FALL OF BERLIN, THE - 1945

The Red Army had much to avenge when it finally reached the frontiers of the Reich in January 1945. Frenzied by their terrible experiences with Wehrmacht and SS brutality, they wreaked havoc -- tanks crushing refugee columns under their tracks, mass rape, pillage and destruction. Hundreds of thousands of women and children froze to death or were massacred because Nazi Party chiefs, refusing to face defeat, had forbidden the evacuation of civilians. More than seven million fled westward from the terror of the Red Army. It was the most terrifying example of fire and sword ever known. Within the trapped mass, individuals faced an arbitrary fate. Some suffered appallingly, others were saved by extraordinary chance. Soviet soldiers showed both spontaneous generosity and inhuman cruelty to German women and children. The Nazis sent fourteen-year-old boys on bicycles on suicidal attacks against Soviet tanks, and as the Red Army encircled Berlin, SS squads roamed the city, shooting or hanging any man not at his post. The personal moral chaos that determined the lives of many Germans was a result of a titanic conflict between the most tyrannical egos of the twentieth century. Hitler, half crazed in his bunker, issued wild orders in the monstrous vanity of a personal Gotterdammerung, determined to bring down the Reich capital. Stalin, meanwhile, was prepared to risk any number of his men to seize Berlin before the Americans. New documents from a Russian archive show for the first time that the Soviet leader had a particularly powerful motive. Antony Beevor, using often devastating new material from former Soviet files, as well as from German, American, British, French and Swedish archives, has reconstructed the experiences of those millions caught up in the nightmare of the Third Reich's final collapse.