Battle of the Seelow Heights

Background

By spring 1945 the Red Army stood on the Oder, a short drive from Berlin. Zhukov's 1st Belorussian Front held a bridgehead across the river around Küstrin, the most direct route to the capital, and Konev's 1st Ukrainian Front lay to the south on the Neisse. When Königsberg fell on 9 April, Rokossovsky's 2nd Belorussian Front was freed to take over the lower Oder, and Zhukov concentrated his armies opposite the Seelow Heights. Stalin committed three fronts, 2.5 million men, 41,600 guns and mortars and 6,250 tanks and self-propelled guns to the Berlin operation, and he wanted it done fast. He set Zhukov and Konev against each other, and Beevor suggests he even faked a telegram about Allied plans for Berlin to put pressure on both.

In March Hitler replaced Himmler at the head of Army Group Vistula with Gotthard Heinrici, a specialist in defence. Heinrici expected the main blow to come from Küstrin along Reichsstrasse 1. He left only a light screen along the river and fortified the Seelow Heights, an escarpment about 48 metres above the Oderbruch, the flat, ditch-cut flood plain on the river's west bank. Water released from a reservoir upstream turned much of the plain into marsh. Behind the heights lay further defensive lines, the last of them the Wotan-Stellung. The Seelow Heights were the gate to Berlin, 70–90 km away, and both commanders knew it.

The armies

Zhukov packed the Küstrin bridgehead with the 47th, 3rd Shock, 5th Shock (Berzarin) and 8th Guards (Chuikov) Armies, with the Polish 1st Army to the north and the 69th and 33rd Armies to the south. Katukov's 1st Guards and Bogdanov's 2nd Guards Tank Armies waited to exploit. Russian figures give the front 3,059 tanks and self-propelled guns and 18,934 guns and mortars. Zhukov's novelty was 143 anti-aircraft searchlights, one every 200 metres, meant to blind the defenders and light the way for his infantry.

Busse's 9th Army had about 200,000 men, 2,625 guns including nearly 700 flak guns, and 512 serviceable tanks, assault guns and tank-hunters. The CI Corps held the north, Weidling's LVI Panzer Corps the centre at Seelow, and the XI SS Panzer Corps and V SS Mountain Corps the south. Its divisions ranged from the 'Müncheberg' Panzer Division, the 20th and 'Kurmark' Panzergrenadier Divisions and the 9th Fallschirmjäger to the 303rd 'Döberitz' and 309th 'Berlin' Infantry Divisions; many were well under strength or filled out with Volkssturm militia. Tank-hunting brigades and flak batteries thickened the defence on and behind the heights. Its strengths were the ground, the guns, and a commander who had foreseen where and when the blow would fall.

The battle

The night before, 14–15 April. Reinforced battalions probed the German line after short artillery raids, gaining up to 5 km in places. Heinrici and Busse read the signs and, on the night before the assault, pulled most of their men back from the first line to prepared positions on the heights.

16 April: bombardment, searchlights and the Haupt-Graben. At 0300 Berlin time (0500 Moscow) about 9,000 guns and rocket launchers opened fire; over half a million shells fell in the first 30 minutes, much of it on emptied trenches. After 25 minutes the searchlights came on. In the dust and smoke the beams lit a wall of murk: Glantz describes infantry blinded or disoriented by their own lights, Sutton troops silhouetted for German marksmen. A Soviet after-action report insisted the lit zones helped and blamed the dust. The infantry floundered 1.5–2 km across the marshy Oderbruch to the Haupt-Graben, a drainage ditch at the foot of the heights dug out as a tank trap, where German fire held them. CDB90's Seelow Heights engagement (515) is part of this attack: 8th Guards Army's 4th Guards Rifle Corps led with the 47th and 57th Guards Rifle Divisions, and the 57th reached Seelow railway station, below the town, at nightfall. Around 1300 Zhukov, watching from Chuikov's observation post, decided he could not take the heights as planned and threw in both tank armies. Katukov's 1st Guards Tank Army went into 8th Guards Army's sector in the afternoon; Bogdanov's 2nd Guards reached 3rd and 5th Shock Armies' forward units by 1900 and stuck there. Tanks and infantry jammed the few roads and causeways. The front gained 4–6 km, 3rd Shock Army's 7th Rifle Corps 8 km. That day Stalin, on the telephone, let Konev, who was advancing faster in the south, turn his tank armies north towards Berlin; the race was on.

17 April: the second line. The Germans fed in reserves from Army Group Vistula and counterattacked again and again. The 4th Guards Rifle Corps, with part of the 11th Guards Tank Corps, fought into Seelow, and Russian accounts have the 57th Guards fighting in its centre that day; one Osprey account dates the town's fall to early on the 18th. By nightfall 5th Shock and 2nd Guards Tank Armies had broken the Stein-Stellung, the second line. To the south Konev drove back Fourth Panzer Army, and that night his tank armies struck west and then north, deep behind Heinrici's flank.

18 April: the third line. Soviet forces bypassing the heights from the north met counterattacks by the 11th SS 'Nordland', 23rd SS 'Nederland' and SS Heavy Panzer Battalion 103. In 8th Guards Army's sector some 200 flak guns fired over open sights along the road west of Seelow. The front gained only 3–6 km and reached the last German line; Moscow complained of the pace. CDB90's engagement ends on this day.

19 April: the breakthrough. The CI Corps had already given way around Wriezen. The front split along about 25 km between Wriezen and Behlendorf, the Polish 1st Army crossed the Alte Oder, and the 82nd Guards Rifle Division took Müncheberg. By evening the 9th Army no longer held a continuous front.

Aftermath

No one agrees on what the four days cost. Beevor puts Soviet dead at just over 30,000 and German at 12,000; Le Tissier calls 33,000 Soviet dead an admitted figure and suspects more than twice as many, with 743 tanks and self-propelled guns destroyed. The memorial counts over 35,000 Soviet dead to 20 April. At the other extreme Isaev, from Russian archives, gives 5,000–6,000 killed and missing, and Sutton of the Australian War Memorial calls the 30,000 almost certainly wrong. Krivosheev's official figures for the whole Berlin operation, three fronts and three weeks, are 78,291 killed or missing and 274,184 wounded, plus 8,892 Poles; the 1st Belorussian Front's share was 37,610 irrecoverable.

The breakthrough opened the road to Berlin, and Berlin was encircled within a week. Most of the 9th Army was cut off south-east of the city before it could fall back. Zhukov's critics argue he should have bypassed the heights and that his tank armies went in too early; his defenders reply that this was the fastest way to join Konev and cut off 9th Army.

In 1945 Zhukov commissioned Lev Kerbel to put up a monument over the graves of some 200 Soviet soldiers at Seelow. The GDR opened a memorial museum in 1972 that told only the Soviet story; a new exhibition in 1995 also remembers German and Polish soldiers and civilians.

Wargaming it

Seelow is a set-piece breakthrough against a defence in depth, and it works at two scales. At corps and division level (a few hours per turn), the Soviet player has crushing mass but a narrow, marshy approach, a handful of causeways and roads, and two tank armies that will clog everything if released too soon. The German player has too few men, good ground, guns and a short list of reserves. The timing rules matter: the bombardment and searchlight attack, the decision to commit the armour, the arrival of 'Nordland' and 'Nederland', and the pressure of Konev's race to the south, which can be modelled as a clock the Soviet player is racing.

The big what-ifs: Heinrici does not pull back the night before and the barrage hits full trenches; Zhukov holds his tanks until the infantry are through, or swings round the heights from the north; Schörner releases his reserves to the 9th Army's flank. A Soviet win is breaking the third line by 19 April; a German one is to hold long enough that Konev reaches Berlin first.

At battalion or company level, the CDB90 fight suits a tight scenario: the 57th Guards Rifle Division, with tanks and heavy artillery, crossing the Haupt-Graben to Seelow station and fighting up into the town, against tank-hunters and flak in the houses above. Mud, flooded ditches, dust and darkness need their own rules.

Maps and pictures