|
April 30, 1945
The capital of the thousand year Reich, Berlin, was in ruins, after only twelve years of the Nazi regime. For months, it had been pounded from the air by Allied bombers, and now it was being pounded relentlessly by Soviet artillery, bombers, and tanks. Berlin was completely circled by its enemies, who even now were advancing to within artillery range of the Reichstag itself, lobbing shells that were exploding close enough to shake the building. Remnants of the German forces fought a desperate, last ditch defense, even though they were outnumbered and outgunned, with no hope of doing anything more than slowing down the inevitable onslaught by a few days or hours.
Adolf Hitler's dream of creating a Reich that would endure for a thousand years, obtaining Lebensraum in the East for Germans to expand into, enslaving the "inferior" Slavs of that land, and destroying Bolshevism, a dream that had plunged the world into war and led to the deaths of millions, both in combat and in the planned slaughter of six million Jews that later became known as the Holocaust, had backfired spectacularly, plunging Germany into nightmare. Not only had he failed to destroy Bolshevism, his gamble in launching a two-front war had led to the destruction of Germany, the deaths of hundreds of thousands German civilians and soldiers, and the mass rape of German women in the East by soldiers in the advancing Red Army. His most hated enemy had allied itself with nations that he had only half-heartedly gone to war with, Britain and the United States, and the combination was too much to overcome. Although Hitler could not know it at the time, his folly had not only delivered the eastern half of Germany into the hands of his most hated enemies, but that domination would last 45 years, nearly four times as long as the Third Reich had endured.
|
Berlin:
The Downfall, 1945
 |
|
