Product Description

Reconstructs the experiences of millions caught up in the nightmare of the Third Reich's final collapse, telling a terrible story of pride, stupidity, fanatacism, revenge and savagery, and also of endurance, self-sacrifice and survival against all odds.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1718 in Books
• Published on: 2007-10-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 552 pages

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Amazon.co.uk Review
Military history, even at its best, can be a cold art. It's easy to lose sight of the fact that wars involve individuals, each with their own hopes, fears and desires. Berlin: the Downfall, 1945, is Antony Beevor's account of the bloody Götterdämmerung that brought the Second World War in Europe to an end, and in which he has fused the large and the small scale effects of war. Beevor paints the broad picture of Marshals Zhukov and Konev, competing for glory and Stalin's attention, as they race their armies towards Berlin. He gives the reader a gripping account of the brutal street-by-street fighting in the German capital and provides an unforgettable portrait of the last, insane days of Hitler and his entourage in the bunker.

His attention to emotional detail is what made his previous book Stalingrad such a magnificent work, combining a sweeping hisorical narrative with a remarkable sensitivity to human drama. Yet he also highlights the small details of ordinary people caught in the nightmare of history--the sick children evacuated at the last minute from a Potsdam hospital; the Soviet soldiers shaving themselves for the first time in weeks so that they would make appropriately presentable conquerors; and the Nazi Youth teenagers peddling their bikes in despairing, last-ditch attacks against the Red Army's tanks.

The story Beevor tells is an almost unremittingly terrible one--one of death, rape, hunger and human misery--but he tells it with both an epic sweep and an alertness to individuality. The result is a masterpiece of narrative history that is as powerful as Stalingrad. --Nick Rennison

Review
Fascinating, extraordinary, gripping (Jeremy Paxman )

This brilliant storyteller makes us feel the chaos and the fear as if every drop of blood was our own. It is much more than just a humane account; it is compellingly readable, deeply researched, and beautifully written (Simon Sebag Montefiore Spectator )

About the Author
Antony Beevor began his career as a professional officer in the 11th Hussars. He is the author of several books, including The Spanish Civil War, Crete and The Mystery of Olga Chekhova. With his wife, Artemis Cooper, he wrote Paris After the Liberation, but he is best known for his books Berlin and Stalingrad, the international No 1 bestseller, and winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize, Wolfson Price and Hawthornden Prize. He lives in London and Kent.

Customer Reviews

A brutal but gripping read
I had read Stalingrad and was not sure that Berlin could be as gripping a story - the result of the fighting was a forgone conclusion. But its not the description of the progress of the war that really makes this book. Its the individual stories that make this book a 'must read'
What I also did not realise was the reason why the last months of the war ended as they did - ferocious defense by the Germans in the East and rolling over in the West - and the ulterior motives behind the Allies behaviour. If you read Stalingrad in conjunction with Berlin you begin to see that the Russians felt almost justified in their actions. But its the last few pages that are the classic twist in the tail - I won't spoil it but the German Army attitude to the events of the war is stunning. If you think history is a dry affair then read this and get a fresh perspective.

Excellently researched, compassionately written history
Antony Beevor showed in his excellent Stalingrad how to clearly and accurately portray the chaos and confusion of a vast and sprawling military engagement without losing sight of the individual experience and harrowing minutiae of enormous human tragedy. In this book, he again succeeds in portraying the staggering scale of the battle for Berlin, but also brings out the astonishing and shocking level of suffering that accompanied it.

Beevor successfully measures the human suffering against the "meat-grinder" mentality of the ideological clash of Stalinism and Nazism. He contrasts the pride and vanity of Hitler and the paranoid totalitarianism of Stalin, the meeting of which was guaranteed to result in terrible casualties as combatants, deluded and indoctrinated by continuous and insidious propaganda, fought desperately for every inch of ground.

Tales of gang rape and wanton destruction by the invading forces, particularly in East Prussia, hit heavy notes in the reading, whilst the knowledge of how deeply the Red Army operated under the prying and intolerant eyes of its Soviet masters is also clearly and compassionately portrayed; the dispassionate NKVD reports of summary execution and Gulag imprisonment of liberated Red Army prisoners for simply having surrendered fills one with anger, particularly as the Red Army had suffered over 9 million casualties by this time.

In his Stalingrad book, Beevor shifted his sympathies initially from the Russians gradually toward the Germans as the tide of battle shifted; in Berlin: The Downfall, Beevor's sympathies throughout remain in favour of the German civilians, and the German Army commanders who acted against the Nazi leadership. I found this slightly distasteful in view of the preceding four years; indeed, Beevor quotes an injured German veteran speaking out on a crowded Berlin train that if the Russians repay Germany a quarter what was done to them, then Germany would cease to exist. But this appears to be in keeping with the underlying political subtext of the book, which seems to be a demonstration of the consequences of political indoctrination of totalitarian regimes, at the expense of stifling humanity.

Beevor succeeds in delivering a hard-hitting, compassionate story of needless suffering, bravery and sacrifice woven beside unspeakable cruelty, revenge and butchery. It is by turns a clear and well-researched historical account of military operations, and a barely-disguised polemic on the evils of political extremism and the dire consequences of totalitarian expansionism.

A multilayered historical account with a heavyweight political subtext. This is a fine book which should be read by all.

"Berlin" or "The Last Battle"?
This book is, in fact, made up of three shorter books welded together and none of them quite work.
The first is a book about the strategy of the end of the war in Europe, focusing on the advance of the Soviet armies. This is just plain confusing, with inadequate maps and indistinct Soviet generals commanding armies that are literally just numbers and attacking places you've never heard of. My advice is: you know what's going to happen so skip through them.
The second book is a description of the final days of Hitler and his entourage in the Bunker. Even to a casual history reader like me, this was very, very familiar ground. Watching the film "Downfall", while maybe not as historically accurate, is far more memorable and evocative.
Squashed in between these two is the third book, the really interesting one, about what ordinary people - be they German civilians, Russian soldiers, or prisoners-of-war - experienced, thought and felt. These were far-and-away the most interesting sections, although (as other reviewers have noted) it seems a bit obsessed with rape almost any woman by Soviet troops. I am not saying this doesn't deserve attention: it must have traumatised the victims beyond my imagining and ruined many lives, but the author returns to it over and over again and the repetition becomes slightly numbing. More emphasis could have been given to how people lived for the rest of the time.

The other serious quibble I have is that the book takes way too long to get going. Despite being called "Berlin", it begins in January in Poland and it is almost halfway over before the fighting gets to Berlin. The book is easy enough reading and did keep me going but really only to find the next genuinely interesting patch. There were certainly some of these - for example, the author can barely conceal his impatience, even contempt, for what he sees as the naivety of Eisenhower, Marshall and Roosevelt in their dealings with the Soviet army and Stalin in particular.

So, good in parts, but way too long. There's far too much repetition of familiar material here - if only this was genuinely a book about the people involved in the battle in Berlin. Since finishing "Berlin" I have read "The Last Battle" by Cornelius Ryan - I would recommend the latter.