On April 20, 1945, Soviet forces reached the eastern edge of Berlin. It was Hitler’s 56th birthday. Ten days later, he was dead in his bunker, and two days after that, the city surrendered. The Battle of Berlin produced one of the most iconic images of the war: a Soviet soldier raising the red flag over the Reichstag.
But another photograph from those final days has always fascinated me—a wrecked Tiger I tank sitting just a hundred meters from the Brandenburg Gate, its gun pointing backward, surrounded by linden trees. It looked like a monument to a fallen empire. The story of how that tank got there is the story of the last stand of the Thousand-Year Reich. The battle for Berlin was the result of the collapse of Germany’s last major defensive line east of the city, the Seelow Heights.
For three days, from April 16, the Germans fought desperately against a massive Soviet offensive. They inflicted enormous casualties, but by April 19, the Soviets broke through and poured onto the open ground before Berlin. The surviving German units fell back into the city and its three defensive rings. One of those units was the Müncheberg Panzer Division, an ad hoc formation thrown together in February 1945 from training and tank demonstration units at the Kummersdorf testing grounds.
It started with just a handful of heavy tanks—four King Tigers, one Tiger I, and a Jagdtiger. By March, it had been expanded with more tanks, and it fought at the Seelow Heights until it was pulled out on April 17 and withdrawn into Berlin. Its remaining heavy armor was vital for the defense of the city center. By April 24, the Müncheberg was fighting in the northeast sector.
On April 26, it joined the 11th SS Panzergrenadier Division Nordland in a counterattack to push back Soviet spearheads at Tempelhof Airport and Neukölln. Ten tanks took part. The attack failed. After that, the division fell back to defense sector Z—Z for Zitadelle, the Citadel.
This was the central government district, a maze of massive ministry buildings and monuments, defended by thousands of SS, army, navy, and air force troops, along with Volkssturm home guards and Hitler Youth. Their ultimate purpose was to protect Hitler in his bunker beneath the Reich Chancellery garden. The Citadel was a tough nut to crack. The huge buildings, like the Reichstag, were formidable fortresses, and the flak towers mounted large-caliber guns that could fire on Soviet tanks as they advanced.
The Müncheberg and its remaining handful of working heavy tanks were used to bolster the defenses of the Tiergarten, the large central park where the Germans had set up an emergency landing strip on the Charlottenburger Chaussee. The control tower was the repurposed Victory Column, one of Berlin’s most famous monuments. I recently climbed its many steps to the top, where Luftwaffe air traffic controllers in 1945, armed with a radio, directed flights from what would be the last airbase in Berlin. From that height, you can see how the guns of the nearby zoo flak tower dominated the entire area for miles.
Red Army forces fought across the Moltke Bridge over the Spree River to assault first the Ministry of the Interior, which they called Himmler’s house, and the adjacent diplomatic quarter. Then they launched head-on attacks against the Reichstag across Königsplatz. The Reichstag’s defenses included an artificial water obstacle created by flooding an incomplete U-Bahn tunnel, anti-tank ditches, infantry trenches, 88-mm flak guns, and loophole firing positions in the building itself and on its roof. Supporting fire came from the zoo flak tower behind.
A Müncheberg Tiger I, numbered 323, was positioned beside the Reichstag, covering the top end of the Tiergarten in front of the Brandenburg Gate. Low on fuel, its job was to act as a blockhouse, taking on any Soviet tanks that approached the sector. A second Tiger I was probably situated near the zoo flak tower at the other end of the Charlottenburger Chaussee. Looking at the Soviet photographs of Tiger 323 after the war, it’s clear the tank was not in its original fighting position.
It appears to have been sitting in the road, but in the photos, it’s among the linden trees, its gun facing rearward as if ready for transport. I suspect that after the battle, Soviet engineers dragged the tank off the road to clear an obstruction to military traffic, which is why it looks the way it does in those photographs. Generalmajor Werner Mummert, commanding the Müncheberg Panzer Division, established his command post in the enormous zoo flak tower. An armored vehicle sometimes identified as a StuG III or IV assault gun was actually most likely a Müncheberg armored ammunition carrier, based on the Panzer IV tank.
It could well have been hauling ammunition the two kilometers to Tiger 323 from stores at the flak tower when it met its end near the Victory Column. Tiger 323 fought until May 1, 1945, when it was destroyed by its crew and abandoned, probably due to battle damage or lack of ammunition. Only one of its five crew members survived the Battle of Berlin. The Reichstag finally fell on May 2.
Though the Soviets had initially raised their red flag atop the building on April 30, fighting continued inside room-to-room, floor-to-floor for several days. On May 2, the fighting finally ended, and a second photograph was taken—the famous image of another red banner being planted on the roof. Tiger 323 remained in position in the Tiergarten for a while after the German surrender, becoming a popular place for Red Army soldiers to have their photograph taken. Though it is often described as the last Tiger tank to fall in Berlin, that honor actually went to a Tiger II, turret number 314 of the 503rd SS Heavy Panzer Battalion, which made an extraordinary last stand outside Potsdamer Railway Station.
That beast was credited with knocking out 39 Soviet tanks and assault guns and was ironically knocked out when it tried to move and ran over a German mine. This happened several hours after Tiger 323 had been destroyed at the Brandenburg Gate. In one photograph of 323, the Soviets have wound the turret back around, and a truck appears to have been driven right up to the tank. The bow machine gun has been removed.
Perhaps the Soviets were stripping it of ordnance and other movable items before it was hauled away. By the time US and British forces arrived in Berlin in July 1945, Tiger 323 was apparently gone—I can find no photographs of British and American soldiers clambering onto it. Hauled away to a central collecting point, it was eventually stripped and scrapped by the Soviets. But if you’re interested today, you can stand at the exact point where Tiger 323 was destroyed.
Even the trees are exactly the same. None of the knocked-out German tanks were preserved by the Soviets in museums, but there are some tanks involved in the Battle for Berlin that are preserved very close by. This pair of Soviet T-34-76s is preserved today at the Soviet Monument to their war dead in central Berlin, located in the Tiergarten.
Behind the memorial is a cemetery containing about 2,500 Soviet dead from the Battle of Berlin—just a small portion of the 80,000 or so who fell trying to take the city.
