BERLIN: The Downfall 1945,
by Antony Beevor. 490 pages, illustrated. Penguin paperback
With the exception of one
odd blind spot, Antony Beevor's “Berlin” is an outstanding
example of second-generation World War II history.
It benefits both from late
discoveries (such as the disposition of Hitler's cranium) and time to
reflect on the interpretation of events.
Of the events themselves,
Beevor has little new to add, although as with the rest of the
Eastern war, Americans have been offered very little popular history,
compared to the vast stacks of histories and memoirs of the Western
Allies' efforts, and the nearly as vast volumes given the Germans'
versions.
This is understandable but
unfortunate, since 90% of the European war was fought in the East and
even more than 90% of the dying happened there.
This is definitely popular
history. Beevor, an ex-officer in the Household Cavalry, knows his
stuff but intrudes little of it here. There is not even an order of
battle below the level of army group (front in Russian), and
statistics are little used. He never even gives round numbers of the
men and machines involved.
I regard this as a choice,
not a flaw, and perhaps a good one. Unlike so many popular military
historians, he does not let fascination with technical matters get in
the way of telling the story. Those who want numbers can consult the
many well-done books by Richard Overy.
The other reason Americans
are not offered much about the Battle for Berlin, one of the
mightiest of a big war, is that our army did not take part. (Beevor
notes that the Red Army assault on Berlin was the biggest military
drive in history, involving about twice as many men [and women, too,
in the Red Army] as the Germans used to invade Russia.)
And here is where the only
substantive criticism I have of Beevor arises. Many people at the
time and since, not least Heimrich Himmler, would have preferred to
see the Allied armies drive on Berlin. (Himmler deluding himself that
the Western Allies and the Germans could then unite against the
Bolsheviks.)
American officers, with
exception of the in-way-over-his-head Patton, generally were happy to
let the Russians do the dying, and they estimated that taking Berlin
would cost somebody 100,000 lives.
Beevor doubts this
estimate, figuring that there was a moment when the western
approaches were lightly defended.
He gives the eventual
butcher's bill for the Red Army as 78,291 dead and 274,184 wounded,
numbers not all that much lower than America's total for the European
and Pacific wars combined.
General Marshall, with
Eisenhower agreeing, was disinclined to spend any American lives for
a purely political objective. Berlin was not necessary to defeat the
German army.
Beevor says repeatedly
that the naïve Americans simply failed to understand the value of
the political victory, though conceding that Stalin was never going
to allow any but the Red Army to take the prize.
It's an argument that can
be made, but Beevor fails to reference the obvious case of Moscow,
which neither Hitler nor Stalin thought so highly of in 1941. While
Hitler in 1945 refused to evacuate Berlin, Stalin did start
evacuating Moscow in '41 and was prepared to fight on if the capital
were lost.
And Hitler also did not
think Moscow was a supreme objective, since he turned aside
suggestions from his generals to concentrate on it.
(Most historians think the
Germans could have taken Moscow by concentrating armor in that
assault in October-November. It's possible, but considering the
logistical incompetence of both the German army and the Nazi
party-state, there's room for plenty of doubt.)
Beevor never does say what
political benefits the democracies would have gained by taking
Berlin, and it is hard to think of any. The USSR's desire for a
defensive cordon of subject states from the Gulf of Riga to the Black
Sea was entirely understandable. And the Red Army was there.
The Stalinist-style
regimes installed were far weaker, as barriers, than strong states
would have been, but that was a miscalculation of the Stalin state.
Any conceivable Russian state would have sought similar guarantees,
just as the United States would not allow either an occupied nor an
independent Hawaii. (And American arguments were based on far, far
smaller actual threats.)
Under these circumstances,
the clearance of Germans from the regions east of the Oder-Neisse
line was a necessary event. Beevor gives full weight to the cruelty
that this involved, calling it the largest mass transfer of
population in history. Certainly it was the largest in such a short
period, perhaps 11 million Germans killed or driven out.
The result was an eastern
Europe with the possibility of development as a series of
nation-states. This could never have happened with Germans
interspersed among the populations in the numbers they were in 1939.
Something not to be found
in “Berlin: the Downfall” tends to confirm this interpretation.
There is no evidence in
this book, or in any other I know of, that the Red Army soldiers, of
any rank, understood the racial motivation of the German invasion.
For them, war was an opportunity for plunder (of women as well as
tangible goods), and Soviet propaganda did not attempt to make them
fight for marxism.
Both Overy and Beevor, for
example, note the stunned reaction of the Russians when they finally
reached East Prussia, to find that, as one put it, the pigs there
lived in better houses than Russians did.
They could not believe
that Germans, so rich, would bother to rob poor Russians. And, if it
had been put to the Germans that way, possibly the Nazis could not
have carried the nation to war. But that was not why Germans fought.
