[E-book ENG - epub-mobi-pdf] - Antony Beevor - Berlin. The Downfall, 1945

Berlin: The Downfall 1945 - Antony Beevor

Publication Year: 2002

Language: English



Berlin: The Downfall 1945 is Antony Beevor's brilliant account of the fall of the Third Reich.
The Red Army had much to avenge when it finally reached the frontiers of the Reich in January 1945. Political instructors rammed home the message of Wehrmacht and SS brutality. The result was the most terrifying example of fire and sword ever known, with 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. Over seven million fled westwards from the terror of the Red Army.
Antony Beevor reconstructs the experiences of those millions caught up in the nightmare of the Third Reich's final collapse, telling a terrible story of pride, stupidity, fanatacism, revenge and savagery, but also one of astonishing endurance, self-sacrifice and survival against all odds.

'Fascinating, extraordinary, gripping' Jeremy Paxman

'This brilliant storyteller makes us feel the chaos and the fear as if every drop of blood was our own. It is much more than just a humane account; it is compellingly readable, deeply researched, and beautifully written' Simon Sebag Montefiore, Spectator


The author



Antony Beevor was educated at Winchester and Sandhurst. A regular officer in the 11th Hussars, he served in Germany and England. He has published several novels, while his works of non-fiction include The Spanish Civil War, Crete: The Battle and the Resistance, which won the 1993 Runciman Award, Stalingrad and Berlin: The Downfall 1945. With his wife, Artemis Cooper, he wrote Paris After the Liberation: 1944–1949. Stalingrad was awarded the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-fiction, the Wolfson History Prize and the Hawthornden Prize in 1999. It became a number-one bestseller both in hardback and paperback, the UK edition alone selling over half a million copies. It is being published around the world in twenty-four translations. Berlin: The Downfall 1945 was also a number-one bestseller and is being translated into twenty-four languages. Most of his titles are published by Penguin.
Antony Beevor is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Chevalier de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France. In 2003, he received the first Longman-History Today Trustees’ Award. He was the 2002–2003 Lees-Knowles lecturer at Cambridge and is a visiting professor at Birkbeck College, University of London.