German 9th Parachute Division

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9th Parachute Division
Active	1944-1945
Country	Germany
Branch	Luftwaffe
Type	Paratrooper
Battles/wars	Battle of Berlin

The German 9th Parachute Division was the final parachute division to be raised by Germany during World War II. The division was destroyed during the Battle of Berlin in April 1945.

The ninth was formed in late 1944 or early 1945 under the command of General Bruno Bräuer with many Luftwaffe personnel transferred to combat duties for which they had no experience.^[1] In January 1945 two of his battalion were encircled by the 1st Ukrainian Front in Breslau where they were destroyed^{[citation needed]}.

In the Battle of the Seelow Heights the ninth were positioned between Seelow and Neuhardenberg, they received the full force of the first days artillery bombardment by Marshal Georgi Zhukov's 1st Belorussian Front on 16 April. Under this bombardment the ninth buckled. It rallied briefly on the morning of 17 April, when it was given some armoured support, but collapsed again shortly afterwards. Bräuer suffered a nervous breakdown and was relieved of his command at the request of Goering angry at the collapse of one of his Luftwaffe divisions. The SS Nordland Division rounded up some elements of the ninth and managed a temporarily successful counter attack.^[2]

By the 19 April, the remnants of the ninth along with what remained of the rest of the LVI Panzer Corps were within the Berlin U-Bahn outer defensive ring.^[3]During the attempted breakout on the night of 1 May– 2 May a small group of the ninth stormed the the tower of Spandau Rathaus (Town Hall) from which Soviet machine-gunners were decimating Germans attempting to break out of Berlin over the Haval using Charlottenbruke (bridge).^[4] By the end of the 2 May the ninth had ceased to exist.