May 2, 1945: The Battle of Berlin ends.

After Adolf Hitler’s suicide was announced by Nazi officials, the futile fight for Berlin ended  soon after (although fighting continued around the city until V-E Day). By the battle’s end, perhaps 200,000 people had been killed - thousands of them German civilians (some estimates put the number of civilians dead at over 100,000). 

In one of the most famous events of the battle (or perhaps of the entire war), the Soviets launched a mostly-symbolic attack on the long-abandoned Reichstag building and captured it; they then climbed atop the roof and raised the Soviet flag over the building. The photograph of this event (Raising a flag over the Reichstag) is today as iconic as Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima.

Thousands of tanks and millions of troops swarmed the capital during the battle, and it was devastated by the nine days of fighting that took place within the city’s own boundaries. Although one-fifth of the entire city was destroyed, around half of the buildings and infrastructure of the inner portions suffered heavy damage. The battle also  left a million people homeless and millions of others vulnerable to mass lootings and rapes carried out by vengeful Soviet troops (the frequency of the latter is still highly debatable). With Hitler dead and civilians weary of war, Karl Dönitz (Germany’s new President) announced that “the war must be brought to an end as quickly as possible, in order to prevent further bloodshed”, and Germany surrendered to the Allied Forces on May 8, six days after the end of the battle.