A family acquaintance, an extremely experience and well educated career military man, claimed that the USSR suffered one million casualties in the race to Berlin. This is a far larger number than I’ve seen claimed elsewhere.
He further claims a full 100,000+ of those casualties were caused by intentional friendly fire as general Zhukov and Konev raced to the city. This acquaintance claims that he has read first hand accounts of full scale battles between these two generals men as they competed to get there first. In my limited research, I’ve seen zero evidence of this outside of more “typical” friendly fire insistence caused by mistake or miscommunication.
The ONLY reason I don’t IMMEDIATELY call bullshit is because he is generally very well read on history, but I don’t have enough sources on hand to be sure. That being said, his only source was basically “bro trust me”.
There are great military historians on this subreddit who surely can be better at answering this than me, but this is the first time I hear of Soviet soldiers shooting at each other during the spring '45 Berlin campaign. The best book on the events, to my knowledge, is still Antony Beevor's "Berlin - The Downfall 1945", London 2002; and he does not mention that.
What he does mention is that the competition between Zhukov and Koniev might have led to Zhukovs fateful decision to try to cut to Berlin in a straight line from the Oder river through the Seelow heights, the last good defensible position east of Berlin, rather than marching around North (which he eventually did anyway), leading him to lose as much as 40,000 infantry in 48 hours in a pointless attempt to take a set of hills he did not even need to get to Berlin. I would ask your friend to produce some verifiable evidence.