The Red Army had many reasons for revenge when it finally reached the borders of the Reich in January 1945. The leaders had spread in Russia, in great detail, the atrocities of the Wehrmacht and the SS. The result was the most terrifying slaughter in history, with tanks crushing columns of refugees under their treads, mass rapes, looting, and destruction.

Thousands of women and children died from the cold or were slaughtered because the heads of the Nazi Party, refusing to accept defeat, had forbidden the evacuation of civilians. More than seven million people fled westward fearing the retaliation of the Red Army. However, not everyone met the same fate. Some suffered unbearably, while others were saved by a miracle.

The Soviet soldiers treated German women and children with the greatest generosity but also with the greatest cruelty. This moral chaos was the result of a titanic struggle between two tyrants who disregarded the lives of their faithful. The Nazis sent fourteen-year-old boys on bicycles against Soviet tanks on suicide missions, while, as the Red Army surrounded Berlin, SS detachments combed the city and executed or hanged on the spot every man who was not in his place.

Hitler, half-mad in his bunker, consumed by his monstrous vanity, issued monstrous orders, wanting to destroy the capital of the Reich, experiencing his personal 'Twilight'. Stalin, on the other hand, was prepared to sacrifice as many lives as necessary to capture Berlin before the Americans.

New documents from Russian archives prove for the first time that the Soviet leader had an extremely strong motive. Antony Beevor, often using new material from former Soviet archives as well as from corresponding American, British, French, and Swedish archives, has represented the experiences of all those who were trapped in the nightmare of the final fall of the Third Reich.

'Berlin - The Downfall 1945' is a horrific story of pride, stupidity, fanaticism, revenge, and brutality, but also of astonishing patience, self-sacrifice, and survival under adverse conditions.