The Fall of Berlin 1945

Rating:
Summary: A sensationalist approach to history
Review: After browsing through the list of sources at the end of the book I expected 'The Fall of Berlin 1945' to be at least an informative and well-documented work, but I was disappointed.

The author chose a sensationalist approach to writing on a highly controversial subject of the relationship between the Red Army and the German population during the last months of the Second World War.

Majority of the sources used by the author to support his allegations are not official documents but personal letters, memoirs, and interviews. Often vague individual descriptions of specific incidents are unfairly used to support Anthony Beevor's attempt to represent the Soviet Army in Germany as a horde of rapists, looters and murderers.

In some instances, as the case of alleged rape and mass-murder in Nemmersdorf, the author doesn't even bother to go into the details or to provide any relevant documentation.

Time and time again personal recollections of particular incidents that took place between the Soviet troops and the German civilians are used to paint the bigger picture, while official documents, though briefly mentioned, are not given much consideration and disregarded as either propaganda or massive cover-up.

A characteristic example is the quote from a letter written by a young Soviet woman soldier in which she gripes to a friend about the problems of her love life and writes: "How difficult it is here to find a really faithful man." Anthony Beevor uses this trivial, idealistic letter to substantiate his assertion that "The Red Army attitude towards women had become openly proprietorial..."

The author attempts to put together a giant and highly complex jigsaw puzzle with the most of the pieces missing. He tries to substitute his rich imagination in place of the many missing facts, but this approach just doesn't work for a history book.

Rating:
Summary: Not a history book!
Review: The book contains 102 occurrences of the word "rape" in all of its forms. Yet, the author presents no documentary evidence to support the sensationalist nature of his novel.

The underlying suggestion stalking the reader of Anthony Beevor's latest book is that the Red Army invaded Germany, raped its population and plundered it resources. Moreover, the author insists, these alleged activities were conducted with support and direction from the Soviet command and on the scale comparable with, if not greater than, Nazi crimes against humanity.

Lacking basic documentation and littered with unverifiable assertions this is not a history book but a work of fiction, whatever its literary merits may be.

Rating:
Summary: The Fall of Berlin- Superb but troublingly incomplete
Review: As a military history this is first rate.Having visited Berlin,it provided a vivid impression of the fall of the city.I was troubled with the lack of social context.despite the many detailed accounts of the fall of the Nazi regime,the book never mentions the word "Holocaust" once,and the references to the liberation of Auschwitz for example give equal coverage to Russian prisoners as well as Jews.(Evidently thet could have been both).It also says without further elaboration that the numbers killed in Auschwitz were exaggerated. The book makes a persuasive case that the Nazis had conflicted priorities for the defense of Berlin and in the deployment of limited resources,but does not mention that Jews were still being deported from Berlin in 1945.None of the Nazi leadership is characterized as being anti-semitic.This was the most defining characteric of the Third Reich,and the book minimizes it.
I give it three stars because of this troubling omission,although the book clearly fills a historical gap.

Rating:
Summary: Terrible
Review: This work is a combination of Ryan's study in The Last Battle and countless others. There is nothing original in this work at all, it has all been said before. Beevor should spend more time on the tragedy of the conflict then speculating on 'overestimates' in the number of Germans raped, killed, and wounded by the Red Army. I've known that the Russians wanted German atomic secrets since I took the AP European History exam in 1984. Beevor also tries to take both aides yet this book becomes a stroy of a Berlin and not of the Soivet offensive just like his work Stalingrad was a book on the Germany Sixth Army. He even has the arrogant nerve to say that the Russain veterans he interviewed do not disclose the full horror of how the Red Army raped women in East Prussia. I challenge him to fight in the worst war in human history, survive, and write a book worth the blood and sacrifice of these men that faced death every second of every day.

Rating:
Summary: The locusts descend and devour what's left
Review: The facts of the story only hint at the carnage. By the beginning of 1945 the allied armies had halted after crossing the Rhine in western Germany. There they waited for a move from the Red Army in the east. It was not long in coming and was preceeded by a wave of millions of fleeing German civilians, who abandoning the occupied territories of Prussia and Silesia, had only one panicked and fearful expression on their lips: "Der Ivan Kommt!" Indeed the Russians were coming and in a massive way. They had assembled "the largest army the world had ever seen" comprising 2.5 million soldiers, over 40,000 artillery guns, 6,000 tanks and four air armies, all for the purpose of a rapid attack and capture of the capital of the Third Reich. Berlin in contrast was defended by 45,000 Wehrmacht troops and about 40,000 militia. The militia comprised the young (mostly 14 year old Hitler Youth), the old (Volkssturm), and also foreign fascist volunteers (mostly French and Latvians) who still believed in the fight against Bolshevism.

This last point is well developed by Beevor. He mentions the Nazi and fascist antipathy towards the Russian peasant army and the Soviet form of totalitarianism. The Russians in turn hated all things German. This had been building since Stalingrad and Stalin himself had deliberately stoken the flames of revenge. When unleashed on Berlin this unquenchable fire took the form of drunken violence, looting, and gang-raping of German women by vast numbers of Red Army soldiers. Here is where Beevor's book differs from the many previous descriptions of this battle. THE FALL OF BERLIN 1945 is much too dull a title for the gruesome, disturbing, and emotionally wrenching descriptions of the inhumanity of both the Wehrmacht and the Red Army. Beevor says that besides revenge, what drove the Red Army was Stalin's desire to acquire German A-bomb secrets and Soviet commanders concern that the Allies might take Berlin. This could not be allowed to happen, as "Berlin belonged to the Soviet Union by right of suffering as well as by right of conquest."

The Soviets were in such a hurry to seize the city that many Red Army units entering Berlin were shelled by their own artillery. Add to the confusion the fact that Hitler refused to evacuate civilians and you can see that the convergence of drunken indiscipline and revenge on the part of the invaders, and hatred, fear, and a "strange mixture of supressed hysteria and fatalism" on the part of Berliners, could only lead to what Beevor calls "the apocalypse of totalitarian corruption." Berlin was already a ruin from allied bombers but as April arrived and the Soviets entered, any semblance of normality evaporated and "a sense of nightmare unreality pervaded the city as it awaited its doom." When women were not suffering gang-rapes - "of approximately 100,000 women raped...10,000 died...mostly from suicide" - they were acting like automatons or zombies. Beevor tells of an incident where a Soviet artillery shell exploded on women waiting in a food line. The survivors merely shuffled to fill in the spaces created by the fallen. The Berlin Philharmonic gave its last performance on April 12 and guests helped themselves to cyanide pills as they departed. Beevor desribes the unreal scene outside Hitler's Bunker where as he and Eva Braun burned, an SS guard ran downstairs and said 'the chief's on fire, do you want to come and look?'. There were no takers as people were otherwise occupied as Beevor says "an erotic fever" seemed to have gripped everyone.

Beevor does not ignore the strategic big picture of this chaotic battle that consumed some 350,000 lives and left more than a quarter million Russians wounded. But it is at the level of the individual soldier and the women city dwellers that Beevor's story is at its most compelling. Here the descriptions of the irrationality, inhumanity, and insanity that was Berlin in 1945 provide the only means of getting a grip on the totality of the carnage. This is an unremittingly grim account of humanity at war but it's a useful reminder of what WWII was fought for and it's well worth reading.

Rating:
Summary: A Superb Look At The Last Days Of The War In Europe!
Review: Like Cornelius Ryan's "The Last Battle" and John Toland's "The last Hundred Days", this terrific new book by acclaimed British historian Antony Beevor ("Stalingrad") is both an entertaining thought piece and an incredibly well researched and infinitely detailed description of the fall of Berlin at the end of World War Two. Plagued by food and heating fuel shortages, endangered by increasingly devastating bombardment from a sky full of Allied planes, and badgered by the frantic desperation of the Nazi leadership, the people of Berlin awaited the denouement of the long raging conflict and the terrible retribution they felt certain would rage from the Russians, who had been savaged themselves at the hands of the Wehrmacht during the blitzkrieg of 1941-42. When their moment came, the Soviets ruthlessly pursued it to ensure taking the last full measure of terror.

With strict (but secret) orders from Hitler to quickly annihilate what he and the Nazi leadership considered to be the "subhuman Slavs" in order to make "liebenstraum" (living room) for future German colonization, the Germans had conducted a campaign of such staggering and unparalleled brutality, of such senseless slaughter during their sweep east toward Stalingrad and Moscow that afterward the Russians literally seethed with a profound bloodlust, aching for a chance at revenge. Now that the tide had turned and the Soviet army was flooding over the eastern borders of the fatherland, their chance had arrived, and the day of reckoning was fast approaching.

Beevor's treatment of the story of the fall of Berlin in 1945 is rich with detail and anecdotal information, which helps bring the story to life, putting a human face on the horrific specifics of life in a city under siege. While Hitler cowered deep beneath the city in his bunker, fantasizing about his imminent rescue, Zhukov's Russian shock troops were encircling the city. Yet, it never deteriorated into a situation of "every man for himself'. The author's narrative is filled with examples of individual bravery and personal sacrifice for the benefit of others. Amid the savagery and carnage that surrounded them, ordinary men and women went about their ruined lives, just trying as best they could to survive. Yet hundreds of thousands perished, succumbing to the numbing effect of shelling, bombs, fires, gun-battles and random rape, victims of a half-starved and hate-filled foe hell-bent on bloody revenge.

The author masterfully employs previously unavailable Soviet and German archives to thread a storyline very well told. In so doing, Beevor delivers a very compelling vision of the people and events that shaped the progressive collapse of Berlin under the constant bombardment and attacks of the Russian army, and the horror that awaited ordinary Berliners in the line of fire. What he gives us is an indelibly colored portrait of a time of great pitch and moment in the history of the modern world, a snapshot of two titans, the Germans and Russians, locked in mortal combat in one of the great cities of Europe. The aftermath of that struggle was felt for decades afterward. This is a well-written and very carefully researched book, one that added to my personal knowledge of the history of the Second World War. I heartily recommend it. Enjoy!

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant account of the tragedy of our time
Review: We're still puzzled by the pathetic line in all the "B" movies, 'how did all this happen?' Two psychopathic "Kings" slugging it out on the bloody chessboard that was Western Europe
with hundreds of thousand pawns, eventually totalling millions, sacrificed to the horrific carnage.

Beevor again does a stupendous job in researching the end of a German dream that became a nightmare for everyone else. It is perhaps ironic that it came to the end that it did. It is difficult, maybe impossible, when one realizes the true extent of the killings, murders, tortures and combat related deaths from 1935 to 1945 surpassing anything in history, not to be overwhelmed with the deepest sadness.

Beevor occasionally is criticized for his journalistic approach to history. I think it's brilliant. You be your own judge. Larry Scantlebury. 5 stars.

Rating:
Summary: Familiar Story with Fascinating Details
Review: Antony Beevor's last book recounts the familiar but still fascinating story of the success of Russian arms and political wiles in taking Berlin and thus cementing the focal point of the Cold War. Potential readers should understand that this is not a "war college" type of military history where troop movements are traced on a minute-by-minute basis, though their basic thrusts and counterthrusts are there for any one who cares to try to follow them. Rather, it is a much broader story emphasizing the resiliance of the German Army in the face of inevitable defeat, the indifference of Russian military and political leadership to the wholesale loss of troops, the revenge exacted on the German civilian population by the Red Army for the Wehrmacht's predations in the course of invading the Motherland, and, perhaps most importantly, a stimulating portrayal of Stalin's delicious duplicity as he hoodwinked the Allies time and time again as his Army unrelentingly surged on to their objective. Given that most WW II histories understandably tend to treat with the fall of Berlin almost as an afterthought, Beevor's book makes a solid contribution to the scholarship of the period and is well worth the read.

Rating:
Summary: A savage retribution from the East
Review: In a novelization of the World War II capture of Berlin, THE END OF WAR by David Robbins, the author paints a powerful word picture of the hatred between German troops and the Red Army when he describes a fictional band of German POWs being escorted to the rear by Russian guards commanded by one Ilya:

"The guards hurl more names at the Germans. Names of prison camps, Rovno, Ternopol, Zitomir; names of occupied villages, Braslav, Balvi, Vigala; names of death camps, Auschwitz, Sobibor, Treblinka; names of dead comrades ...; names of fathers and mothers, brothers, women. The Red soldiers vent themselves on the Germans ... They have debts to collect ... One of the Germans mutters in Russian, `Bastards' ... All of these men hate. Back and forth, volleys of loathing ... One of the Russians raises his rifle to his cheek, ridiculous, as though he needs to aim this close to his targets ... Ilya's mouth is bone dry. He could speak ... He could say, what? ...Another crow dispatches his voice from the trees ... Ilya turns his back."

Debts. Oh, yes. THE FALL OF BERLIN 1945 by Antony Beevor is the true account of the savage retribution visited on the Third Reich and its capital by avenging armies from the East.

At 431 paperbacked pages, THE FALL OF BERLIN 1945 hasn't the length to be overly detailed. Rather, as Beevor might put it, it's "the tidy version of events - the staff officer's summary." The narrative could arbitrarily be divided into five sections: the Red Army's assault across the Vistula River into western Poland to the German border at the Oder River, the defeat of the Nazi armies along the Baltic in East Prussia and Pomerania, the final drive across the Oder to Berlin by the 1st Belorussian and 1st Ukranian Fronts, the fighting within the city itself, and the immediate aftermath of the German surrender. Relatively little is said of the conflict on the Western Europe except as it contributed to Stalin's paranoia about a separate peace treaty between Germany and the Western Allies and/or the possibility that the Anglo-American forces might reach Berlin first. Stalin needn't have worried about the latter. Eisenhower's political and strategic naiveté, and a misplaced desire to keep Uncle Joe a happy camper, assured a halt of the western armies on the Elbe River.

The bare bones of the narrative are fleshed out with details derived from a multitude of other written sources and the author's interviews with survivors, especially evident in those sections relating to events in Hitler's Reich Chancellery bunker both before and after his suicide.

The book includes a number of maps that are perfectly adequate, and three photo sections. My only complaint is that there are no pictures of certain individuals. While Hitler, Goebbels, Eva Braun, Himmler, Keitel, Zhukov and Stalin appear, key players such as Konev, Rokossovsky, Chuikov, Vlasov, Weidling, Guderian and Heinrici do not. And where's that famous photo of Soviet soldiers planting the Red Banner on the Reichstag - an image just as famous to Russians as that of the Iwo Jima flag raising is to Americans?

A subtitle to the book might as well be "The Red Army and Rape". Beevor is particularly struck by the horrific record of the Soviet forces in that regard. The author reports the estimate that 95,000 to 130,000 Berlin women were sexually assaulted, and another 1.4 million German women in Pomerania, East Prussia and Silesia - many, if not most, multiple times.

THE FALL OF BERLIN 1945 is a superlative overview of the last four months of fighting on the Eastern Front, and is a must-read for any casual student of the European Theater of WWII.


Rating:
Summary: Apocalypse Now...
Review: Beevor is a well-repsected historian and author. This is a very recent book, so he can draw on some new research, opened archives, and interviews with participants. It is thoroughly researched, and sheds light on a surprisingly unknown phase of the second world war.
The tale is grim. He starts his narrative with the Soviet reinvading Poland. The Red army, intent on revenge, embarks on an orgy of destruction, pillage, murder, ethnic cleansing, and rape. The suffering of the civilians, especially the women, is one of the main themes of this book. And an important theme it is. The other main themes are how Stalin manipulated the western Allies, especially the US, and the total collapse of leadership in the Third Reich. The latter two themes are better known than the first, but it is always good to be reminded. Espcially now when so many of our leaders demand unquestioning faith from us.
I do not think any other history of the second world war has told the story of the ethnic cleansing of Poland and the eastern parts of Germany. Again we find out that history repeats itself. Rwanda, or the Balkans are nothing new.
The only drawback to the book, as I see it, is that it ends quite abruptly. I wonder what happened to the remnats of the German Ninth Army south of Berlin, or the pockets left in Koningsberg and Kurland, or to the international SS units defending the Reichstag. We only get hints at what happened to the returning Red army soldiers that had been 'contaminated' by exposure to the west. We are only told about what happened to marshall Zjukov, and he did not fare well. Otherwise an excellent book.