Berlin - The Downfall 1945

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. Some suffered appallingly, others were saved by extraordinary chance. Soviet soldiers could show spontaneous generosity to German women and children as well as cruelty. This moral chaos was the outcome of a titanic conflict between two tyrants heedless of the lives of their followers. The Nazis sent fourteen-year-old boys on bicycles on 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 in the monstrous vanity of a personal Götterdämmerung. 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.

Format: Hardback - Excellent condition for its age

Publisher: Viking

Published: 2002

ISBN: 0670886955