Antony Beevor obviously has a great interest in the second world war from the volume of work he has dedicated to the subject. What is always amazing about his work is that while engrossing, educational and fascinating he also leaves you with a sense of the destructiveness and futility of war. Berlin is an absorbing account of the final downfall of Hitler’s Germany.
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.
Berlin is the second book in the acclaimed World War II trilogy by Antony Beevor. The first book in the trilogy is Stalingrad and the last, Paris after the Liberation.
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.
His book 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 half a million copies, and has been published around the world in twenty-one translations. Berlin: The Downfall 1945 has dominated the bestseller lists even more than Stalingrad. 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.
