The Fall of Berlin 1945

New York, N.Y.: Viking, 2002. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. Raymond Turvey (Map illustrations). xxxvii, [1], 489, [1] pages. DJ is price clipped. Illustrated endpapers. Includes List of Illustrations, Maps, Glossary, Preface, References, Source Notes, Select Bibliography, and Index. Chapters include Berlin in the New Year; The "House of Cards" on the Vistula; Fire and Sword and "Noble Fury"; The Great Winter Offensive; The Charge to the Oder; East and West; Clearing the Rear Areas; Pomerania and the Oder Bridgeheads; Objective Berlin; The Kamarilla and the General Staff; Preparing the Coup de Grace; Waiting for the Onslaught; Americans on the Elbe; Eve of Battle; Zhukov on the Reitwein Spur; Seelow and the Spree; The Fuhrer's Last Birthday; The Flight of the Golden Pheasants; The Bombarded City; False Hopes; Fighting in the City; Fighting in the Forest; The Betrayal of the Will; Fehrerdammerung; Reich Chancellery and Reichstag; The End of the Battle; Vae Victis!; and The Man on the White Horse. Also includes 49 black and white illustrations, as well as 16 black and white maps. Sir Antony James Beevor, FRSL (born 14 December 1946) is a British military historian. He has published several histories on the Second World War and the 20th century in general. His best-known works, the best-selling Stalingrad and Berlin - The Downfall 1945, recount the World War II battles between the Soviet Union and Germany. They have been praised for their vivid, compelling style, their treatment of the ordinary lives of combatants and civilians and the use of newly disclosed documents from Soviet archives. Overall, his works have been translated into over 30 languages. 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. Derived from a Kirkus review: "Few things reveal more about political leaders and their systems than the manner of their downfall," states military historian Beevor, 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 of thousands 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.