The Journal of History     Spring 2005    TABLE OF CONTENTS

From the Mouths of the Belly of the Beast:
Quotes from Antony Beevor


By Arlene Johnson

Beevor, Antony
Berlin: The Downfall 1945
Penguin Books
Copyright © 2004
ISBN 0 - 141-01747-3

Even books such as Berlin: The Downfall 1945 contribute to denying the Holocaust. Read quotes from Antony Beevor regarding this deception of history.

Page 41 " The Soviet advances also prompted the evacuation of prisoner-of-war camps as well as concentration camps."

Page 45-6 "Soviet officers, on realizing what they had found, called forward all available medical teams to care for the 3,000 sick prisoners, many too close to death to save. They had been too weak to walk when the SS began to evacuate the camps nine days before. Soviet officers started to question some of the inmates. Adam Kurilowicz, the ex-chairman of the Polish railway workers' union, who had been in the camp since June 1941, told them how the first tests of the newly built gas chambers had been carried out on 15 September 1941, with eighty Red Army and 600 Polish prisoners. Professor Mansfield, a Hungarian scientist, told them of the 'medical experiments', including injections of carbolic acid, a method used to kill 140 Polish boys. The Red Army authorities estimated that more than 4 million people were killed, although this was later shown to be a considerable over-estimate. An army photographer was summoned to take pictures of the Arbeit-Macht-Frei gateway covered in snow, dead children with swollen bellies, bundles of human hair, open-mouthed corpses and numbers tattooed on the arms of living skeletons."

Page 155 "On 13 March, [1945] a day in which 2.500 Berliners died in air raids and another 120,000 found themselves homeless, Bormann ordered 'on the grounds of security' that prisoners must be moved from areas close to the front to the interior of the Reich. It is not entirely clear whether this instruction also accelerated the existing SS programme for evacuating concentration camps threatened by advancing troops."

Also on page 155 "Soon after issuing his order for the evacuation of prisoners, Bormann flew to Salzburg on 15 March. Over the next three days he visited mines in the area. The purpose of this must have been to choose sites for concealing Nazi loot and Hitler's private possessions."

If Hitler was to commit suicide on 30 April 1045 as he had everyone believing he would do, he would not need his possessions.

Page 174 "American incendiary bombs dropped in bombing raids were collected and concentration camp inmates were forced to check them and extract the material for re-use."

Page 181 "On 9 April, a number of well-known opponents of the regime were butchered by the SS in a variety of concentration camps."

Page 203 "Large numbers of civilians, including prison and concentration camp inmates, also had to be fed. Considerable resources were required."

                    No mention of suicide

Page 251 "'To the surprise of nearly everyone present,' Speer stated, 'Hitler announced that he would stay in Berlin until the last minute and only then fly to the south.' His entourage was surprised that 'discussion of evacuation had been general.' After the meeting, the rest of the leadership began to invent 'all manner of excuses' to leave Berlin on official business. Himmler, Ribbentrop, and Kaltenbrunner departed in different directions. A number of the Reich Chancellery staff were detailed to leave for the Berghof the next day. 'Führer's birthday but unfortunately no mood for celebration,' Bormann noted in his diary."

Page 275-6 "Hitler went on to say that because he could not die fighting, because he was too weak, he would simply shoot himself to avoid falling into the hands of the enemy. They tried to persuade him to leave for Berchtesgaden, but he had clearly made up him mind. He ordered Keitel, Jodl, and Bormann to leave for the south, but they refused. Anyone else who wanted to go could go, he told them, but he was staying in Berlin to the end. He wanted an announcement made to that effect."

Page 278 "Hitler knew and approved of the decision by Joseph and Magda Goebbels to kill their children before they killed themselves. This proof of total loyalty prompted him to present her with his own gold Nazi Party badge, which he always wore on his tunic. The arrival of the children in the bunker had a momentarily sobering effect. Everyone who saw them enter knew that they would be murdered by their parents as part of a Führerdämmerung."

Page 288 "A hopeless addict, he [Hitler] felt a renewed conviction that the Red Army could be defeated."

Further down on page 288-9 "Hitler, Speer found, was calm, like an old man resigned to death. He asked questions about Grand Admiral Dönitz and Speer sensed immediately that Hitler intended to nominate him as his successor. Hitler also asked his opinion about flying to Berchtesgaden or staying in Berlin. Speer said that he thought it would be better to end it all in Berlin rather than at his country retreat, where 'the legends would be hard to create. Hitler seemed reassured that Speer agreed with his decision. He then discussed suicide and Eva Braun's determination to die with him.

Speer was still in the bunker on that evening of 23 April when Bormann rushed in with a signal from Göring in Bavaria. Göring had received from General Koller a third-hand account of Hitler's breakdown the day before and his pronouncement that he would stay in Berlin and shoot himself."

Page 343 "He [Hitler] had never wanted war. It had been forced on him by international Jewish interests....Goebbels, meanwhile wrote his own will."

What would be the point of writing a will when all his family, including his children, would be dead too?

Page 350 "Führer dictates his political and private wills."

Page 359 "Nobody seems to have heard the shot that Hitler fired into his own head. Not long after 3.15 p.m., his valet, Heinz Linge, followed by Günsche, Goebbels, Bormann and the recently arrived Axmann, entered Hitler's sitting room. Others peered over their shoulders before the door was shut in their faces. Günsche and Linge carried Hitler's corpse, wrapped in a Wehrmacht blanket, out into the corridor and then up the stairs to the Reich Chancellery garden. At some point, Linge managed to take his master's watch, although it did him little good because he had to get rid of it before Soviet troops took him prisoner. Eva Hitler's body - her lips were apparently puckered from the poison - was then carried up and laid next to Hitler's, not far from the bunker exit. The two corpses were then drenched in petrol from the jerry cans. Goebbels, Bormann, Krebs, and Burgdorf followed to pay their last respects. They raised their arms in the Hitler salute as a burning torch of paper or rag was dropped on to the two corpses."

Page 381 "Joseph and Magda Goebbels stood next to each other, a few metres from where the bodies of Hitler and his wife had been burned and then buried in a shell crater."

Page 389 "General Berzarin had promised the gold star of Hero of the Soviet Union to the soldier who discovered Hitler's body, so the troops who had taken the Reich Chancellery were less than happy when SMERSH officers turned up and ordered them out."

Page 390 "In the garden they [SMERSH] came across two badly charred corpses which appeared to have 'shrunk in size and looked like puppets.' The sappers, having completed their task, were rapidly sent away. The SMERSH officers recognized the outside head from caricatures in the Soviet press, and the orthopaedic boot confirmed whose body it was. Alongside, lay the body of Magda Goebbels, with the gold cigarette case and Hitler's party badge."

Page 398 "In Berlin, meanwhile, the search for Hitler's corpse continued without success."

Page 399 "The body of a man with a small toothbrush moustache and diagonal fringe was found. the corpse was subsequently eliminated from the investigation because its socks were darned. The Führer, it was agreed, would not have worn darned socks."

Page 426 "In the middle of June in Berlin, Zhukov was asked about the death of Hitler at a press conference. He was forced to admit to the world that 'we have not yet found an identified body.' Around 10 July, Stalin again rang Zhukov to ask him where the body was."



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