"From the moment Stalin heard that the Americans were across the Rhine, he knew that the race for Berlin was on.”—Antony Beevor.

WIth the Allies on the Elbe, and the Red Army on the Oder, nazi Germany was being terminally squeezed by April 1945. But before they can drive on the prize, Berlin, the Red Army must take Vienna.

Georgy Zhukov, Marshal of 1st Belorussian Front

Ivan Konev, Marshal, 1st Ukrainian Front

Rodion Malinovsky, Marshal, 2nd Ukrainian Front

Fyodor Tolbukhin, Marshal, 3rd Ukrainian Front

The #6 Top World War 2 podcast continues following the Red Army’s advance into Hungary and Germany—and the expensive failure of the German Operation Spring Awakening.

People

Rodion Malinovsky

Fyodor Tolbukhin

Heinz Guderian

Friedrich Schorner

Walther Nehring (right)

The Red Army penetrates deep into Germany, leading to the redrawing of eastern European borders after.

Marshal Ivan Konev, Commander of the 1st Ukrainian Front

General Walther Wencke, chief of staff, Army Group Vistula, February 1945

Child soldiers in the wehrmacht: Hitler Youth in Breslau (Wroclaw), February 1945

Breslau (Wroclaw) in fighting, 1945

Why did the Yalta Conference end the way it did? Why did Churchill try an end-run around Roosevelt? Why did Roosevelt try to curry Stalin’s favour? What would this mean to post-war history?

Author Giles Milton joins to discuss some of the Second World War’s most perplexing questions.

Giles Milton, author: https://www.gilesmilton.com/

• Books
• podcast: Ministry of Secrets

Why were the Yalta Conference’s decisions so vague? Why did Stalin get everything he wanted? And why did Roosevelt act so naively?

Giles Milton, bestselling author of The Stalin Affair: The Impossible Alliance that Won the War, joins the podcast today to help understand the relationships that had the greatest impact on the second meeting of the Big Three of the Second World War.

Author Giles Milton

The Stalin Affair: The Impossible Alliance that Won the War by Giles Milton

The Big Three at Yalta, February 1945. Roosevelt would be dead in two months.

Giles Milton, author: https://www.gilesmilton.com/

• Books
• podcast: Ministry of Secrets

Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt meet in Malta in the Mediterranean in February 1945, to prepare to meet Josef Stalin in the second Big Three conference on Soviet territory—Yalta.

It was a meeting that shaped the world for decades.

Left: Franklin Roosevelt in 1944. Right: Roosevelt and Churchill at Malta, 2 February 1945.

Averell Harriman and daughter Kathleen

The Vorontsov Palace, quarters for the British delegation

The Livadia Palace, quarters for the American delegation

The Yusupov Palace, housing the Soviet delegation

The Red Army continues its continual advance onto German soil—and the flight of German civilians and military.

The Samland Peninsula in 1905, showing city and town names still present in 1945.

Franklin Roosevelt meets Winston Churchill in Malta, 2 February 1945

Civilians from Konigsberg walk across frozen Vistula Lagoon, January 1945

CIvilians flee Lodz, Poland, January 1945

Red Army arrives in Lodz, Poland, January 1945

Hitler shakes hands with Col. Claus von Stauffenberg at the “Wolf’s Lair," July 1944.

Ruins of the Wolfsschanze, “Wolf’s Lair,” Hitler’s headquarters in East Prussia

Antony Beevor, The Second World War. New York, NY, USA: Little, Brown and Company, 2012.

Scott Bury, Walking Out of War: Volume 3 of the Eastern Front Trilogy. Ottawa, Canada: The Written Word, 2017.

Evan Mawdsley, Thunder in the East: The Nazi-Soviet War, 1941–1945. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016.

Anthony Tucker-Jones, Slaughter on the Eastern Front: Hitler and Stalin’s War, 1941–1945. Stroud, Gloucestershire, UK: The History Press, 2017.

David Sumner, Europe at War: A podcast about lesser-known battles of the Second World War. https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/europe-at-war-a-ww2-podcast/id1788043665

Larysa Zariczniak, Wandering the Edge: Ukrainian history and culture https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/wandering-the-edge/id1547149262

David Sumner, Europe at War: A WW2 podcast https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/europe-at-war-a-ww2-podcast/id1788043665

Morse code by Thane Brown

Music composed and recorded by Nicolas Bury

After 10 shattering blows on the Eastern Front in 1944, the Western Allies and the USSR continue to compress nazi Germany in January 1945.

1a: 1 January 1944

1b: 1 January 1945

1c: 15 January 1945

Map 4: The East Prussia offensive

The Budapest Chain Bridge destroyed, January 1945

Ruins of Warsaw, even in 1947

Source: New York photographer Henry N. Cobb, taken in 1947, via Rare Historical Photos.