Germany 1945
On 2 May 1945, after one of the most intense battles in human history, the guns at last stopped firing amongst the ruins of Berlin. According to Soviet veterans, the silence that followed the fighting was literally deafening. Less than four years after his attack on the Soviet Union, Hitler's self-proclaimed thousand-year Reich had ceased to exist. The German Führer himself was dead.
Europe would never be the same again. Despite years of Cold War tension, the continent would remain free of war for decades to come, unprecedented in European history. Crucially, by the time that Germany re-emerged as a single and united nation in 1990, the megalomania that had brought death and destruction to the continent in the first half of the century had been well and truly purged.
But the human cost of the battle for Berlin had been enormous. Millions of shells were fired into a city that was already devastated after two years of relentless bombing raids by British and American warplanes. Nearly a quarter of a million people died during the last three weeks of World War Two, almost as many as the United States lost during the entire war.
'The battle of Berlin has never been told from the point of view of the ordinary Russian soldier ...'
Some 54 years after the war, the acclaimed British military historian, Antony Beevor, embarked on one of the most ambitious projects of his career. His aim was to discover new material on the battle for Berlin, following the success of his award-winning book on the battle of Stalingrad.
'The battle of Berlin has never been told from the point of view of the ordinary Russian soldier,' Beevor said when I first interviewed him in 1999. 'Nor has it been told from the point of view of the revenge they took on the population of Berlin when they captured the city.'
Bookmark with:
What are these?