Berlin - Antony Beevor

"That's how Berlin is going to look!" - These words, screamed at his prisoners by a Soviet officer in the ruins of Stalingrad neatly sum up the whole premise of this book; encapsulating in a single sentence all the hate, despair, shattered hopes and lust for vengeance planted by the German Sixth Army on the shores of the Volga in 1943.

That I am a devout fan of Beevor's work is already a matter of record - see my review of Stalingrad - but I always wondered after finishing it how he was going to match it's breathtaking scope and detail and the sheer hubristic tragedy of it all. Turns out that I needn't have worried.
The Red Army had much to avenge when it finally reached the frontiers of the Reich in January 1945. Political commissars 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. Antony Beevor reconstructs the experiences of those millions caught up in the nightmare of the Third Reich's final collapse, telling a terrible story of pride, stupidity, fanatacism, revenge and savagery, but also one of astonishing endurance, self-sacrifice and survival against all odds.

It's easy to lose sight of the fact that wars involve individuals, each with their own hopes, fears and desires. Berlin: the Downfall, 1945, is Antony Beevor's account of the bloody Götterdämmerung that brought the Second World War in Europe to an end, and in which he has fused the large and the small scale effects of war. Beevor paints the broad picture of Marshals Zhukov and Konev, competing for glory and Stalin's attention, as they race their armies towards Berlin. He gives the reader a gripping account of the brutal street-by-street fighting in the German capital and provides an unforgettable portrait of the last, insane days of Hitler and his entourage in the bunker.
His attention to emotional detail is what made his previous book such a magnificent work, combining sweeping hisorical narrative with high human drama. Yet he also highlights the small details of ordinary people caught in the nightmare of history -the sick children evacuated at the last minute from a Potsdam hospital; the Soviet soldiers shaving themselves for the first time in weeks so that they would make appropriately presentable conquerors; and the Nazi Youth teenagers peddling their bikes in despairing, last-ditch attacks against the Red Army's tanks.
The story Beevor tells is an almost unremittingly terrible one--one of death, rape, hunger and human misery--but he tells it with an alertness to individuality. The result is a masterpiece of narrative history that only narrowly gives the crown to his previous book, and that purely because after Stalingrad, everyone knew what Beevor was capable of.

9 and 3/4's out of 10