Fall of Berlin 1945 FROM OUR EDITORS
Antony Brevor's Stalingrad became a surprise bestseller because the author gracefully transformed his exhaustive research into a fluid and striking narrative. The Fall of Berlin 1945 captures the final siege against the German capital city with comparable force. Utilizing the WWII archives of six nations, the British historian presents Berliners as they experienced almost constant bombing raids. Veering between hysteria and fatalism, these hapless burghers and fugitives fell prey to any passing rumor. Beevor alternates reports of German High Command decisions with news of ration shortages and suicides in latrines.
FROM THE PUBLISHER
The Red Army had much to avenge when it finally reached the frontiers of the Reich in January 1945. Frenzied by their terrible experiences with Wehrmacht and SS brutality, they wreaked havoc -- tanks crushing refugee columns under their tracks, mass rape, pillage and destruction. Hundreds of thousands of women and children froze to death or were massacred because Nazi Party chiefs, refusing to face defeat, had forbidden the evacuation of civilians. More than seven million fled westward from the terror of the Red Army. It was the most terrifying example of fire and sword ever known. Within the trapped mass, individuals faced an arbitrary fate. Some suffered appallingly, others were saved by extraordinary chance. Soviet soldiers showed both spontaneous generosity and inhuman cruelty to German women and children. The Nazis sent fourteen-year-old boys on bicycles on suicidal attacks against Soviet tanks, and as the Red Army encircled Berlin, SS squads roamed the city, shooting or hanging any man not at his post.
The personal moral chaos that determined the lives of many Germans was a result of a titanic conflict between the most tyrannical egos of the twentieth century. Hitler, half crazed in his bunker, issued wild orders in the monstrous vanity of a personal Gotterdammerung, determined to bring down the Reich capital. Stalin, meanwhile, was prepared to risk any number of his men to seize Berlin before the Americans. New documents from a Russian archive show for the first time that the Soviet leader had a particularly powerful motive. Antony Beevor, using often devastating new material from former Soviet files, as well as from German, American, British, French and Swedish archives, has reconstructed the experiences of those millions caught up in the nightmare of the Third Reich's final collapse. The Fall of Berlin 1945 is a terrible story of pride, stupidity, fanaticism, revenge and savagery, yet it is also one of astonishing endurance, self-sacrifice and survival against all odds.
FROM THE CRITICS
Kirkus Reviews
Richly detailed, gracefully written: a wrenching reminder that evil wears a human face.
Publishers Weekly
Covering the months from January to May in 1945, as Soviet and other Allied troops advanced to Berlin, freelance British historian Beevor (Stalingrad) opts for direct narrative with overheard quotes from the main players, making the reader an eavesdropper to Hitler and Stalin's obiter dicta. Brisk and judgmental, the narrative is studded with short sentences and summary judgments: about Nazi minister Hermann Goring, we are told that his "vanity was as ludicrous as his irresponsibility" and he looked more like " `a cheerful market woman' than a Marshal of the Reich." During the rubble-strewn city's Christmas of 1944, "the quip of that festive season was: `be practical: give a coffin.' " The book is based on material from former Soviet files as well as from German, American, British, French and Swedish archives, but the somewhat limited bibliography is disappointing, and many of the usual sources are quoted, such as Hitler's personal secretary, who took dictation in the bunker to the end. Her expectation that Hitler would suddenly produce "a profound explanation" of the war's "great purpose" says as much about German self-delusion of the time as about Hitler, but here and elsewhere, Beevor simply quotes her flatly and fails to connect the dots. However, given the scope of this book the 1945 advance on Berlin is thought to be the largest battle in history, with two and a half million Soviet troops attacking one million Germans the summary approach is inevitable. (May) Forecast: Beevor visited the set of the blockbuster film Enemy at the Gates, which is set during the siege of Stalingrad, and summed it up for the BBC as "fiction, based on a grain of truth." Whether such straight-shooting remarks speed up or slow down adaptation rights for this book remains to be seen, but the Hitler bunker and the city that surrounded it remain objects of morbid fascination. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
"Few things reveal more about political leaders and their systems than the manner of their downfall," states military historian Beevor (Stalingrad, not reviewed, etc.), a sturdy thesis abundantly supported in his chronicle of the Third Reich's last days. Beevor musters a powerful array of evidence: documents, diaries, interviews, books in English, German, and Russian. He begins this riveting account during Christmas 1944. Berlin, experiencing round-the-clock bombing from American and RAF crews, was a city in ruin. Its leaders were hunkered down in bunkers, its people reduced to the most severe austerity. Beevor focuses much of his attention on the Soviets advancing from the east-after all, they were the first to enter the city-but moves easily from their forces to the Allied camps in the west to the Nazis. Along the way, he displays a dazzling command of fact and facility with detail, describing in one incredible sentence the motley Soviet forces advancing in tanks, on horseback, and in Lend-Lease Studebakers and Dodges. Beevor notes that the Soviets were interested not just in defeating but in harshly punishing the Nazis for their ferocious invasion of Russia four years earlier; they wanted, as well, to capture and whisk back to Moscow those German nuclear scientists and rocket experts who might help the USSR close the atomic-bomb gap. Terror was perpetrated by all the war's participants, the author reminds us. He describes the Danzig Anatomical Medical Institute at which Nazi technicians made soap and leather from human beings, the liberation of Auschwitz, widespread looting and destruction by the advancing Americans, and-in compelling and excruciating detail-the brutal rape of tens ofthousands of German women and girls by the Soviets. Nor does he neglect a thoughtful examination of the author of it all, Adolf Hitler, whose mad refusal to surrender cost countless lives on all sides. Richly detailed, gracefully written: a wrenching reminder that evil wears a human face. (16 maps, 49 b&w illustrations, not seen)
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