That's a speech which would never have been necessary if Eisenhower hadn't held back to let the Russians take Berlin. Churchill thought he was nuts - capturing Berlin was the culmination of the Allied war effort in Germany. Patton was irate. He thought it was the worst blunder of the war. Of course, Stalin would have held on to whatever the Russians captured, anyway, but letting the Soviets have part of Berlin wasn't such a good idea.
Well, it did do one thing - it showed both the capitalist system and the communist system, side by side, sort of a controlled experiment.
I have a piece of the wall - can't think about it without getting tears in my eyes.
Last night, by coincidence, I was reading an account of the fall of Berlin, and Hitler's final days. He ordered the army and the police to blow up all the bridges and factories and everything else before the Allies captured it - and Speer drove around persuading people not to obey the orders. The army quit supporting Hitler and many refused to defend Berlin, which was defended by civilians, mostly women, using rocket launchers they carried in wheelbarrows. They were afraid of being raped by the Russians. |
