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Interesting video on the battle.  Germany was in no condition to stop the Russians, but I wonder what would have happened if Hitler had allowed the Courland pocket to have been evacuated earlier when his generals advised him to do so?

 

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Posted

The name of the town is "Seelow", not to be confused with Operation Seelöwe (which, for lack of umlaut keys, could be confused with the "Seelow Heights").

 

To answer your question, the Seelow battle was primarily characterized by too many Russians stumbling over each other. Turns out, there is something as a "too overwhelming numerical superiority", also known as the Three Stooges Effect. With a 15:1 force ratio, there simply wasn't enough space for a non-chaotic release of forces in stages, allowing the Wehrmacht to inflict larger losses than if there had been only eight or ten attackers per defender. Clearing out the Courland pocket earlier wouldn't have made much of a difference if both Op plans had otherwise remained unchanged. If the Wehrmacht had formed a bigger reserve near Seelow, maybe they could have delayed the inevitable a bit longer. If they had crammed everything into the defense, Wehrmacht casualties would have been higher without addressing the problem on the Soviet side that they simply had amassed too many attackers. Had the Courland forces been set up to defend elsewhere, either the Soviets wouldn't have cared because they decided to break through at Seelow. Or if they actually had diluted their attack force by detaching a stronger flank security, I suppose it might even have helped them to break through better.

You'd have to step one level deeper into fantasy land to think of a substantially different outcome (e.g. a German counterattack, or Fegelein! Fegelein! Fegelein! actually having forces at his disposal a few weeks later, not just paper troops to inflict paper cuts). The difference not being the Soviets failing to capture Berlin, but, well, possibly denying Zhukov the grand prize of being the first in Berlin.

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