The Fall of Berlin, 1945 (review)

The last days of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich in 1945, the German "Twilight of the Gods," have always fascinated students of World War II. Already bled white by four years of war, the Red Army suffered a further 250,000 casualties to capture Berlin, overcoming the uneven resistance of veteran Waffen SS troops, deluded Hitler Youth, and over-aged militiamen.

In The Fall of Berlin, 1945, Antony Beevor places the battle for the German capital in the larger context of the final four months of the war in Europe. He breathes new life into the oft-told tales of Hitler's arguments with his more realistic subordinates, his gradual loss of hope, and his final marriage and suicide. Beevor is almost as effective while recounting the less-familiar story of Joseph Stalin's efforts to encourage rivalries among his subordinate commanders. In particular, front commanders Georgi Zhukov and Ivan Konev were so eager to beat each other to the center of Berlin that they sacrificed troops needlessly to German and even friendly fire.

The author contributes his own new interpretations of the battle, repeatedly demonstrating how the Soviets exaggerated the weak defenses of Berlin in order to make their victory seem more heroic. Beevor also argues that one major reason for Stalin's haste was to advance the Soviet atomic weapons program by securing control of German physicists and uranium supplies. This combination of symbolic and practical objectives was so strong that, in the author's mind, Winston Churchill was naive to believe that the Soviets might permit the western allies to occupy Berlin on their own.

Although Beevor began his career as a British army officer, he makes no pretense at writing a tactical and operational analysis of the Berlin campaign. He deliberately rejects "the staff officer's summary, trying to produce order out of chaos" (p. 332) in order to give the reader a sense of the drama and human misery of this conflict. Thus, he returns repeatedly to the Soviet propensity to rape any woman, even Slavic and Jewish women who had been slave laborers for Germany. His purpose is not prurient curiosity, but rather an attempt to understand the nature of this horror for both the rapists and their victims. The author is equally diligent in portraying vignettes from the desperate battles for a city, although his sources tend to be more detailed on the German side than on the Soviet.

The Fall of Berlin, 1945 is a fascinating, richly detailed account that will entertain and enlighten any reader, exceeding the high standard set by Beevor's previous works. American students of the war may be jarred by the anachronistic term "U.S. Air Force," but that is a minor blemish in an otherwise well-researched and superbly written study.