The audiobook is on Youtube here and here
After several days of high temperatures, today is a cold and grey morning, hardly the setting to read Antony Beevor's depressing book "Berlin - The Downfall 1945" but I'll persevere for as long as my hot cup of coffee will last.
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 mass rape, tanks crushing refugee columns under their tracks, pillage and destruction. Hundreds of thousands of women and children froze to death or were massacred because Nazi Party chiefs, refusing to face the reality of defeat, had forbidden the evacuation of civilians until it was too late. Over seven million fled westwards from the terror of the Red Army.
The Nazis sent fourteen-year-old boys on bicycles in suicidal attacks against Soviet tanks, and as the Red Army encircled Berlin, SS squads roamed the city, shooting or hanging any man not at his post. Hitler, half-crazed in his bunker, issued wild orders, determined to bring down the Reich capital and all its inhabitants in the monstrous vanity of a personal Götterdämmerung. Stalin, meanwhile, was prepared to risk any number of his men to seize Berlin before the Western Allies could get there.
A glimmer of hope: Berlin in July 1945
I was born just months after the end of the war had ended but my family was in Berlin during that time although they never talked about it afterwards. Perhaps it was just too gruesome to put into words. Berlin became to Germany what Stalingrad had become to Russia. As one angry Russian colonel in February 1943 yelled to a group of emaciated German prisoners in the rubble of Stalingrad, "That's how Berlin is going to look!"
At almost five hundred pages, it will take many more grey mornings and many more hot cups of coffee before I'm finished with this book.
