In the dying months of the Second World War on 31 January 1945, the first Red Army troops reached the River Oder, barely forty miles from Berlin. Everyone at Soviet Headquarters expected Marshal Zhukov's troops quickly to bring the war to an end. But despite bitter fighting by both sides, a bloody s[...]

This text on Berlin charts the Nazi-Communist struggle of the Weimar Republic; the grandeur, both public and architectural, of the Third Reich; and the city's battering by Allied and Soviet forces. "Focus on the Cold War" looks at the partition, and eventual reunion, of East and West Berlin.[...]

On 16 April 1945 the Red Army unleashed a colossal offensive against Berlin with the aim of destroying Hitler's armies in the East and capturing the German capital before the Western Allies. Over two million soldiers confronted each other in the last act in the war against Nazi Germany. In the cours[...]

In May 1945, as the triumphant Red Army crushed the last pockets of German resistance in central Berlin, French soldiers fought back. They were the last surviving members of SS Charlemagne, the Waffen SS division made up of French volunteers. They were among the final defenders of the city and of Hi[...]

Sixty years have elapsed since the cataclysmic demise of Adolf Hitler and his Third Reich. In this book Tony Le Tissier (author of Berlin Then and Now) traces the rise of Hitler, the Nazi Party and its ramifications, together with its deeds and accomplishments, during the twelve years that the Third[...]