Capt. Mondo's World o' Mondo-ness

Book Review: The Fall of Berlin 1945 by Antony Beevor
I haven’t posted reviews of many of the books I’ve read of late, so here are my impressions of the book I just finished.

I picked this book up shortly after my Mother passed away. I put it down to an inherent interest in the subject, and the idea that “misery loves company”. There’s certainly a lot of the latter here – depressing tales of lives thrown needlessly into the maw of War, the waves of rapes that came with the Red Army’s invasion first of Prussia, then Berlin itself. What I found interesting was how the conflict brought out the worst in both the German and Russian armies.

This is also arguably a book that could only have been written after the fall of the Iron Curtain. While there are certainly other accounts of the fall of Berlin, few have the Russian perspective that Beevor brings to this book. He has obviously spent a lot of time in Russian archives, as well as spending a lot of time reading autobiographical accounts and diaries of Germans, both civilian and military, which were caught up in the conflict.

There are all sorts of interesting revelations in the book. I was constantly amazed at the level of political naivety of the Americans at the highest levels about what Stalin was planning on doing with the “liberated” parts of Eastern Europe (i.e. hold on to them instead of letting their pre-war governments in exile take over). How Stalin was almost constantly in fear that his Allies might take Berlin first, leading him to misdirect Allied commanders that Berlin was not the final target of his assault, and how he got his commanders to deliberately encircle the city, as much to keep the Americans and British out as keeping the remaining Berliners in.

I had heard from previous documentaries on the subject that the loss in lives was great. No surprise there of course, but it was interesting to see how the Russian’s efforts at systematic revenge on the Germans led directly to far greater resistance from their foe. Word got out that captured German troupes were more often than not taken back to Russia to work as slave labour. This of course is exactly what the Nazi’s did with the Russians they captured on their initial advance to Moscow, but knowing that this was their likely fate made the Germans fight all the harder against the Russians. It’s no major surprise then that the last German offense of the war was directed not for the rescue of Hitler – for whom several generals at rescuing pockets of their own troops from the Russian front in Berlin to “escape” to the American front lines to the West.

The conflict highlighted the many defects in both systems of government. The increasingly tyrannical martinet Hitler screeching out orders from his bunker to largely non-existent, almost mythical divisions. Stalin pitting his generals against each other in order to speed up the capture of Berlin. His general claiming to have made advances that hadn’t yet made, forcing them to throw more men than was absolutely necessary in order to achieve a goal already “captured”. NKVD and NKGB divisions constantly arresting their own soldiers for actions deemed politically incorrect. The increasingly desperate-sounding German propaganda efforts, lying and also hoping for a rapprochement with the Western Allies in the vain hope of stopping the Russians. Then the seemingly horror stories of wave after wave of rapes by Russian troops – word of which got out at the end of the war and led directly to many Western communist groups beginning to be disenchanted with Stalin’s government.

Ugh. Such a huge, overwhelming mess of a conflict. And to Beevor’s credit, he covers it well.

My only qualms with the book are that it becomes somewhat mechanical in structure at times. One of the basic structures I identified was: description of orders from the top, how these orders were interpreted by the Generals, followed by an anecdote from somebody who was at the scene of the actual conflict. The book and particularly the research behind it are impressive, but I also would have appreciated having the maps contained at the start of the book instead associated with the chapters that cover them. These are minor complaints though – the book otherwise is excellent. I am tempted now to track down a copy of his account of Stalingrad.