Was the Battle of Berlin 1945 for the Germans a senseless battle?

 

Of course it was. After the Allies landed at Normandy and then broke out, General von Rundstedt very correctly said that the proper thing to do next was “End the damned war!” Germany’s situation was already hopeless. All that extending the war could do was kill more people, and most of those people would be Germans. More cities would be bombed: German cities. More and more destruction, devastation and death would be visited on Germany every single day. There was no way out, and at the end of it all, Germany was either going to surrender or be conquered and left a heap of ruins, with several million more dead people.

The Nazis chose to fight to the end, which merely meant all of those ruins, all of those dead people, and an even greater desire for revenge on the part of the Allies, particularly the Soviets.

The Germans should have surrendered in 1944. Failing that, they should have surrendered in January 1945. Every day that war went on, was a day when the future of Germany was made less bright, by depriving the German future of more and more, and more German lives.

By the time it came to the Battle of Berlin, the situation was completely hopeless. The place was going to fall to the Soviets one way or the other, and the Soviets were not kind conquerors (nor did they have any reason to be). To surrender and endure a somewhat orderly sack would have been better for the Germans than to endure the utter savage destruction and the subsequent rape they did.

The Germans accomplished nothing by continuing the fight in 1945, other than the elimination of 1 million more German lives on the Eastern front alone. There was nothing brave, nor proud, nor prudent, nor reasonable, nor remotely intelligent in continuing that fight once it was clear the war was over. All that the German leaders did by prolonging the war after it had been irretrievably lost was guarantee the deaths of millions more Germans. Utter insane stupidity, which accomplished nothing other than to permanently diminish the nation they led into the ground.