Why Stalin Rushed In
HOTTELET, RICHARD C.
Why Stalin Rushed In The Fall of Berlin 1945 By Antony Beevor Viking. 490 pp. $29.95. Reviewed by Richard C. Hottelet Former CBS News correspondent The Battle of Berlin in the winter and...
...that is not enough for a military history, but too much for a story whose real significance is political...
...Hitler furiously refused, denying that the Russians, whom he called vastly understrength, would attack...
...As the Russian noose tightened...
...Older men were dragooned into the Volkssturm, irregular and ineffectual defense forces...
...Ships loaded with evacuees from Königsberg and Danzig were torpedoed in the Baltic Sea by Russian submarines...
...Paranoid as always, he had political officers throughout the Army, and both NKVD and smersh counterespionage units watched for treason and insufficient zeal...
...It may well be that Stalin also coveted Berlin for its symbolic value as Hitler's last refuge, and for its political worth as the capital of Germany...
...Russian casualties were higher, but the worst sufferers were the civilians in the battle zone...
...Of the soldiers who had been taken as prisoners of war and were returned, some 1.5 million were sent to the Gulag or to labor battalions in Siberia and the far North...
...Instead, he turned the American thrust to the southeast to meet the Red Army, and south to deal with what he thought could be a Nazi "national redoubt" for a last stand in Bavaria and the Austrian Tyrol...
...As Stalin rose, Hitler fell...
...The only variable was the pace of events, given a certain drama by Stalin's racing to take the city...
...The French were especially effective against Soviet tanks...
...He and General George C. Marshall, the Army Chief of Staff, left its accomplishment to General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander...
...Four million of them, supported by thousands of warplanes, massed along the Vistula and south of East Prussia...
...Overall, Germany absorbed some 12 million refugees from the east...
...Although German women seemed to figure as war booty, all women, whether Russian and Ukrainian liberated slave laborers, Jewish or Communist, were ravished—frequently gangraped...
...His propagandists accused the West of helping Hitler escape and hiding him (Argentina was a favorite place...
...Hitler's death, in a strange way, joined his fate with his archenemy's...
...The Soviet ruler has risen above the bloody tyrant who decapitated the Red Army as he disemboweled the Communist Party in the 1930s...
...Churchill had, with consternation, taken Stalin's measure at the Yalta Conference in February and felt keenly the Kremlin's intention, already openly pursued, to subjugate Poland...
...On January 12 they struck with an artillery firestorm...
...In adding Berlin to the prizes they had already won—Warsaw, Prague, Budapest, and Vienna—the Soviets would have one more token of Russian power and Communist influence...
...Stalin had shown intense interest in Hitler's whereabouts, and upon hearing of the suicide he ordered a search for the body in all secrecy...
...Beevor describes him as a hands-on boss and a competent strategist, one who pitted the ambitions of his marshals, Georgy K. Zhukov and Ivan S. Konev, against each other to speed the conquest of Berlin...
...He authorized further offensive action in Alsace and transferred an (understrength) SS panzer unit from the Vi stula front to Hungary...
...Carts could still be seen rolling through Berlin in July...
...And Beevor has provided a colorful, highly readable, impartial, authoritative account of the climax of an incredible conflict that shaped our world...
...Many more died in the relentless, subzero cold...
...The invaders burned homesteads, looted food stores and vandalized on drunken impulse...
...Eisenhower saw no strategic need to rush to Berlin and was content to leave the city to the Russians...
...Astonishingly, what was left of his Army fought well, perhaps for fear of losing...
...The mystery was necessary for Stalin's next campaign...
...A "live" Hitler was a great asset in denigrating his former allies and making them the enemy he needed as he embarked on the Cold War...
...After Stalingrad, he took charge of the Stavka, the Soviet Supreme Headquarters, and became commander in chief...
...Maps, however, help to straighten things out...
...During the last four months of the War, when the Army was fighting in Europe, 135,056 soldiers were convicted of counterrevolutionary crimes...
...This was no Dunkirk...
...The outcome was never in doubt —it was the exclamation mark to a long sentence...
...His Army commander for the eastern front, General Heinz Guderian, came to warn him that the Soviets were building up east of the Vistula River in Poland for a huge winter offensive and to plead for reinforcements...
...At this stage, helped by Western Allies and moving toward victory, he is more than vozhd, the leader (a favorite 1930s appellation...
...Although his suspicion of Soviet motives had been aroused, his goal was military victory over Nazi Germany...
...Beevor's best chapters relate the nightmarish struggle on the Oder River line and then the breakout of the remnants of the Ninth and Twelfth armies westward, against Hitler's orders, to surrender to the American forces on the Elbe...
...beyond the man who became Hitler's ally and left his country open to Nazi invasion...
...So did Eva Braun, his longtime mistress, whom he married two days before they committed suicide on April 30...
...His own Operation Borodino had produced nothing for lack of uranium...
...Women of all ages were raped, a practice multiplied farther west...
...Why he did was not altogether clear until now...
...As the Red Army advanced it drove before it, and often literally overran, an endless trek of carts and wagons loaded with belongings that had escaped looting, pulled by people, horses and oxen as long as they could walk on the icy roads...
...Some 20,000 Germans died that day...
...Hitler had no compunction about sending teenage boys into battle with antitank grenades tied to their bicycles...
...When, within days, it was found, the fact was a state secret so tightly held that even Marshal Zhukov in Berlin was not told...
...Freight trains full of refugees made it west, often with many adults and children frozen to death...
...Why resurrect the well-known story of those four months in 1945, even with the prodigious new detail Beevor has assembled...
...The Red Army had 6.7 million men along a line that stretched from the Baltic to the Adriatic, more than twice the strength of the Wehrmacht and its allies when they invaded the Soviet Union in 1941...
...Unlike Hitler, Stalin listened to counterarguments and gave his commanders considerable latitude of action, but he kept full control...
...That figure rose to 11 million by March...
...Joseph Goebbels alone decided that he and his family would die with the Führer...
...The foreign SS divisions, Charlemagne, Nordland and Nederland, who comprised half of the Waffen-SS in 1945, were loyal until they were rubbed out in battle...
...But Antony Beevor has found what may be the explanation in Russian archives...
...I think there is a point in telling the growing number to whom the story is not well-known—not only neo-Nazis and skinheads—exactly what happened...
...Soviet intelligence had learned that the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics in Berlin was the center of German atomic research...
...Brutal to the end, he sat in his bunker in Berlin ordering counterattacks and the defense of strongpoints to the last man...
...Faithful Heinrich" Himmler tried to make a deal with the Allies...
...Hitler had squandered much of his precious reserves and fuel in December 1944 in the essentially hopeless Battle of the Bulge...
...Franklin D. Roosevelt's focus was different...
...Beevor writes a long prologue to the final scene with some colorful, bitter and violent action...
...By February 19, the Germans counted nearly 8.5 million on the move...
...Reviewed by Richard C. Hottelet Former CBS News correspondent The Battle of Berlin in the winter and spring of 1945 was not one of the titanic encounters of World War II, like Stalingrad, the Kursk salient or Normandy...
...The Red Army's offensive sent people fleeing for their lives from East Prussia, Silesia and Pomerania...
...The dictator had been pushing his scientists to develop a nuclear weapon ever since he first heard of the Manhattan Project in May 1942...
...But nothing could stop the decomposition of the rotten regime...
...One flaw in the book is the author's tendency to list in detail the units involved in complex operations...
...Meanwhile, fighting raged in all directions, westward toward the Oder, north into East Prussia, and against some 200,000 German troops isolated and holding their ground on Hitler's order in the Baltic states...
...In the course of the narrative Beevor interestingly juxtaposes Hitler and Stalin...
...The portrait of Frederick the Great that hung in Hitler's small bunker living room gave him hope for the kind of miracle that saved Frederick in his war with Russia...
...Hermann Goering, now an irrelevant tub of lard, wanted to take over...
...Moscow had not found out that most of the institute's scientists, equipment and supplies had been sent to the Black Forest in southwest Germany...
...Hope for progress lay in seizing German supplies before the Western allies found them...
...Winston Churchill, looking ahead to postwar Europe, fully understood the latter...
...Thus was the stage set when, on April 16, Stalin launched the assault across the Oder River toward Berlin...
...Martin Bormann sought only to escape...
...He suspected, with good reason, that Russians who saw even the battered traces of life outside the USSR would draw their own negative conclusions about Soviet socialism...
Vol. 85 • May 2002 • No. 3
