Fall Of Berlin 1945 (Paperback)

By December 1944, many of the 3 million citizens of Berlin had stopped giving the Nazi salute, and jokes circulated that the most practical Christmas gift of the season was a coffin. And for good reason, military historian Antony Beevor writes in this richly detailed reconstruction of events in the final days of Adolf Hitler's Berlin. Following savage years of campaigns in Russia, the Nazi regime had not only failed to crush Bolshevism, it had brought the Soviet army to the very gates of the capital. That army, ill-fed and hungry for vengeance, unloosed its fury on Berlin just a month later in a long siege that would cost hundreds of thousands of lives on both sides. But as Beevor recounts, the siege was also marked by remarkable acts of courage and even compassion. Drawing on unexplored Soviet and German archives and dozens of eyewitness accounts, Beevor brings us a harrowing portrait of the battle and its terrible aftermath, which would color world history for years to follow. --Gregory McNamee --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

IN The past decade the Second World War has become a favorite with moviegoers, many of them too young to have even a grandfather who was involved. Tom Brokaw's "Greatest Generation" series and Stephen Ambrose's numerous bestsellers are unprecedented in their across-the-board popularity. And historian Daniel Goldhagen's book Hitler's Willing Executioners:Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust caused a phenomena of a reaction—not just in the academic world, but on talk shows and in common parlance. There is even a term—"the Goldhagen effect"—to describe Goldhagen's influence on Holocaust scholarship.
One book reflecting the current interest in the Second World War,and,in this case, the ripples of Goldhagen's work, is Antony Beevor's The Fall of Berlin 1945.

Antony Beevor is an astonishingly good military historian, at once a gifted writer at ease with the narrative and also knowledgeable about the finer points of an army's day to day operations, hierarchies and challenges. He has penned a fine history of the Spanish Civil War, and along with his wife, Artemis Cooper, a lively book about Paris after the liberation. But it was his 1998 book Stalingrad, which sprung him into the spotlight, into the slim ranks of well-known military writers. Stalingrad won numerous prizes, but while an excellent book, it insisted too much on the military aspects of the famous battle. Missing was a feeling for civilians, an idea of what their experience was. This is not the case in The Fall of Berlin 1945. The book's opening page tells of the most popular quip among Berliners during the 1944 Christmas season: "Be practical: give a coffin." (p1).
Most North Americans and Brits would probably date the "beginning of the end" of the Second World War from the Battle of the Bulge, just before that same Christmas. After that, while there remained brutal battles to be won and the horrors of uncovering the death camps, the worst was more or less over. But for the Soviets, who suffered unthinkable violence (and an unthinkable death count) at the hands of the Wehrmacht, the march from the east towards Berlin marked not only the beginning of the end, but a release of long simmering hatred. The Soviet Army, hungry for both food and a revenge, had little pity for civilian Germans. When researching the book, Beevor not only relied on accepted and important texts of the era, he also interviewed elderly Germans whose memories were still vivid. The rape of German women by Soviet soldiers is something Beevor goes on about at length. After one such description he writes that "mornings were safe, with Soviet soldiers either sleeping off their debauches or returned to the fighting..." (p 313).
Most Germans soldiers—if not civilians—knew what to expect from the Soviets, and would sooner have been captured by British, Canadian or American soldiers than our friends to the east. Even after the war, most POWs preferred to go to British or US camps than Soviet ones. To understand the level of Soviet wrath against the German invaders, keep in mind that of the 90,000 German soldiers who surrendered at Stalingrad in 1943, less than 10% made it home.
And this is the focus of Beevor's book, starting from the point in January, 1945, when, on the banks of Poland's Vistula River, millions of Red Army soldiers began their trek to Germany—a battle-lined trek. Many of those same soldiers entered Berlin in April, and the book ends a few weeks after May 8. Soviet acts of revenge carried on for a few days after VE Day and only stopped because the Soviets needed German cooperation. Some of the richest descriptions in the book are of the vicious street fighting that went on between early April and May 8, some of it ending in hand-to-hand combat, and of the absurd fact that Hitler was hiding in a bunker underneath it all.
Beevor doesn't simply write about unleashed Soviet anger. The uncovering of Nazi atrocities is detailed, as well it should be. Particularly disturbing is the description of the Red Army's discovery of Auschwitz. "An army photographer was summoned to take pictures of...dead children with swollen bellies, bundles of human hair, open-mouthed corpses..." (p46). Also important was the Nazi leadership's creation of the "Volkssturm", a militia made up of mostly old men and young boys, who fought in the last desperate months. One perverse bit of comic relief throughout the text are the almost darkly humorous descriptions of a vain, fat and posturing Hermann Goring.
The final weeks of the war in Europe have been covered before, in, for example Cornelius Ryan's The Last Battle. But Ryan's book included American and British contributions and excluded some of what makes reading Beevor's take on things difficult. While there are incidences of Soviet courage and kindness described here, there is above all a surprising amount of compassion—and what seems at times to be sympathy—for the Germans written into the text. It almost makes one queasy. With the passing of time it is normal, perhaps, to soften towards one's former enemies, but it is taxing to read passages where German civilians are portrayed as innocent victims, existing in a vacuum from their leadership, and Allied soldiers as beastly and unpardonable. True, some German civilians were innocent and some Allies unpardonable. But it is Germany that started the war, and the Allies were not there as a matter of choice.
Rondi Adamson (Books in Canada) --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.