Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine
Save Your Time And Money
| AnyBook4Less.com | Order from a Major Online Bookstore |
|
| Home | Store List | FAQ | Contact Us | | ||
| Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money |
||
 |
Title: The Fall of Berlin 1945 by Antony Beevor ISBN: 0670030414 Publisher: Viking Press Pub. Date: 09 May, 2002 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.49
Rating: 5
Summary: The locusts descend and devour what's left
Comment: 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: 4
Summary: The Fall of the Nazi Fascists
Comment: The Fall of Berlin 1945 is obviously about the last series of battles in World War II. It not only covers the final battle for the German capital, but it actually starts in January 1945. The Russians are sitting on the Vistula river, just outside Warsaw, and waiting to launch one of the final attacks that will finally collapse the Nazi regime. Beevor has done lots of research, and it shows. This is a completely compelling book. You do, however, have to have an interest in the subject and you should probably not be in a really bad mood when you read it. It is kind of a downer.
For the most part, Beevor concentrates on the Russian front as the Germans face off against the Soviet army. He does have a chapter or two about the other allies, but most of the time that he is talking about them, it is in relation to the Eastern Front and how some of the remaining Germans were trying to retreat to the American and British lines so that they could surrender and hopefully not get killed by the invading Soviet hordes. Beevor also details the Yalta conference and how Stalin completely hoodwinked Churchill and Roosevelt (Roosevelt himself was very ill at this time and certainly wasn't at his best) in regards to his intentions for Poland and for Berlin. Other than this, however, Beevor is completely devoted to action in Poland and in eastern Germany. This isn't surprising, as most of the action in this period of the war was centred here. Not to say there wasn't any fighting in the West, but once the Americans crossed the Rhine river, the Germans seemed more intent on making sure they didn't surrender to the Russians.
Beevor does a good job with the subject. He writes in an interesting manner that doesn't contain the dryness that is prevalent in some history texts. However, he does go deep enough into the subject that it's obviously not intended for light reading. This is a history book, and it certainly feels like one. It's not history-lite for somebody with just a mild interest in the subject. Not being a historian, I can't speak to the accuracy of the research, but he does have a lot of sources, all of which are detailed in the back. He uses archives, interviews, unpublished diaries (including three sources that he insists must remain anonymous, so presumably they are Russian), mostly primary sources. The notes, unfortunately, are in my least favourite format: instead of end or footnotes, the notes are listed by page number and then a brief snippet of a quote to state which section he is referencing. I find this incredibly annoying and hard to follow, so much so that I don't even bother after awhile.
The maps are outstanding as well. Unfortunately, they are all at the front of the book, so you do find yourself flipping back and forth a little bit. It would have been nice to have a couple of full strategic maps at the beginning of the book, but to have the tactical maps begin the section in which they are described. Still, the maps themselves are very well done and definitely worth the time it takes to look at them before reading about the specific operation. They detail every attack, even the attacks on the Western Front. Since the Western Front is not talked about very much, this shows how complete they are.
This is a truly powerful book, especially where Beevor describes the utter devastation that affected Poland and eastern Germany. Berlin was nothing but a pile of rubble with bombs going off everywhere and hardly any buildings without any bomb damage. I think it affected me even more because of the time I was reading it (i.e during the Iraq war). Here I was seeing so little (relatively speaking of course) city and civilian damage, and then I'm reading this book where cities were being bombed into oblivion. It was very disheartening. You certainly should not be reading this book if you're depressed. Beevor details the horrors of war, as German citizens flee from the onrushing Soviets, victorious soldiers rape and pillage to their hearts' content, and there is so much human suffering. Even the Polish and the captured Soviet troops were not spared any of this. It is truly amazing sometimes what the human race is capable of, and Beevor tells us all about it.
That is another small fault with this book, though. While I certainly understand the concentration on the devastation that was inflicted on the Germans, Beevor really seems to centre on the subject of rape. Time and time again he comes back to the subject, and it became a bit annoying after awhile. This is not necessarily because he kept coming back to it, but because every time he did come back to it, he'd go on for a couple of pages about it. It started to get monotonous. I realize that this happened, and that it shouldn't be white-washed, but after the first few times he could surely just briefly cover the fact that more rapes happened at this time. Either that, or he should have just had a chapter detailing the horrors that happened and then not really talked about them again.
Ultimately, though, this is a very worthy book, with just enough minor quibbles to bring it down to four stars. If you like military history, this is definitely the book for you. This period of World War II is not well-documented in book form, at least not that I've seen. Beevor does a great job of covering the subject and I think you'll like it. You certainly won't enjoy it, but you will find it compelling. And isn't that what a history book should be?
David Roy
Rating: 4
Summary: Great Introduction
Comment: I have always been a big fan of World War 2 books, I used to read one or two every month. I have also read this authors book Leningrad, which was just a wonderful book. With this said I was very excited to dig into the authors latest offering. I read the book and came away a bit disappointed. The writing was very good, but it seamed to me that it lacked some of the detail that the Leningrad book went into. Then again the author took a slightly different approach to the two books. Here the author needed to tell a larger story with Russian advances into Northern Germany so he could not dig into the real gritty details that Leningrad had so many of. He also chose not to make the book another recap of the last days in the bunker, probably figuring that that story had been told enough times.
Overall the book was good and it gives the reader a good understanding of the overall last few breaths of the Nazis. I just felt that some of the zip or raw emotion that the author had so wonderfully detailed out in Leningrad was missing from this book. Also if you are looking for just the detail of the last days in the bunker there are a number of better books out there that detail it down to the hour. The author does a good job and the book is very readable. It acts as a great introduction to this particular section of the war and could easily push the reader to more in depth studies of the end in Berlin. I just felt the author slipped a bit.
 |
Title: Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege, 1942-1943 by Antony Beevor ISBN: 0140284583 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: May, 1999 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
 |
Title: The Spanish Civil War by Antony Beevor ISBN: 0141001488 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: 03 July, 2001 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
 |
Title: Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust by Richard Rhodes ISBN: 0375409009 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 07 May, 2002 List Price(USD): $27.50 |
 |
Title: An Army at Dawn: The War in Africa, 1942-1943, Volume One of the Liberation Trilogy by Rick Atkinson ISBN: 0805062882 Publisher: Henry Holt & Company, Inc. Pub. Date: 02 October, 2002 List Price(USD): $30.00 |
 |
Title: Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World by Margaret Olwen Macmillan, Richard Holbrooke ISBN: 0375508260 Publisher: Random House Pub. Date: 29 October, 2002 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
Thank you for visiting www.AnyBook4Less.com and enjoy your savings!
Copyright� 2001-2021 Send your comments
