Berlin: The Downfall, 1945
by Antony Beevor
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Book Summary Information
Author: Antony BeevorEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2010-06
ISBN: 0141032391
Number of pages: 489
Publisher: Penguin Books, Limited (UK)
Book Reviews of Berlin: The Downfall, 1945
Book Review: The Beast of War
Summary: 5 Stars
I had tears in my eyes as I began compiling this review, shortly before finishing the book. The suffering which it relentlessly and rather coolly lays out seems on the one hand as if it ought to be unimaginable. On the other hand, it sounds no different to accounts of the 30 Years War, except with the addition of industrial-scale killing machinery. Germany has seen this before, and at least in the mid-20th Century had still not learned from the experience.
Beevor follows up "Stalingrad" with "Berlin". So did the Russians. One Red Army member in Stalingrad angrily shouted at a prisoner that Berlin would one day look like this. And so it came to pass. The concentrations of artillery used on the Eastern Front and in the offensive against Berlin itself are staggering - upwards of an artillery piece per four metres of front. Beevor's style conveys repressed excitement and horror at the story he narrates, matter-of-fact and dry and yet rivetting. I flew through the book in half the time this many pages would normally require.
The story of the Red Army in its unstoppable march to Berlin is punctuated by the the pounding not only of guns, but of rape. Rape on an unimaginable scale. From teenage girls to women in their 80s, the surprisingly undisciplined soldiers of a politically prudish state used the bodies of women as proxies for revenge as soon as they ran out of Wehrmacht and SS to kill. Russian women soldiers watched and laughed. Liberated Jews, communists, civilians - none were spared. As ever before, a victorious army scorched the Earth it passed over with rape and pillage, comprehensively asset-stripping the civilian population to send trophies home and taking women as further spoils. 2 million women may have been raped during the conquest and one report from Berlin estimates that of 100,000 rape victims, 10,000 died. Mainly by suicide. The survivors from the Eastern parts of Germany were then dragged off to forced labour in the USSR, only half of whom returned alive. Suicide, desperate attempts to flee to the comparative safety of the Western occupation, disease and unimaginable suffering were the results of this storm of brutality. And German women knew this was coming. Even though they often had no conception of what had been done in Russia, the rumours flew ahead of the advancing Russian formations.
What truly defies belief is the sheer self-destructive futility with which the Nazi state hung on to the last building. Much of this can be attributed to Hitler's character, which seems to have degenerated into a pathological self-identification with the German nation - there was no point in saving Germany because he was Germany, and his death the end of the German Volk which he hurled onto the conflagration just to see it burn with him. How an entire nation could have been co-opted into this insane tenacity is not so easy to explain away, on the other hand, but the murderous brutality of the Felgendarmerie and SS goes a long way. Tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians alike were pointlessly executed for failing to show sufficient devotion to a lost war, or just on the vague suspicion. Prepare to confront some inner darkness while reading this account.
One big surprise was finding that Hitler's body had actually been found, and kept in the USSR until 1970, when it was secretly burned and ground up to be flushed away into the sewers, perhaps appropriately. The rumours of Hitler sneaking off to Latin America were the result of deliberate policy by Stalin. Poor Zhukov, as near as this story comes to producing a hero, was kept in the dark for 20 years and expected to explain away the disappearance to the allies purely to humiliate the man. I always knew that Stalin, Hitler and Beria were archetypal brutes, but I didn't expect to see just how much they resembled spiteful children.
Ultimately, the fascist demagogues that expected every German to fight to the last drop of blood either tried to sneak off in civilian clothes, committed suicide or both. Only Bormann met the guns of the Russians and that was by accident while seeking to escape from the Berlin Kessel. This is humanity at its most tawdry, but there are glints of light here and there. The Red Army soldier appears to have been an extraordinary barrel of contradictions, prepared to rape and loot, yet sentimental about children, ready to share his last piece of bread and laying down quietly to die "as if it were also part of his work". This generation are a true enigma. The standard of the Red Army was raised over the Reichstag before the upper floor had been cleared of suicidally fanatical SS, reminding me of the Muslims raising Saladin's standard on the battlement of Jerusalem - and that humankind has perhaps not come so far in all that time.
This is rivetting and harrowing modern history, told by a master.
Summary of Berlin: The Downfall, 1945
The Red Army had much to avenge when it finally reached the frontiers of the Reich in January 1945. Political instructors rammed home the message of Wehrmacht and SS brutality. The result was the most terrifying example of fire and sword ever known, with 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. Over seven million fled westwards from the terror of the Red Army. Antony Beevor reconstructs the experiences of those millions caught up in the nightmare of the Third Reich's final collapse, telling a terrible story of pride, stupidity, fanatacism, revenge and savagery, but also one of astonishing endurance, self-sacrifice and survival against all odds.Germany Books
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