Armageddon - Max Hastings [379]
* 9First Belorussian Front, 179,490 casualties; 2nd Belorussian Front, 59,110; 1st Ukrainian Front, 113,825.
SOURCES AND REFERENCES
With a book of this kind, a bibliography would represent a mere virility parade. The published literature is vast, and I have been reading about this period for forty years. Such a list would become a catalogue of hundreds of books on my own shelves, and many more besides. Instead, it seems more useful and relevant to detail books as sources for specific passages of text, and of course for quotations, where appropriate.
Major sources of documents are abbreviated as follows: works from the Public Record Office in London—PRO; the Imperial War Museum—IWM; the Liddell Hart Archive—LHA; the German Bundesarchiv—BA; the U.S. National Archive—NA; the United States Army’s Military History Institute at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania—USAMHI; the Stephen Ambrose manuscript collection at the U.S. National D-Day Museum in New Orleans, Louisiana—SA; material quoted from the British Second Army’s daily Intelligence Reports, of which a full set is held in the papers of General Sir Miles Dempsey in the Liddell Hart Archive at King’s College, London—Second Army MD; Russian Ministry of Defence Archives—RMDA; Russian State Archives—RSA. A special difficulty exists in the latter case. A foreign researcher is overwhelmingly dependent upon requesting specified material of which photocopies are supplied by RSA staff. Luba Vinogradova has translated aloud for me many hundreds of pages of such material. Some of these documents bear file numbers. Others do not, for which I apologize to students who wish to follow in my wake.
Several German documents quoted in my text were captured by the Russians, and are today held in Moscow archives in Russian translation. No doubt there are linguistic oddities about some of this material, which appears here after yet another transition, into English. I have quoted from several Russian and German published works which I have not myself read, and which are reproduced in other works. I have given references to the original texts, which seems most helpful to students.
A note is due about the source of some German civilian letters from which I have used extracts. Especially in the last months of the war, advancing Allied troops captured large quantities of mail destined for the Wehrmacht or removed from the bodies of German soldiers. The most interesting and vivid of these were translated and circulated among the intelligence reports of the American and British armies. Many of the German letters from which I quote are derived from this source. There is no reason to doubt their authenticity, but names and addresses are sometimes incomplete or inaccurate.
I should draw special attention to the manuscript of the Danish journalist Paul von Stemann. Von Stemann after the war made his home in Britain, and married an Englishwoman. To his deep sadness, he never found a publisher for the memoir of his wartime experiences, which now reposes in the Imperial War Museum. I have written relatively little about the battle for Berlin in my own text, because the story is so well known. But I have quoted extensively from von Stemann’s remarkable description of life in Hitler’s capital, which as far as I know has never been exploited by an historian. I am most grateful to his widow for permission to do so.
Much of the quoted material in this book is derived from personal interviews with the individuals concerned. This raises an issue which is hotly debated among modern historians: how far is oral testimony to be relied upon, especially when it is taken from