The Fall of Berlin 1945 Quotes

“Hitler had learned nothing and had forgotten nothing.”
― Antony Beevor, The Fall of Berlin 1945

“so when American soldiers arrived with almost limitless cartons at their disposal, they did not need to rape.”
― Antony Beevor, The Fall of Berlin 1945

“In Berlin, the black-market exchange rate was based on Zigarettenwahrung - ‘cigarette currency’ —”
― Antony Beevor, The Fall of Berlin 1945

“The power, of course, becomes even greater when a woman has a child to feed, as so many German soldiers found in France.”
― Antony Beevor, The Fall of Berlin 1945

“The writer Ernst Jünger, when a Wehrmacht officer in occupied Paris, observed that food is power.”
― Antony Beevor, The Fall of Berlin 1945

“The need to survive had distorted more than just morals.”
― Antony Beevor, The Fall of Berlin 1945

“Young women of thirty looked years older, she noticed.”
― Antony Beevor, The Fall of Berlin 1945

“Willkommen in Shanghai,’ remarked one cynic.”
― Antony Beevor, The Fall of Berlin 1945

“Standards of morality had indeed taken a battering, but in the circumstances there was little option.”
― Antony Beevor, The Fall of Berlin 1945

“Many think that the Red Army was given two weeks to plunder and rape in Berlin before discipline was exerted, but it was not nearly so simple as that.”
― Antony Beevor, The Fall of Berlin 1945

“Large numbers of women soon found that they had to queue at medical centres.”
― Antony Beevor, The Fall of Berlin 1945

“Hanna Gerlitz gave in to two drunk Soviet officers to save both her husband and herself.”
― Antony Beevor, The Fall of Berlin 1945

“Rape had become a collective experience — the diarist noted”
― Antony Beevor, The Fall of Berlin 1945

“They noted that the Ivans went for fatter women first of all, which provided a certain schadenfreude.”
― Antony Beevor, The Fall of Berlin 1945

“She had to be stitched up in hospital afterwards.”
― Antony Beevor, The Fall of Berlin 1945

“A friend of Ursula von Kardorff and the Soviet spy Schulze-Boysen was raped by ‘twenty-three soldiers one after the other’.”
― Antony Beevor, The Fall of Berlin 1945

“Altogether at least 2 million German women are thought to have been raped, and a substantial minority, if not a majority, appear to have suffered multiple rape.”
― Antony Beevor, The Fall of Berlin 1945

“Young daughters were hidden in storage lofts for days on end. Mothers emerged into the street to fetch water only in the early morning, when Soviet soldiers were sleeping off the alcohol from the night before.”
― Antony Beevor, The Fall of Berlin 1945

“Women soon learned to disappear during the ‘hunting hours’ of the evening.”
― Antony Beevor, The Fall of Berlin 1945

“Tragically for the female population, however, it was exactly what Red Army soldiers seemed to need to give them courage to rape as well as to celebrate the end of such a terrible war.”
― Antony Beevor, The Fall of Berlin 1945

“This decision was based on the idea that a drunken enemy could not fight.”
― Antony Beevor, The Fall of Berlin 1945

“The worst mistake of the German military authorities had been their refusal to destroy alcohol stocks in the path of the Red Army’s advance.”
― Antony Beevor, The Fall of Berlin 1945

“Red Army soldiers who discovered methyl alcohol drank it and shared it with their comrades.”
― Antony Beevor, The Fall of Berlin 1945

“Most of the programme of stripping laboratories and factories was marked by chaos and disaster.”
― Antony Beevor, The Fall of Berlin 1945

“Even the NKVD in Moscow provided a shopping list of items wanted from police forensic laboratories.”
― Antony Beevor, The Fall of Berlin 1945

“The main objective was to strip Germany of all its laboratories, workshops and factories.”
― Antony Beevor, The Fall of Berlin 1945

“Stalin saw the capture of Berlin as the Soviet Union’s rightful reward, but the yield was disappointing and the waste terrible.”
― Antony Beevor, The Fall of Berlin 1945

“Vae Victis!”
― Antony Beevor, The Fall of Berlin 1945

“Most of the 17,000 French prisoners of war from Stalag III D were put to work in the city, creating barricades and digging foxholes in pavements at street corners. How much they achieved is open to question, however, especially since French prisoners round Berlin were those most regularly accused of being ‘Arbeitsunlustig’ - reluctant to work — and of escaping from their camps, usually to visit German women.”
― Antony Beevor, The Fall of Berlin 1945

“He then ‘went off to have a rest’, which was often a Soviet euphemism for incapacity through alcohol.”
― Antony Beevor, Berlin: The Downfall 1945