quote:
The Battle of Halbe (German: Kesselschlacht von Halbe) was a battle lasting from April 24 to May 1, 1945[2] in which the German Ninth Army under the command of General Theodor Busse was destroyed as a fighting force by the advancing Red Army during the Battle of Berlin.

quote:
The Ninth Army, encircled in a large pocket in the Spree Forest region south-east of Berlin, attempted to break out westwards through the village of Halbe and the pine forests south of Berlin to link up with the German Twelfth Army commanded by General Walther Wenck with the intention of heading west and surrendering to the Western Allies. To do this, the Ninth Army had to fight its way through three lines of Soviet troops of the 1st Ukrainian Front under the command of Marshal Ivan Konev, while at the same time units of the 1st Belorussian Front, under the command of Marshal Georgy Zhukov, attacked the German rearguard from the northeast.

After heavy fighting, about 30,000 German soldiers—just over one third of those originally in the pocket—reached the comparative safety of the Twelfth Army's front lines. The rest were either killed or captured by Soviet forces.

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9th Army’s ordeal actually began a week earlier on the Seelow Heights where it held the last real defensive line at the gates of Berlin. 9th Army held back Zhukov’s 1st Belorussian Front for 3 days before the line broke. After that, part of 9th Army (CI corps) was driven north and reassigned to a motley collection of shattered formations cobbled together and named “Army Detachment Steiner”, the rest of 9th Army moved south to the Spree Forest where they were encircled and destroyed.

(Sidenote: if you’ve ever seen the famous scene where Hitler has a total come-apart on his generals; what started it was when they informed him Steiner’s “army detachment” was unable to attack the Soviets and save Berlin. Hitler had personally ordered this fanciful attack. Steiner’s “army detachment” was supposed to envelop the entire 1st Belorussian Front despite the fact 1st Belorussian front outnumbered Steiner's formation 10 to 1. This really shows how completely delusional and divorced from reality Hitler had become by early 1945. The news of the failure of this attack to materialize ultimately led Hitler to admit the war was lost and subsequently commit suicide)