The fall of Berlin, 1945

549 Pages·2002·7 MB·English

by  Antony Beevor

U.S. $29.95
Canada $43.99 (continued from from flap)
Antony Beevor, using often devastating new mater-
he Red Army had much to avenge when ial from former Soviet files, as well as from German,
it finally reached the frontiers of the American, British, French and Swedish archives, has
Reich in January 1945. Frenzied by their reconstructed the experiences of those millions
terrible experiences with Wehrmacht and caught up in the nightmare of the Third Reich's final
SS brutality, they wreaked havoc-tanks crushing collapse. The Fall o f Berlin 1945 is a terrible story
refugee columns under their tracks, mass rape, pil- of pride, stupidity, fanaticism, revenge and savagery,
lage and destruction. Hundreds of thousands of yet it is also one of astonishing endurance, self-
women and children froze to death or were massa- sacrifice and survival against all odds.
cred because Nazi Party chiefs, refusing to face
defeat, had forbidden the evacuation of civilians.
More than seven million fled westward from the
terror of the Red Army. It was the most terrifying
example of fire and sword ever known.
Within the trapped mass, individuals faced an arbi-
trary fate. Some suffered appallingly, others were
saved by extraordinary chance. Soviet soldiers
showed both spontaneous.generosity and inhuman
cruelty to German women and children. The Nazis
ANTONY BEEVOR began his career as a
sent fourteen-year-old boys on bicycles on suicidal
professional officer in the 11th Hussars. He is the
attacks against Soviet tanks, and as the Red Army author of a number of books, including The Spanish
encircled Berlin, SS squads roamed the city, shoot- Civil War, Inside the British Army and Crete: The
ing or hanging any man not at his post. Battle and the Resistance. With his wife, Artemis
Cooper, he wrote Paris After the Liberation,
The personal moral chaos that determined the lives
1944-1949. His book Stalingradhas been published
of many Germans was a result of a titanic conflict
in nineteen languages and was awarded the first
between the most tyrannical egos of the twentieth
Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction, the Wolfson
Hitler, half crazed in his bunker, issued
century. History Prize and the Hawthornden Prize for
wild orders in the monstrous vanity of a personal
Literature. Antony Beevor is a Fellow of the Royal
Gotterdammerung, determined to bring down the
Society of Literature and a Chevalier de 1'Ordre des
Reich capital. Stalin, meanwhile, was prepared to
Arts et des Lettres in France.
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.
Jacket photograph by Ullsteinbild/Nowosti, Berlin
(cid:9)(cid:9)(cid:9)
P R A I S E F O R
STALINGRAD
"The colossal scale of Stalingrad, the megalomania, the utter absurdity,
the sheer magnitude of the carnage . . . are marvelously captured in
Antony Beevor's new history ... a fantastic and sobering story, and it
has been fully and authoritatively told in Beevor's new book."
-RICHARD BERNSTEIN, THE NEW YORK TIMES
"Stalingrad's heart-piercing tragedy needed a chronicler with acute
insight into human nature as well as the forces of history. Antony
Beevor is that historian." -STUART FERGUSON, The Wall street Journal
"Antony Beevor has produced a compelling and extraordinary story,
richly detailed and engrossingly written. Western scholars owe him a
very great debt. We now have a real history of Stalingrad without myth
or embellishment." -RICHARD OVERY, AUTHOR OF WHY THE ALLIES WON ,
RUSSIA'S WAR AND INTERROGATIONS
"What a pleasure it is to welcome a real book by a writer who truly
understands the drama and tragedy of great operations. It is certainly the
best narrative of the battle yet to appear and is not likely to be surpassed
in our time ... [a] magnificent book."
-JOHN KEEGAN, DAILY TELEGRAPH
THE FALL OF BERLIN 1945
ANTONY BEEVOR
VIKING
VIKING
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street,
NewYork, NewYork 10014, U.S.A.
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand,
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:
Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England
First published in 2002 byViking Penguin,
a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.
1 3579108642
Copyright © Antony Beevor and Artemis Cooper, 2002
Map illustrations by Raymond Turvey
0-670-03041-4
CIP data available
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Printed in the United States ofAmerica
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication
may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form
or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photo-copying, recording or otherwise), without the prior
written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
(cid:9)(cid:9)(cid:9)(cid:9)(cid:9)(cid:9)
Contents
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Vii
MAPS Xi
GLOSSARY XXix
PREFACE XXXiii
I Berlin in the New Year I
2 The `House of Cards' on the Vistula I I
3 Fire and Sword and `Noble Fury' 24
4 The Great Winter Offensive 39
The Charge to the Oder 56
'
6 East and West T7
Clearing the Rear Areas 96
8 Pomerania and the Oder Bridgeheads 115
9 Objective Berlin 136
1o The Kamarilla and the General Staff 148
I I Preparing the Coupde Grice 165
12 Waiting for the Onslaught 173
13 Americans on the Elbe I9o
14 Eve of Battle 2o6
15 Zhukov on the Reitwein Spur 216
16 Seelow and the Spree 234
v
Contents
17 The Fuhrer's Last Birthday 249
18 The Flight of the Golden Pheasants 261
1g The Bombarded City 280
2o False Hopes 291
21 Fighting in the City 310
22 Fighting in the Forest 328
23 The Betrayal of the Will 339
24 Fuhrerdkmmerung 354
25 Reich Chancellery and Reichstag 370
26 The End of the Battle 386
27 hae hictis! 406
28 The Man on the White Horse 421
REFERENCES 432
SOURCE NOTES 435
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY 466
INDEX 4'76
vi
List of Illustrations
Endpapers
German prisoners of war being marched past the Brandenburg Gate on
their way to captivity.
1. Hitler Youth during the fighting in Lauban in Silesia.
2. Part of the Grossdeutschland Corps being inspected in an East Prus-
sian forest before the Soviet onslaught.
3. Volkssturm captured in Insterburg, East Prussia.
4. Berliners after a heavy air raid.
5. A `trek' of German refugees from Silesia fleeing before the Red
Army. .
6. Red Army troops march into an East Prussian town.
7. Soviet mechanized troops enter the East Prussian town of Muhl-
hausen.
8. Red Army troops occupy Tilsit.
9. A Soviet self-propelled assault gun breaks into Danzig.
10. A Hitler Youth at a Volkssturm parade taken by Goebbels.
11. Two German soldiers in the defence of the besieged Silesian capital,
Breslau.
ia. SS Panzergrenadiers before a counter-attack in southern Pom-
erania.
Goebbels decorates a Hitler Youth after the recapture of Lauban.
13.
14. German women and children trying to escape westwards by rail.
vii
List of Illustrations
15. Famished refugees collecting beechnuts in a wood near Potsdam.
16. Eva Braun after the wedding of SS Gruppenfuhrer Hermann
Fegelein to her sister Gretl, Berchtesgaden.
17. Red Army doctors care for Auschwitz survivors.
18-i9. A German engineer after committing suicide with his family
before the arrival of the Red Army.
20. A German soldier hanged on the orders of General Sch6rner.
21. Hitler Youth tank-hunting squad with panzerfausts clipped to their
bicycles.
22. Reichsftihrer S S Heinrich Himmler, who seldom touched a gun
yet dreamed of being a military leader.
23. Marshal Stalin and Winston Churchill at Yalta.
24. A T-34 of Marshal Zhukov's i st Belorussian Front crosses the Oder.
25. Soviet sappers bridging the Oder to prepare the assault on Berlin.
26. Red Army soldiers retrieving an anti-tank gun on the waterlogged
Oder flood plain.
2'7. Soviet women released from forced labour near Berlin by the Red
Army.
28. An improvised graveyard in the ruins of Berlin.
29. Hitler caresses one of his youngest defenders, watched by Artur
Axmann, head of the Hitler Youth.
30-33. The Red Army fighting street by street to capture the `lair of
the fascist beast'.
34. Across the Moltke bridge to attack `Himmler's House' - the Minis-
try of the Interior - then the Reichstag.
35. Soviet assault gun firing down a Berlin street.
36. A riddled Volkswagen by the Reich Chancellery.
37. Forces of the i st Ukrainian Front sent to crush the Ninth Army in
pine forests south of Berlin.
38. German soldiers surrendering to the Red Army in Berlin.
39. Soviet mechanized troops having a wash in a Berlin street.
40. Cooking in the ruins.
41. Red Army meets US Army: Colonel Ivanov proposes a toast, while
Major General Robert C. Macon of the 83rd Infantry Division
listens.
42. German civilians escaping the Red Army cross the ruined rail bridge
over the Elbe to American territory.
viii
List of Illustrations
43. The end of the battle for Hans-Georg Henke, a teenage conscript.
44. A wounded Soviet soldier tended by a female medical assistant.
45. General Stumpff, Field Marshal Keitel and Admiral von Friedeburg
arrive at Karlshorst to sign the final surrender.
46. A Red Army soldier tries to seize a Berliner's bicycle.
47. Marshal Zhukov takes the victory parade on the horse which had
thrown Stalin.
48. Zhukov watched by General K. F. Telegin, head of the political
department, and General Ivan Serov, the NKVD chief.
49. Visiting the battleground inside the Reichstag.
PHOTOGRAPHIC ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
AKG London: 3, 6, 7, 8, 9, 13, 17, 22, 24, 26, 28, 34, 37, 40, 42
Alexander Ustinov/Bildarchiv PreuBischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin: 27
Bildarchiv PreuBischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin: 16, 21 , 39, 43
Bundesarchiv Bild, Koblenz: 2 (x46/85/22/20), 47 (183/K0907/310)
Chronos, Berlin: 18, 19, 36
Hilmar Pabel/Bildarchiv PreuBischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin: 15
Hulton Getty: 46
Imperial War Museum, London: io (FLM 3345) 29 (FLM 3351), 30
(FLM 3349),31 (FLM 3348), 32 (FLM 3346), 33 (FLM 3350)
Jurgen Stumpff/Bildarchiv PreuBischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin: 45
National Archives and Records Administration, Maryland: 20 (111-S C-
20522i), 41 (iii-SC-205367), 49 (306-NT-885-C2)
PK-Benno Wundshammer/Bildarchiv PreuBischer Kulturbesitz,
Berlin: t
Private Collection/Novosti/Bridgeman Art Library: 23, 25
Ullstein Bild, Berlin: 4, 5, 11 , 12, 14, 38, 44
Victor Tiomin: Endpapers, 35
Every effort has been made to contact all copyright holders. The pub-
lishers will be glad to make good in future editions any errors or
omissions brought to their attention.
ix