The Fall of Berlin 1945 by Antony
Beevor
A Wonder Full Book As Usual From This Writer
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 Hitlers 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
Personal Review: The Fall of Berlin 1945 by Antony Beevor

Mesmerising. The final cataclysmic struggle between Nazism and
Stalinism is laid out for the reader with its human cost spread out like some
morbid tableau; the whole affair has a grim fascination like some historical
train wreck. Though being one of the terminal events, to use Speers
phrase, of the 20th century, the detail is something missing from most
peoples knowledge of WWII's famous event. The human scale is what
makes Beevors history writing so engaging.
For the second time in thirty years, Germany ignored Bismarck's dictum of
not fighting Russia militarily and reaped the terrible, terrible whirlwind it had
sowed. The fighting retreat from the East left half of Europe `vasta', a
wasteland. The diary and notebook accounts record a vengeful retribution
as the Red Army raped and looted its way to Berlin, punishing Germany for
the wounds it had inflicted, along with anyone unfortunate enough to be
caught in the way.
The ordinary heroism and self-sacrifice amid the barbarism and cynical
indifference to life exhibited by both sets of leaders stand out like beacons
but those vignettes only serve to highlight the full horror as Chuikov ,the
Soviet general at Stalingrad had his revenge. Stalin's dissembling to the
allies, the Americans in particular is laid out, explaining his desire to seize
Berlin himself with the Nazi Atomic facilities at Dahlemberg and bolster the
myth of Soviet suffering and superiority as the only army to seize the `lair
of the fascist beast'. Eisenhower's naivety in not pressing on past the Elbe
increased the Soviet position in post-war Europe may have prolonged the
Cold War may be open to interpretation, but the suffering of the people
condemned to live under their rule because of that decision is not. That
duplicity was recognised by the British who struggled to make the
Americans aware of it. Their unauthorised dash across the north German
coast prevented an opportunistic Soviet march west to annexe Denmark.
For the Germans, the loss forever of Prussia, Pomerania and their Baltic
lands as the Soviets redrew the map of eastern Europe to better suit
themselves led to one of the greatest humanitarian disasters of WWII as
millions were uprooted from lands their families had held for generations.
All ignored or overlooked and greeted with indifference and regarded as
retribution earned.
The Fûhrerdammerung wasn't the Wagnerian funeral pyre for Germany
that Hitler wanted but a sordid orgy of destruction fought out in the rubble
of a levelled Berlin by his loyal foreign supporters in the SS and children
and old men press ganged into the Võlksturm who had no opportunity to
escape, unlike the 9th and 12th Armies who were able to fight to the Elbe
and escape being sent to the camps or shot like so many others.
A brutal story laid out with th authors usual compassionate observation
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