The Twentieth of July conspirators intended to liberate Germany from within. Their failure to do so meant that the country would have to be conquered by its foreign opponents. As we have seen, some Allied strategists had hoped to force a surrender by pounding German cities into rubble. It had become apparent by mid-1944 that this strategy was not going to work. Not only was the Reich holding on, but its industrial capacity was actually increasing despite the bombing. In Berlin, the target of dozens of major raids, many key plants had been damaged and the transportation system was in shambles. However, through rationalization and the relocation of plants to outlying districts, the city’s industrial production managed to reach its wartime peak in early 1944.
There being no doubt that Germany would have to be conquered with ground forces, Allied armies pressed their assault on the Reich from west and east. When the Americans managed to cross the Rhine at Remagen in early March 1945, it became urgently necessary to decide how best to organize the push across Germany. A second question was where Berlin would fit in the broader picture. A bitter debate broke out in the Western camp over these issues. General Bernard Montgomery and the British wanted to focus maximum effort on a drive across northern Germany with Berlin as the goal. In their view, this represented not only the fastest way to defeat Germany but had the added advantage of taking Berlin before the Russians could get there. But General Dwight D. (Ike) Eisenhower, the overall commander of the Allied armies, concluded that the most efficacious route to victory lay in destroying large Wehrmacht concentrations in the center and south, a task he believed could be best handled by forces under Generals Omar Bradley and George Patton. Ike also decided to let the Russians take Berlin, which by Allied agreement was designated to lie within the Soviet zone of occupation after the war. For him this was not an overly painful decision: his priority was to defeat the Reich as quickly as possible and with minimal loss of Allied lives. Moreover, he believed that the crucial test would come not in Berlin but in the south of Germany, were the Nazis were rumored to be planning a last-ditch defense in the Alps (the rumors turned out to be false).
Eisenhower was much criticized, especially by the British, for not racing the Russians to Berlin. British officers contemptuously referred to the American general’s deference to Stalin as “Have a Go, Joe,” a phrase used by London prostitutes seeking GIs’ custom during the war. Ike himself later told Willy Brandt that if he had to do it over again, he would have ordered American troops to take the German capital. Yet in the context of the time, he probably made the right decision. In late March, when he reaffirmed his basic strategy, Western armies still stood 250 miles from Berlin, while the Russians were on the Oder-Neisse line, only thirty-three miles from the eastern edge of the city. Asked by Ike to estimate probable Western Allied casualties in an assault on Berlin, Bradley projected a loss of about 100,000 men. “A pretty stiff price for a prestige objective,” he said, “especially when we’ve got to fall back and let the other fellows take over.”
The Russians, meanwhile, were gearing up for their push on a city which they considered to be far more than just a prestige objective. “He who controls Berlin controls Germany and whoever controls Germany controls Europe,” Lenin once said. The German capital loomed so important in Russian strategy that its prospective conquest ignited a race between two military rivals every bit as fierce as the fabled contest between Montgomery and Patton. In November 1944 Stalin had promised Berlin to Marshal Georgi Zhukov, who had been the principal architect of the Red Army victories so far. But at a staff meeting on April 1, 1945, as the Russians were making their final plans for the Berlin offensive, the Soviet leader allowed himself to be convinced that Berlin could be taken more quickly if General Ivan Konev’s First Ukrainian Front pressured the city simultaneously with the forces of Zhukov. Understanding the usefulness of competition, and always willing to play off one subleader against another, Stalin drew up two approach routes to the German capital that stopped just short of the city. After reaching that point, he said, “whoever breaks in first, let him take Berlin.”
