The Fall of Berlin
About The Fall of Berlin
A narrator ticks off the rivers the Red Army has crossed moving west, from the Volga to the Oder. Combat footage shows the crossing under fire and the street fighting in Berlin, cut against older German parade shots of the same streets. A unit fights to the Reichstag. The sequence ends on the raising of the Soviet flag. On 8 May 1945 the Soviet flag is up over Berlin.
Cast & crew
More about The Fall of Berlin
Yuli Raizman and Yelizaveta Svilova directed. More than forty cameramen with the 1st Belorussian and 1st Ukrainian Fronts supplied battle footage, and captured German film was cut in. Leonid Khmara narrates. Svilova also edited.
Themes
Background
The picture was assembled in 1945 from footage of the last Soviet offensive in Europe, after the Reichstag fight and the 8 May surrender.
Making
Front cameramen shot the advance and the city fighting. The editors alternated that material with German newsreel parades filmed on the same ground.
Preservation
A circulating print runs a little over an hour. A copy is on Wikimedia Commons.
Notes
- The Russian title is Berlin, also given as The Battle for Berlin – 1945.
- Vasily Chuikov, Georgy Zhukov, Hitler, Göring, Keitel, and Stalin appear in the footage, some of it archival.
- Raizman received a Stalin Prize of the first degree in 1946 for this documentary and for Towards an Armistice with Finland.
Awards
- Stalin Prize, first degree (1946)
Scenes
- The narrator names the rivers as an animated map moves west.
- Soviet troops cross the Oder while under fire.
- The flag goes up on the Reichstag.
