On 16 April 1945, Marshal Zhukov's First Belorussian Front launched a massive offensive on the Seelow Heights, east of Berlin. It was the beginning of the last major battle of the war in Europe.
‘At last it was the end of the war,' says Vladlen Anchishkin, an officer with a mortar unit involved in the Battle for Berlin, ‘it was a triumph and it was like a race, like a long distance race, the end of the race.'
Red Army soldiers had fought in the most extreme conditions, had seen their own motherland devastated, and many had already wreaked revenge on the Germans from the moment they had crossed into German territory. ‘In the end, in the war itself, people go mad,' says Vladlen Anchishkin. ‘They become like beasts. You shouldn't consider a soldier an intellectual. Even when an intellectual becomes a soldier, and he sees the blood and intestines and the brains, then the instinct of self preservation begins to work… And he loses all the humanitarian features inside himself. A soldier turns into a beast.'
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