Berlin

Good review, Chris. Thanks.

Stalin, of course, had already conducted an overwhelming purge of his officer corps before Operation Barbarossa, but I recall recently seeing statistics as to how many officers he had executed during the war, and it was some staggering and little known figure. I’m not sure I could easily find it again, but it was in the tens of thousands.

Thanks for the review. Sounds interesting, although I was thoroughly underwhelmed by his book on Stalingrad. (I thought it spent way too much time setting the scene, and never really gave a feel for the urban combat, which was the defining feature of that battle. As a consequence, the German defeat was pretty much militarily inexplicable, at least from the details Beevor presented.)

Chris,

It sounds great. If I was interested in picking up either Stalingrad or Berlin, which would you recommend?

“Hitler’s military incompetence and insistence on getting his own way against experts like Guderian….”

Well, maybe.

It has been a long time since I looked at Nazi Germany and strategy in WWII, but, it strikes me that Hitler’s strategy wasn’t too bad–for the Germans–up to the encounter with the USSR. Indeed, his actions as early as 1936, when he militarily re-occupied the Ruhrgebeit and Rheinland, and outfoxed the French, English and his own military advisors, suggested that he might prevail. His surrogates defeated the monarchy in Spain. He defeated Poland, France, etc. in a couple of weeks. Moreover, if Hitler hadn’t suffered a bit of pique and dawdled in Yugoslavia for a few months before attacking the USSR, he might have prevailed on the eastern front, as well.

Regarding reports of numbers of rapes by the advancing Russians, you might want to think about considering those reports with more than a bit of a grain of salt. There were reports of thousands if not tens of thousands of rapes in Bosnia, too, during the civil/serbian war there. But after that ended, there were also reports of investigators who went in to find the people who had been raped. They found almost none. Maybe there were many, but they didn’t want to admit it. On the other, maybe there weren’t nearly the numbers that had been reported during the war. You know, the “fog of war” kind of thing.

That isn’t intended to suggest that rape doesn’t occur during war. But it is intended to suggest that reports of almost anything in wartime are, well, often exaggerated.

BTW, I’m glad that you found the book interesting. But just because one finds a book to one’s liking–for whatever reason–doesn’t mean that the information contained therein has anything to do with reality.

Regarding that particular book, there’s a book in our library back in the States that is subtitled something to the effect that the Nazis were basically the head of a group that was trying to “nationalize” assets of Jews. Don’t remember the name of the book, but we’ll be back in the US next week, and if this thread is still alive I’ll post the name of the book after we get back. I’m a little dubious as to whether that was their only goal, but that was clearly one. And it was supported by more than a few people in France and in Grossbritannien.

Oops, wrong thread!

He is highly critical of the Western allies – and especially the United States – for the naivety about Stalin. The British at least looked to the future state of Europe; the Americans were concerned simply to get the war over with as quickly as possible at the least cost to their own soldiers. As a result, Stalin was effectively handed the opportunity to finish the war in Berlin (which might have fallen more easily to an advance from the Western allies).

I think this is a bit unfair; the US was involved in a major war against the Japanese at the time, which for them was in many ways the more immediate enemy given that they had acutally attacked the US and posed a direct military threat to the mainland – something Nazi Germany did not at the time. The usual argument about Montgomery being too cautious, tends to overlook the fact that he had to conserve the men and materials at his command and had less leeway to work with here. Given that the US was catapulted to the pre-eminent position of the world’s industrial powerhouse and armoury by the War, this is not surprising.

Beevor is also indigant at the fate of Poland and at the abandonment of Poland to Stalin

Some Polish Nationalists still believe that Sikorski’s death was the result of British intelligence and fitted in with the larger selling out of the Polish Government in Exile to Russian interests.

In their turn, Soviet soldiers, encountering the wealthy farms of East Prussian and Pomerania were uncomprehending and angry that a people with as much material prosperity as the Germans should have launched the invasion of 1941 against them.

Economic historians have pointed out that there was a pretty systematic policy of stripping and transporting large amounts of physical capital and movable infrastructure from Eastern Germany to Russia, in many cases this reached the level of pure looting.

So, for example, generals concede that the Jews shouldn’t have been persecuted. But not because racism and genocide are wrong, but because they were a diversion from the war effort.

One of the most troubling things I can remember hearing was when I asked a German academic who had lived through this period whether there was any real mourning for the victims of the Nazi genocides. His reply was “We mourned all right, but the mourning was for our own dead from the wartime losses. The victims of the regime were not very present in the consciousness of grief”. Looking at films from the immediate postwar period, there are subtle hints to this as well, since in mnay of the early ones; where the rise of the Nazis’ is depicted, the opponents to the regime are invaraibly very German and idealised and scenes of detainees in concentration camps tended to represent their populations as generalised political prisoners of conscience rather than those from specific ethnic groups.

WRT the diversion argument on the genocides, this has been shown to be marginal at best; Raul Hilberg in his magesterial work on the destruction of European Jewry, does some calculations on various aspects of the ‘Final Solution’ and determines for example that the total cost to the railway network for diverting trains to these uses was less than 5% using generous parameters. More damaging was the ideological nature of the regime which imposed severe costs from the alienating of potentially freidnly civilian populations in the Eastern Front to pointless gestures like the diversion of several full infantry battalions to act as extras in the propaganda film “Kolberg” – symptomatic of the Nazi regime’s obsession with media control and the need to minutely control dissemination of political imagery.

Indeed Beevor suggests that the Western allies did not favour assassinating Hitler precisely because of the damage he inflicted on the German war effort. Stalin comes across as much more canny. Smart enough to leave most important decisions to the generals of whom he was insanely jealous; but knowing he had the power to reduce and intimidate them when he wanted to.

Well yes and no. Remember that Stalin’s stupidity was largely responsible for the fiasco and collapse of Russian defences in Operation Barbarossa and his incompetence showed everytime he did overule or ignore his generals – as in the neglect to deal with the German Operation Blue and the disastrous early counter-offensives in 1941 and 1942. We won’t even mention the Finland war which destroyed several Russian divisions.

The relationship between the two was that Stalin performed much better under adverse circumstances and took command – in fact was asked to do so by the Politburo; since he had a near breakdown after the initial German invasion. Hitler on the other hand tended to let success carry him away. Guderian was a military innovator of the first order, but is often overrated as a field commander – the man after all tended to lack the discipline necessary for command; his rage at haiving details of his plans for a thrust through the Ardennes in 1940 modified led him to resign in a pique during the camparing itself and well before its completion and outcome were secure. Not the professional standard one expects of a responsible General.

A great book.

I also recommend, to any interested, Richard Overy’s “Russia’s War”. Piercing analysis by a skilled military + economic historian.

“That isn’t intended to suggest that rape doesn’t occur during war. But it is intended to suggest that reports of almost anything in wartime are, well, often exaggerated.”

Raj,

I can’t remember where I read it, but I saw a statistic indicating that the number of impromptu abortions carried out in East Germany in the months after the spring of 1945 ran into the hundreds of thousands.

Which of course doesn’t mean much on its own, but it adds fuel to the fire.

Conrad Barwa at January 1, 2004 01:33 AM

>I think this is a bit unfair; the US was involved in a major war against the Japanese at the time, which for them was in many ways the more immediate enemy given that they had acutally attacked the US and posed a direct military threat to the mainland…

I believe that this is something often lost in the Euro-centric nature of American education. I don’t know how it developed since, but when I was in high school in the 1960’s, “world history” was largely Euro-centric, and most of the discussions regarding WWII involved the European theater. The Pacific theater was largely ignored. But the fact is that the threat to the US from Japan in the Pacific theater was much greater than the threat from Nazi Germany. I have often found it odd that Americans seem to date the beginning of WWII, if not to Dec 1941 (when the US declared war on Japan, and later on Germany), to Sept 1 1939, when Germany invaded Poland. The real beginning of the war was much earlier. Perhaps as early as the Spanish civil war, but, also, perhaps as early as the Japanese invasion of Manchuria. Australians where heavily involved in the war, as were the Canadians, long before the US officially committed combat personnel. Quite frankly, the actions of the Australians and the Canadians before the US got (officially) involved may have helped save the US more than Americans would like to believe.

>Some Polish Nationalists still believe that Sikorski’s death was the result of British intelligence and fitted in with the larger selling out of the Polish Government in Exile to Russian interests.

Regarding selling out of Polish interests, it IS interesting to note that current-day Poland is somewhat to the west of historical Poland, largely in historical East Prussia (not that most Germans would complain about the loss of part of Prussia, I’m sure).

>Economic historians have pointed out that there was a pretty systematic policy of stripping and transporting large amounts of physical capital and movable infrastructure from Eastern Germany to Russia, in many cases this reached the level of pure looting.

I don’t know whether this looting (which you correctly refer to) was during the war or after the war, but before the end of the war the Allies did have had a plan exact “reparations” for the war from Germany, in large part to be paid by dismantling some of its industrial infrastructure. The western (non-Russian) allies actually did some of that in the areas that they controlled. They (with a lot of complaining from the French, not surprising) stopped that in 1947 or so, after it became clear that the Russians were intending to communize the parts of eastern Europe that they had over-run, from fear that the rest of Germany might become radicalized. That is what led to the Marshall Plan.

“Beevor does write about the dismantling of factories and the Soviet plan to ship them home. Apparently this was carried out incompetently and much of the material just rotted and rusted in the open and was never properly employed.”

Doesn’t sound like the Soviets.