wenck's 12th Army.17
The same day, 25 April, American and Soviet troops met on the Elbe at Torgau, cutting Germany in two. Inside the ring the capital was defended by a scratch force: LeMO counts just under 100,000 men, a little over 40,000 of them Volkssturm, and dzieje.pl over 80,000, nearly half of them poorly trained and poorly armed Volkssturm units.18
The battle for the city itself lasted until 2 May, when the garrison commander, General Helmuth Weidling, surrendered. Britannica puts the Red Army's losses in the whole Berlin operation at some 350,000 casualties; dzieje.pl gives over 361,000 Soviet and Polish soldiers killed or wounded.19 › Battle of Berlin, 1945
Legacy and memory
Soon after Berlin fell, Zhukov had the sculptor Lev Kerbel raise monuments along the Red Army's road to the capital. At Seelow a bronze Red Army soldier stands over the graves of his fallen comrades.20
In 1972 East Germany opened a memorial museum at the foot of the Soviet monument. Its exhibition told the battle from the Soviet side only and, in the words of the Federal Agency for Civic Education, glorified the Red Army's victory; it was revised in 1985. Only after reunification could the battle be studied without ideological constraints, and since 1995 a new exhibition has widened the story beyond the Red Army, to the other nations' soldiers and to the civilian victims.21
The memorial's own catalogue now corrects one of the legends: the searchlight on display, long claimed to have been used on the night of 16 April, was in fact made after the war and served to light the memorial at ceremonies until the end of the GDR; the Memorial Museums portal still lists it as one of the searchlights of the battle.22
Visiting the battlefield today
The memorial and museum stand on the heights at Seelow, above the Oderbruch, with Kerbel's statue and the Soviet cemetery, and tanks, rocket launchers and guns displayed in the grounds. The site offers guided tours that explain the course of the battle, and programs for school groups and teachers.23
