Berlin: The Downfall 1945

Berlin: The Downfall 1945
Author Antony Beevor
Country United Kingdom
Language English
Subject Military history
Genre Non-fiction
Publisher Viking Press, Penguin Books
Publication date
 2002
Pages 501
ISBN ISBN 978-0-14-103239-9
(Paperback)
OCLC 156890868

Berlin: The Downfall 1945 (aka The Fall of Berlin 1945 in the US) is a narrative history by Antony Beevor of the Battle of Berlin during World War II. It was published by Viking Press in 2002, then later by Penguin Books in 2003. The book achieved both critical and commercial success. It has been a No. 1 best seller in seven countries apart from Britain, and in the top five in another nine countries. Together with Beevor's Stalingrad, first published in 1998, they have sold nearly three million copies.[1]

About the book

The book revisits the events of the Battle of Berlin in 1945. The book narrates how the Red Army defeated the German Army and brought an end to Hitler's Third Reich, as well as an end to the war in Europe. The book was accompanied by a BBC Timewatch programme on his research into the subject.[1]

Prizes

Beevor received the first Trustees' Award of the Longman-History Today Awards in 2003.[1][2]

Publication notes

The book was published in the United States under the title of The Fall of Berlin 1945, and has been translated into 24 languages. The British paperback version was published by Penguin Books in 2003.

Criticism

The book encountered criticism, especially in Russia,[3] centering on the book's discussion of atrocities, which were committed by the Red Army against German civilians. In particular, the book describes widespread rape of German women and female Soviet forced labourers, both before and after the end of the war. The Russian ambassador to the UK denounced the book as "lies" and "slander against the people who saved the world from Nazism".[4]

Oleg Rzheshevsky, a professor and the president of the Russian Association of World War II Historians, has stated that Beevor is merely resurrecting the discredited and racist views of Neo-Nazi historians, who depicted Soviet troops as subhuman "Asiatic hordes".[5] He argues that Beevor's use of phrases such as "Berliners remember" and "the experiences of the raped German women" were better suited "for pulp fiction, than scientific research". Rzheshevsky also stated that the Germans could have expected an "avalanche of revenge" after what they did in the Soviet Union, but "that did not happen".[6]

Beevor responded by stating that he used excerpts from the report of General Tsigankov, the chief of the political department of the 1st Ukrainian Front, to cite the incident. He wrote: "the bulk of the evidence on the subject came from Soviet sources, especially the NKVD reports in GARF (State Archive of the Russian Federation), and a wide range of reliable personal accounts".[7] Beevor stated that he hopes that Russian historians will "take a more objective approach to material in their own archives which are at odds to the heroic myth of the Red Army as 'liberators' in 1945".[8]

UK historian Richard Overy, from the University of Exeter, has criticized Russian reaction to the book and defended Beevor. Overy accused the Russians of refusing to acknowledge Soviet war crimes, "Partly this is because they felt that much of it was justified vengeance against an enemy who committed much worse, and partly it was because they were writing the victors' history".[6]

Beevor has stated that German women were part of a society that supported Hitler and are thus unable to identify themselves as victims in the same way as Jews, Poles and Russians.[9]

Russian historian Yelena Senyavskaya argues that Beevor's use of Soviet archival documents does not prove his point. One can find large collections of reports and tribunal materials about crimes committed by the military, but that is because such crimes were considered extraordinary events and the documents about them were collected and stored together. According to Senyavskaya, "those guilty of these crimes account for no more than two percent of the total number of servicemen."[10]

Beevor's use of rape statistics has also been criticized, specifically the estimate that two million German women were raped by the Red Army. Senyavskaya describes the estimate as being dubiously derived based on the number of newborns in 1945 and 1946 whose fathers are listed as Russian in only one Berlin clinic.[10] Furthermore, in his review of the book, Nicky Bird writes: "Statistics proliferate, and are unverifiable. Beevor tends to accept estimates from a single doctor — how can we possibly know that 90 percent of Berlin women were infected by VD, that 90 percent of rape victims had abortions, that 8.7 percent of children born in 1946 had Russian fathers?"[11]

Beevor's portrayal of the Red Army is also criticized by US historian Albert Axell, who argues that Zhukov and other generals took swift action to enforce discipline.[12]

German historian Joachim Fest described the book as "patchwork history" and said that it is filled with factual inaccuracies.[12]

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 "Antony Beevor Biography". Literary Festivals. May 31, 2011. Retrieved March 27, 2012.
  2. ↑ "Awards Winners". History Today. Retrieved March 27, 2012.
  3. ↑ Johnson, Daniel (25 January 2002). "Russians angry at war rape claims". Telegraph. Retrieved 4 March 2009.
  4. ↑ Grigory, Karasin (25 January 2002). "Lies and insinuations". London: Telegraph. Retrieved 10 July 2014.
  5. ↑ Rzheshevsky, Oleg A. (2002). Берлинская операция 1945 г.: дискуссия продолжается [The Berlin Operation of 1945: Discussion Continues]. Мир истории [World of History] (in Russian) (4).
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 Summers, Chris (29 April 2002). "Red Army rapists exposed". BBC News Online. Retrieved 27 May 2010.
  7. ↑ Cragg quotes Beevor (Cragg, Claudia (interviewer) (11 November 2010). "Chatting Up A Storm - Remembrance (Veterans') Day II - Professor Antony Beevor, 'D Day - The Battle for Normandy'". ccragg123.libsyn.com.).
  8. ↑ Von Maier, Robert; Glantz, David M. (1 November 2008). "Questions and Answers: Antony Beevor" (PDF). World War II Quarterly 5 (1): 50. ISSN 1559-8012.
  9. ↑ Wieliński, Bartosz (28 October 2008). "Tak właśnie było – mówi brytyjski historyk Antony Beevor". Gazeta Wyborcza. Retrieved 4 March 2009.
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 Senyavskaya, Yelena, "Красная Армия в Европе в 1945 году в контексте информационной войны" [The Red Army in Europe in 1945 in the Context of Information War], histrf.ru (Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation), retrieved 1 June 2014
  11. ↑ Bird, Nicky (October 2002). "Berlin: The Downfall 1945 by Antony Beevor". International Affairs (Royal Institute of International Affairs) 78 (4): 914–916.
  12. ↑ 12.0 12.1 Axell, Albert (2003), Marshal Zhukov: The Man Who Beat Hitler, London: Pearson Longman, pp. 5–6, ISBN 9780582772335

External links