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.
Within the mass, individuals faced an arbitrary fate. Soviet soldiers could show spontaneous generosity to German women and children as well as cruelty. Hitler, half-crazed in his bunker, issued wild orders, determined to bring down the Reich capital in the monstrous vanity of a personal Götterdämmerung. Stalin, meanwhile, was prepared to risk any number of 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. Berlin 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.
‘An epic account of the implosion of a great metropolis, steeped in startling quotidian details of blood, sweat, and terror.’
—Kai Friese
