In April 1945 there was little doubt in the Allied camp about ultimate victory over the Third Reich. For Stalin and the Soviet Union the only real goal now was to capture Berlin before the western Allies got there. Stalin was painfully aware of the limited resistance the Allies were meeting in their advance and he knew how desperately the Germans fought against his forces on the Eastern Front. Eisenhower's assurance that there would be no western drive on Berlin merely made Stalin more suspicious of his allies' intentions.

Marshal Zhukov, Stalin's (almost) trusted second in command, was positioned to become the conqueror of Berlin. After loyal and successful service on all sectors of the Eastern Front, the boisterous Marshal of the Soviet Union now commanded 1st Belorussian Front which was poised a mere fifty kilometers from Berlin, along the Oder River. The sheer quantity of Soviet artillery, tanks, planes and men massed into the 1st Belorussian Front seemed enough to assure a quick and decisive victory over the hastily assembled German forces opposite it. Even so, Stalin is reputed to have hedged a couple of weeks before the offensive. He removed the previously established boundary of operations in the Berlin area between 1st Belorussian Front and its southern neighbor, 1st Ukrainian Front, commanded by Marshal Konev. Some have since interpreted this as a none-too-subtle hint to the marshals that what mattered most was that the battle be completed quickly. However, Konev was at a clear disadvantage in this race to Berlin as he had a much longer distance to cover.

Opposite Marshal Zhukov and his forces stood Army Group Vistula, commanded by Colonel General Heinrici. He had replaced Reichsfuhrer Himmler as commanding officer near the end of March and was assigned the unenviable task of preventing a Soviet drive to Berlin from the east. Heinrici's army group consisted of 3rd Panzer Army under General Manteuffel to the north and 9th Army under General Busse in the south, where Zhukov intended to break through. Neither army had any substantial combat value - their units consisted of already depleted army units, numerous divisions of the Volksturm and a myriad of hastily assembled formations that did not have significant combat training or even enough weapons for the individuals pressed into the ranks. There seemed to be little available to Heinrici to offer any significant resistance to a Soviet thrust anywhere along his front line.

Heinrici, however, was probably the most brilliant defensive tactician to fight in World War II. Over time he had acquired a reputation for being unbreakable in a defensive battle. He commanded 4th Army before Moscow during the Soviet winter offensive of 1941-42 and had managed to hold. For two years he continued to hold against what are now known to have been important Soviet attempts to break through his army. They never did.

During the devestating Soviet onslaught in the fall of 1944, Heinrici commanded 1st Panzer Army which resisted the Soviet advance so stubbornly that Heinrici was credited with their hesitation to advance further and the subsequent restoration of a stable German front. Equally important was the fact that Heinrici made do with whatever he was given. He was never favored by Hitler and his commands never received generous quantities of replacements or material. The battle Heinrici was now expected to fight would be no different - Hitler had other priorities.

Ever since the unsuccessful conclusion of the Battle of the Bulge, Hitler had turned his attention southwards to Hungary and its scanty oil resources. In March, the last panzer reserves were used in an attempt to recover the Hungarian oil fields. It failed. Hitler continued to see the threat from the southeast as greater than that from the east, regardless of what his senior generals advised, and he showered what little reserves were left to the German armed forces (including some from Army Group Vistula) on Field Marshal Schorner, Heinrici's southern neighbor.

Schorner, the devout Nazi, commanded Army Group Center facing Marshal Konev's 1st Ukrainian Front. The Soviet leadership had hoped for precisely this. They wanted Konev to appear more menacing and draw German units south away from their intended axis of advance along the Berlin highway. Hitler apparently fell for the deception, leaving Heinrici's command with even less to resist a Soviet assault.

It was a situation that Heinrici had faced before and his four years of command experience on the Eastern Front had prepared him well for the coming battle. Heinrici firmly believed in a defense in depth. When his forces were not engaged in combat they were utilized for building lines of communication and further defensive lines behind the front. Doing so facilitated the movement of units from quiet sectors of the front to the focal point of a battle and it allowed for the ability to fall back in the face of overwhelming forces without losing the advantages of a prepared defense. There were some serious risks involved in the manner in which Heinrici fought back against a Soviet attack.

Heinrici tended to aggressively thin out quiet sectors in order to provide enough forces to the sectors targeted for a breakthrough. Given the generally inadequate number of troops he had available, it was the only way to compensate for Soviet numerical superiority but it left quiet sectors virtually defenseless. That was one reason Heinrici emphasized tactical reconnaissance - it allowed such thinning to take place with reasonable confidence that nothing would happen in the depleted areas. Intensive local reconnaissance provided Heinrici with an accurate and up-to-date picture of the tactical situation along his front. With this he would derive an estimate of when to expect a Soviet offensive to begin and would judiciously order a withdrawal of his main forces to a second line (the main defensive position) hours prior to the time he calculated for Soviet artillery to begin firing. Heinrici never erred in his calculations.

The focal point of this Soviet offensive was the Seelow Heights...