I was glad to find out that I could purchase a paper copy of this book at my favorite bookshop in Ibadan. If you have noticed, books like Berlin were scarce to come by in Nigerian bookshops. Anyway, I bought the book in November 2024 at ₦4,250 and kept it in my Angular library until now in 2026. I finally have the time to read and digest the thing in full.
100-Word Summary
This book recounts the Battle for Berlin, which took place between the Red Army and the Wehrmacht, beginning in January 1945 and continuing until May. In the first chapters, Antony Beevor laid out Stalin’s forces that’d storm Berlin and how they advanced town by town to the city’s gates. The author also horrifically showed the atrocities committed by the rampaging Red Army, especially against German women on their path to Berlin and inside Berlin. The author also emphasizes how uneasy it was for the Red Army to finally take Berlin, despite having ten times the ammunition held by the Red Army.
How different is this book from Kershaw’s The End?
I’ve read Professor Kershaw’s The End. It was months ago, and there were similarities, simply because both books describe how the Third Reich comes to an end in their respective ways. But then again, alongside their commonalities, there are differences to be acknowledged.
- The End captures the last ten months of the Third Reich, starting from July 20, 1944, when Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg tried and failed to assassinate Hitler, to the bitter end of Hitler’s Germany in 1945. While Berlin by Beevor begins in January 1945 with the suffering of Berliners as losses against Germany mounted up until May 1945, when the Third Reich finally collapsed for good.
- Berlin laid out the battle terrain in an extended manner, which makes it difficult for novice readers of the Third Reich, like myself, to keep track of the Red Army’s advance. While in Kershaw’s The End, those towns were contracted into major cities and attached to the Red Army’s advance to cities like Krakow, Vienna, Prague, and Berlin itself. That makes the Red Army’s advance easy to follow and understand in the latter book.
- Beevor’s Berlin focuses solely on the advance of the Red Army toward Berlin, while Kershaw’s The End tells the stories of all the war theaters involved with the Wehrmacht.
Criticism of the book
The most popular criticism about this book is the extent to which the author reports the atrocities committed by the Red Army against German women. This criticism was so high that the Russian government dismissed this book as “blasphemy.” As if that’s the only topic the author goes out of his way in the book to tell and retell. How about the strength of the German Army, which Stalin and his Stavka fellows thought was weak? Beevor described in extensive detail how the understrength The Wehrmacht managed to defend Hitler’s Germany despite extremely low fighting equipment vs. their Red Army counterpart. Can’t reviewers talk about this instead? Or an individual like General Wenck, whom the author describes in the book, who helped tens of thousands of civilians and soldiers escape the Soviets’ clutches to be arrested by more lenient Americans. Is that not worth talking about instead? The book is so much more than rape stories.
Two funny facts about the book:
- I bought the book for ₦4,250 ($3.09) in Nigeria in 2024, while it’s priced at $19.51 on Amazon. However, the official price stamped on the back of the book was U.K. £9.99. I still haven’t understood why the same book is way cheaper in Nigeria than in Europe.
- D-DAY: The Battle for Normandy by the same author weighs 500 g, which makes it stressful to hold and read for a longer period of time than Berlin, which weighs 89 g less at 411 g. Meanwhile, Stalingrad weighs just 406 g while having more pages than Berlin.