The Fall of Berlin is a good follow-up to Beevor's Stalingrad, but definitely not as engaging a read due to the subject matter. Stalingrad is interesting because it is the turning of the tide on the Eastern Front. The fall of Berlin is less interesting because it is a fait accompli.
The scale of the Russian offensive post-Stalingrad is mind-blowing. It was 6.7 million men in the Red Army from the Baltic to the Adriatic, TWICE the number of Nazi invaders who went to Russia. The effect of this is even greater because the Russians, moving west, would be concentrating their troops on the central European plain, whereas the Germans would need to be ever expanding as they entered Asia, especially when passing the Black Sea to the south and the Baltic Sea to the north. In front of the Soviet invasion was a refugee crisis in the German-occupied territories, with 19 million refugees by February of 1945, with up to 50,000 arriving in Berlin every day ahead of the Red Army.
Meanwhile, Hitler was completely devastated and could not have cared less about the lives of Germans. In ordering the destruction of bridges, Hitler said, "If the war is lost, the people will also be lost. It is not necessary to worry about their needs for elemental survival... For the nation has proved to be weak, and the future belongs entirely to the strong people of the East." Unsurprisingly, most Germans were not so absolutist, and absolutely planned to outlive the war. For the military, it was a difficult choice. One German lieutenant wrote, "to be an officer means almost always having to swing back and forth like a pendulum between a Knights Cross, a birchwood cross, and a court martial."
A major theme of the book is the Americans' naivete and the Russians willingness to use it to advance further faster. Stalin was dead-set on extending the Soviet Union as far west as possible, and largely succeeded by telling Americans the advance on Berlin was just a reconnaissance mission. the British urged the Americans to move faster and moved to Denmark quickly so that it wouldn't fall to the Russians, but Eisenhower was resolute that he wouldn't sacrifice American lives for speed. For this reason, the Russians went all the way into Germany and Czechoslovakia as well as the Balkans. This really makes you think about how Russia needs massive disruption and conflict in Europe to achieve such gains. The Russian Revolution couldn't do it. Only a massive invasion of Russia, followed by a counter-offensive, could lead to sweeping over the continent. Europe needs to be highly unstable for Russia to do this, as the only two times I can think of in the modern era that Russians have successfully invaded Europe are WWII and the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Otherwise I can only think of the Golden Horde and the Mongol invasion of Hungary and Attila the Hun almost a thousand years before that.
Socially speaking, there was madness as the Russians got closer, bringing with them waves of mass rape to the women of Germany. Beevor writes that ahead of the Russian advance, young Germans were having lots of sex, as they knew they could die soon, and the German girls preferred to lose their virginity on their own terms to a German rather than by rape. By April this was common, The Russians were of course indiscriminate, raping not just German women, but liberated Jews and also some of their own women as well as the "liberated" people of Eastern Europe. Russian women started to grow despondent, knowing that, with so many Russian men dead, they would be a generation of spinsters. After their rapes, women then had to deal with German men, who regularly divorced them, cried, or refused to talk about it. Or all three. German men were immensely shamed at their inability to protect their women, which further damaged their relationships. The line of consent was also blurred. Sometimes, Russian soldiers would simply offer food in exchange for a sexual relationship, which is inherently coercive. In Berlin, cigarettes were used as currency, so one reason we may hear more about Russian rapes than Americans is that Americans were given nearly limitless cartons of cigarettes, meaning they could trade them for sex instead of using force. Beevor describes rape as evolving in 1945 from the forceful to the simply coercive, to the trading, and finally to a form of cohabitation in which Soviet officers settled in with German "occupation wives" who replaced their Soviet "campaign wives."
Miscellaneous Facts:
- Apparently Eva Braun was totally unknown outside Hitler's court, and hardly anyone who hadn't visited the high command knew who she was.
- I had never heard of the greatest maritime disaster in history: the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustoff, in which between 5,300 and 7,400 German refugees died when a Soviet submarine sunk the ship.
- The Red Army had to issue an order prohibiting soldiers from riding bicycles because so many Russian soldiers were injuring themselves with the plundered bikes.
- Hitler was very into Frederick the Great and kept a portrait of him in the bunker.
- The USSR was very skeptical of its soldiers who had spent time being exposed to Nazi propaganda in prison camps. As recently as 1998, declaration forms to join a research institute in Russia asked whether a member of the applicant's family had been in an "enemy prison camp."
- Germans were completely oblivious to the facts of the war and learned a lot when Berlin was taken. They had thought the United States declared war on Germany when it was the other way around, and they had no idea about their bombing campaigns against Britain.
