Revisiting Battle That Surrounded Berlin

The officers huddled in a candlelit cellar in an abandoned farmhouse midway between the Oder River and Berlin. Outside the walls could be heard the steady pounding of artillery explosions and the whoosh of rockets to the east. Sixty-year-old General Helmuth Weidling, a holder of the Knights Cross with Oak Leaves and Swords, listened to reports of the three-day-old battle from his subordinates. Weidling's LVI Corps had been tasked with the most difficult assignment given to any of the four corps in the German Ninth Army: defend the most direct approach to Berlin against Vasily Chuikov's reinforced Eighth Guards Army.