The End of the Third Reich

Vasiliy Chuikov was still breathing at the end, every soldier’s desire. This account of the operations of his army on the Eastern Front from the summer of 1944 until the surrender of Germany is not as dramatic as his history of Stalingrad. As Chuikov himself said, Stalingrad was ‘idiosyncratic.’ No one had ever seen the like and, with a bit of luck, no one will ever see the like again.

This book relates many stories, but also contains a fair amount of detailed military reporting. If the small-town geography of Poland and Ukraine becomes too tedious, skim it. This book can educate those who do not fully appreciate the sacrifice made by Red Army troops in World War II. Russians of the Soviet period almost always failed in their appeals for understanding by painting themselves as courageous, kind, etc. etc., when they weren’t painting themselves as poor and pitiable. Of course, they were neither angelic nor universally victimized. You will find the ‘courageous and kind…’ version here. Chuikov’s propaganda on the benevolent fraternity enjoyed by Russians and Poles is nauseating.

Even so, I think the general was an honest man, as honest as he could be under the circumstances. Recall that he survived Stalin’s great purge of the military in the late 1930s. He may have been just the right age, a fish too small to be noticed at the time. However, the warning that a firing squad could be at the other end of a piddling mistake—or possibly no mistake at all—could not have been missed. Chuikov became a master at criticizing ambiguously. His little shots at Marshal Zhukov are delightfully crafted. An out-of-print English translation of this book is available, but it is deeply flawed. I’m sure I made a few mistakes, but I hope a better version will be welcomed.