"Berlin" by Antony Beevor

This book recounts the final months of the Nazi regime. It starts in January 1945 when the Soviet forces invade Eastern Prussia and cross the Vistula to liberate the rest of Poland. It finishes when Berlin is captured and the Germans surrender.

It is compelling reading. Although I found it very difficult to keep track of which army was attacking where and who was defending against whom (and the maps at the front are frankly inadequate) one cannot miss the broad sweep of the narrative. Using individual and eye-witness accounts, Beevor touches the human horror of war and then multiplies it into an utterly shocking yet believable narrative. This we go from individual accounts of gang rape into the realisation that a staggering 100,000 German women are estimated to have been exposed to these awful experiences. He describes the confusion of troops attacking through forests and he emphasises the futility of sending scarcely pubescent boys into battle. There are scenes of hell as mis-thrown grenades blow a feet off and moments of utter weariness as shell-shocked and exhausted soldiers stumble through mud, falling in front of and being crushed by tanks. There are scarcely credible accounts of women queuing for water: when a shell kills some the others just close ranks a little closer to the front of the queue. There are also moments of pathos: the eighteen year old broadcaster announcing that the Fuhrer is dead in the last broadcast before the aerial is destroyed and others who tried to continue with normal life as bombs exploded around them.

Why did the Nazis fight on? They were massively outnumbered by an a]enemy whose equipment and supplies were better in every way. Often they had insufficient ammunition. They threw into the battle inexperienced and unfit soldiers, often armed with antiquated and useless weapons. They must have known that they were going to lose. At then end they were fighting from building to building and they were dying for no purpose. Why did they not surrender sooner?

Beevor believes that the Battle for Berlin reveals "the incompetence, the frenzied refusal to accept reality and the inhumanity of the Nazi regime." It is difficult to insert a cigarette paper between the inhumanity of Hitler and that of Stalin but these inhumanities often went right down the line to each general who attacked when he knew he would lose many, many men. What doomed the Nazis was probably their incompetence. It seems difficult to brand a regime that ran Germany so successfully for five peaceful years as incompetent but it is difficult to understand how any system that deliberately set up duplicate bureaucracies so that they could compete with one another can possibly be competent. The leadership fought one another at every opportunity, even while hiding in a bunker.

The Nazis were massively inefficient in almost every way. They were especially wasteful of human talent. But they never had anything like the resource potential of the USSR. Invading Soviet Russia and declaring war on the USA were mistakes born of monstrous vanity. And Beevor suggests that the tragedy of fighting to the bitter end had its genesis in Hitler's  own vanity. He had no future after the war and he refused to consider the possibility that other people might be better off without him. He delayed his suicide until Berlin was destroyed and Germany devastated.

The Nazi leadership would have been laughable if they had not been so wicked and if they had not caused so much suffering to so many people.

One of the refreshing things about Beevor's book is how he is able to step aside from the faux objectivity of the scholarly historian and condemn wickedness and stupidity when it occurs. He highlights the moral deficiencies of the Nazi regime and many of those who followed them, even if they claimed to be ordinary soldiers or civilians following orders. "The Third Reich, in its death throes, revealed its frenzied rage against both common sense and common humanity."

This is a terrible tale in many ways. At the same time it makes gripping reading. Beevor's narrative, though confusing at times, has moments of genius. In the end it reassures. The Third Reich could not have survived because hatred is doomed to destroy itself. To build you need cooperation, you need to share, and you need trust.

Harrowing but brilliant. September 2013; 431 pages.

Books about war in this blog:

• Invasion 1940 by Peter Fleming
• Memoir of the Bobotes by Joyce Cary: A memoir of a Red Cross worker on the front in the Balkan Wars
• The End by Ian Kershaw: A history of the last few months of Nazi Germany
• All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque: an antiwar novel by a world war one soldier
• Bridge on the River Kwai by Pierre Boulle: a novel about a Japanese Prisoner of War camp
• The History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides
• A Detail on the Burma Front: a memoir of a nurse working in Burma during World War Two
• Catch 22: A classic antiwar novel set during world war two

"The end" by Ian Kershaw

This is the story of the last 10 months of Nazi Germany, starting with the failure of the Stauffenberg plot to  assassinate Hitler and overthrow the government. Kershaw seeks to understand why Nazi Germany  unlike almost any other regime, should have fought to the bitter end when it was plain to most outsiders that the Reich was doomed. By this time the Allies had established themselves in Normandy and the Russians were pushing the Eastern front back. Mussolini had been deposed and Rome had fallen. The devastating bomb raids on German cities were destroying civilian morale; the Luftwaffe could offer no significant resistance. The German troops were clearly outnumbered and, despite the incredible efforts of armaments minister Speer, were also massively outgunned. Yet the Germans fought on. Roughly as many Germans died in the last ten months as in the four years previously.

The reasons Kershaw advances are several. He dismisses the idea that it was the Allies unprecedented requirement for unconditional surrender that led to the bitter resistance: many Germans did in fact try to negotiate with the Western allies. However, this uncompromising stance may have hardened Hitler against any possibility of capitulation.

Other possibilities include the fear of the Russians, bolstered by the success of the Nazi propaganda campaign to demonise the Bolsheviks and helped by the Russian predilection (to some extent in revenge for what the Nazis had earlier done to them) for raping, looting, killing and generally terrorising the civilian population of the towns they occupied (only one in three German soldiers captured by the Soviet forces made it back to Germany after the war). Certainly, most of the Reich leadership's discussions around surrender involved the vain hope that they might be able to surrender to the Western Allies and then join forces with them to fight the Russians. This hope continued after Hitler's suicide.

Kerhsaw also considers the possibility that Germans are, simply, obedient to authority. He does not put it as crudely as this but he talks about the cultures of loyalty in both the army and the efficient civil service bureaucracy.

He also points out that many people were simply terrorised into continuing to fight. People who tried to surrender were shot or hanged, sometimes only minutes before the Nazi executioners themselves fled from the approaching enemy forces. He suggests that most of the population wanted to capitulate but that the few who wanted to fight on, for whom their past crimes meant that they had no future after the warm, were those with the power of life and death.

The main reason that Germany fought to the end seems to be because Adolf Hitler created a government that could not disobey him. He was head of government, head of state, commander in chief and head of the Party. He governed for years without a cabinet. When he made a new appointment he would ensure that whoever was appointed had their powers balanced by someone else; blurred responsibilities were endemic. In the end everyone had to check with Adolf. And the people in his inner circle were mutually antagonistic. The only person to whom they were all loyal was himself. In the bunker the day after Hitler's suicide, Goebbels killed himself, his wife and his six children. Goering and Himmler both were dismissed in the final week for attempting to usurp Hitler but both did it by mistake. Speer, who recognised early that the war was lost and attempted to undermine Hitler's scorched earth policies so that the industrialists he worked with would have something to begin again with after defeat, made an incredibly risky flight back to Berlin in the final week to say goodbye. Kesselring refused to surrender Italy until Hitler had died (although hjis second in command did surrender on his behalf).

The proof is that the final surrender came just one week after Hitler's death (and would have come earlier had Eisenhower agreed to any of the requests that Hitler's successor Donitz put to him).

There are haunting images of pointlessness. There are the starving and pathetic concentration camp prisoners, too weak for forced labour,  who are force-marched from one camp to another for no obvious reason. There are the efficient bureaucrats in the German civil service who are still shuffling paper as Berlin is surrounded. There is the Donitz regime who discuss the new Reich flag in the two weeks after unconditional surrender and before they are imprisoned by the Allies.

One criticism I would make is that there are two few maps. Towards the end there were many references to Berchtesgaden where the Germans might have made a last stand. It was clearly an important place. It isn't on any provided map; I had to find it using Google.

There are moments when this book is gripping. There is also much scholarship here and this sometimes makes the book drag. But overall this is a fascinating read.

April 2013; 400 pages

Books about war in this blog:

• Invasion 1940 by Peter Fleming
• Memoir of the Bobotes by Joyce Cary: A memoir of a Red Cross worker on the front in the Balkan Wars
• All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque: an antiwar novel by a world war one soldier
• Bridge on the River Kwai by Pierre Boulle: a novel about a Japanese Prisoner of War camp
• The History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides
• A Detail on the Burma Front: a memoir of a nurse working in Burma during World War Two
• Berlin by Antony Beevoir: A history of the last few months of the Nazi regime
• Catch 22: A classic antiwar novel set during world war two