Potsdam Station John Russell series Book 4 eBook David Downing
Download As PDF : Potsdam Station John Russell series Book 4 eBook David Downing 
April 1945. Hitler's Reich is on the verge of extinction, and its enemies are already plotting against each other. Assaulted by Allied bombs and Soviet shells, ruled by Nazis with nothing to lose, Berlin has become the most dangerous place on earth.
Anglo-American journalist John Russell has travelled to Moscow, having escaped from Berlin in 1941 as America entered the war following the attack on Pearl Harbour.
Russell's eighteen-year-old son Paul, born to a German mother, is on the Oder front line, awaiting the final Soviet onslaught, ready to retreat towards Berlin, and resigned to the certain prospect of either death or imprisonment. Inside Berlin, Russell's girlfriend Effi has a Jewish orphan to care for, and the Gestapo on her trail. The advancing Red Army promises liberation, but is also seeking retribution, particularly from German women.
To find and save his son and girlfriend, Russell must reach Berlin no later than the Red Army. But only the Soviets can get him there, and the price of their help will threaten both his and the world's future.
Potsdam Station John Russell series Book 4 eBook David Downing
Thanks to #SohoPress updates, I learned about David Downing--and now that we've lost Philip Kerr, Downing is my go-to author for WWII Berlin. Kerr gave us Bernie Gunther, David Downing writes about John Russell. Bernie is a PI, Russell a journalist. Because Russell has ties to Russia from his embrace of communism in the 1920s, he has useful connections to the Russians who are, in Potsdam Station, encroaching on Berlin. Russia under Stalin has dimmed Russell's youthful idealism, but he still knows how to work his contacts, as any good journalist does. In Potsdam Station, Russell is in the position of trying to unite his family, to determine--as Germany falls--what the next move should be--and this book moves between his journey to Berlin to reunite with Effie and Paul--and the independent journeys those two characters are on. I was born in 1944, and as a school kid in the 50s, I was tapped to be part of the solution to US' inferiority in the space race. As a result, I did not study history--it was considered a "frill." In retrospect, that ignited my love of history as an untapped field of study that has lasted a lifetime. I also feel that when I was in school, a true perspective on the horrors of WWII hadn't emerged. Emotions in the period immediately following the war ran high, but they also fragmented the picture of what actually happened. Reading authors like Downing gives me insight into that period. While I was reading this book, I was also watching #BabylonBerlin on Netflix. The portrait that emerges of Berlin between the wars and after WWII is fascinating--and horrible. David Downing writes with clarity and specificity. If you haven't read his books yet, start with the first, Zoo Station, and keep reading.Product details
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Potsdam Station John Russell series Book 4 eBook David Downing Reviews
I've enjoyed David Downing's John Russell series, but this book is particularly fine. Historical novels set at the fall of Berlin in 1945 are particularly grabbing for me, because of the fatefulness of it all, and also because of its grayness. More on that later.
For three books Downing dealt with John Russell's complex intrigues in prewar Nazi Germany. Now he has put together a series plot which allows him to look at Berlin's fall from three different perspectives simultaneously.
Russell escapes Germany in the previous book, "Stettin Station", in 1941 after Pearl Harbor and America's entry into the war makes the Anglo-American journalist an enemy alien. A war correspondent since then, now in April 1945 he goes to Moscow on a dangerous long-shot bet - that he can cover the Red Army's entry into Berlin, ostensibly to write about it, but really because he wants to find girlfriend Effi Koenen. Russell doesn't know if she's alive but if so she'll be in danger when the city falls. The NKVD first jails him, then make him an offer he can't refuse - parachuting into Berlin with a spy team charged with bringing back Germany's atomic secrets. Russell's intimate familiarity with Berlin makes him a good guide.
His son Paul Gehrts was a 14 year old Hitler Youth when Russell left. He's now in the Wehrmacht, and at 18, after a year at the Eastern Front, a war-weary artilleryman trying to stay alive as his unit falls back towards Berlin. He's lost all his naïve Hitler Youth gung-ho and idealism. He sees Nazism as the lie that it is, and its war effort a lost cause. His mother and stepfather are dead. So is his first love. He's angry at his father for having left.
Effi Koenen, a onetime movie actress, lives under assumed names and continues to do what she's been doing since Russell fled Helping Jews and others escape the country. She works closely with a Swedish diplomat who gets them on ships to neutral Sweden. It's harrowing work if any of her charges are caught and tortured, they will tell what they know of her to the Gestapo. She uses all her acting ability to disguise who she really is. As the Russians advance, she finds herself with a new charge - an 8-year-old Jewish orphan who has somehow managed to survive this long, and has no one else.
So we're looking at this simultaneously from all three perspectives. Russell sees what's happened to the city he left more than three years before, and suspects his NKVD keepers will kill him once the mission is complete to keep their new secrets, secret. (And because, well, that's how the NKVD rolls.) He has no idea if Paul or Effi or any of his other former or almost relatives - his former brother in law Thomas, Effi's sister Zahra, Paul's mother Ilse - are still alive, or how to find them in a huge city now in ruins. Meanwhile the SS still roams its streets executing anyone deemed a deserter or traitor. Every decision he makes about where to go and how to get there - this subway station or that? this person's house or that? streets or rails or through the woods? - will affect whether he survives or not.
Effi experiences the fall of Berlin as other civilians do. Most of the people left are women. Food is in increasingly short supply. Her real identity and Rosa's are still too dangerous to disclose to anyone. Every other building has been reduced to rubble by relentless Allied bombing and now Soviet shelling. Goebbels' propaganda machine still spreads propaganda about secret weapons, about a surprise peace deal bringing the US and Britain into the war against the Russians, about German armies poised to relieve Berlin, and a few people actually still believe it. Many people flee to the West towards Allied lines, knowing the Red Army will rape every German woman they can find.
Paul, as his own unit is decimated and he finds himself without orders, must steer clear of insane SS types while still seeking to do his duty as a soldier - and wondering what, exactly, his duty now is.
The odds for any of them - German soldier, German woman, Anglo-American journalist/spy - surviving this cataclysm are iffy.
Downing keeps ratcheting up the tension, and the story moves fast as the net closes on Berlin. The reader knows each day brings the war significantly closer to its finish and its aftermath. Russell, Paul and Effi and circle around in the dying city, and you wonder when and how they will finally meet one another.
What makes this series great is its understanding of the shades of gray created by dual citizenship, by competing ideologies and dictatorships, by marriage, by blood, by familiarity. The beginners course on World War II is about good guys and bad guys. The advanced course gets into all the things blurring that.
Like the Jewish informers still, in 1945, working for the Gestapo, walking the streets and fingering other Jews they recognize who are living in hiding.
Or the American agreement not to enter Berlin. Is it to let the Red Army have its day after fighting the brunt of the war against the Nazis? Or is it to continuing letting them take most of the casualties, with the postwar lines of occupation already decided? Are the Communists heroic anti-fascists and partisans, or part of a death machine as formidable as Hitler's? Amidst this all, individuals just try to survive.
Russell is mostly English, a Tommy fighting in the trenches in World War I, but has U.S. citizenship through his mother. He was a Communist in the 1920s, but has long since walked away from that. Germany may be the home of the Nazis, but it's also home to those he loves, like Paul and Effi, and more widely to a city, Berlin, whose style, sophistication and sarcasm had always held it a bit apart from the Nazi ethos.
And his circle embodies the pros and cons - former brother-in-law Thomas, whose business protects Jewish employees until well into the war; Effi's sister Zarah, her husband a fanatical Nazi to the end; Paul, whose heart is torn as a child by wanting to be as German and patriotic as his friends, while having a father who's a foreigner and quite skeptical of this whole Hitler thing.
One vignette has Russell encounter a German Communist railway worker who helps hide him and a scientist on his spy team. Russell realizes what romantic and idealistic views the man holds about Communism - having been isolated from it, and the terror state it's become, for decades - and how disillusioned he'll become once seeing his beloved revolution in action.
And while the liberation of some cities is overwhelmingly positive, the fall of Berlin is darkened by our knowledge of what will follow - the violence against helpless civilians, the rape of the women, a new dictatorship succeeding the old one, the gulags and POW camps in the East replacing the Nazi death camp system. Only the choice of victims will change.
Author David Downing has previously written three first-rate war/spy novels in the "Berlin Station" series that feature Anglo-American journalist, John Russell as protagonist. The books chronicle Russell's struggles to survive the prewar political and espionage whirlpool and to protect his German family as the increasingly aggressive and xenophobic Nazi regime prepares to launch WWII in the mid-1930s. These stories have been wonderfully researched, are full of well-sketched characters and a landscape detailed with great accuracy, and always high in nervous energy and, above all else, are highly entertaining. They are all well worth reading. The fourth book in the series, "Potsdam Station", may be the best in the series as author Downing notches up the action of the story to a level well beyond intelligent and cerebral that characterized the earlier books. It's a great action/thriller read that I had difficulty putting down after the first couple of pages.
The time period in "Potsdam Station" jumps ahead to the closing days of the war in Europe, as the Allies are closing in on the German capital and the Nazi armies have mostly retreated to a perimeter of a few miles around Berlin. John Russell, after escaping from Germany in 1941 to avoid interment after the entry of the U.S. into the war, has spent most of the interim in America and with American forces in Britain and France, working as a war correspondent. He has been cut off from news of his family and loved ones in the Reich--his fiance Effi Koenen, his son Paul and his in-laws. Desperate to reach all of them before Germany falls, Russell convinces the Soviet Government to allow him to enter Berlin with their forces. The deal is made only after he agrees to perform a service to the Soviets that would smack of treason to his own and other Allied governments if they learned of it. The core of the novel then becomes the question of whether Russell can reunite with his family and protect from the likely post-defeat horrors that await the German population at the hands of Soviet forces hell bent of victory and revenge.
Meanwhile, the stories of Russell's son, Paul, and fiance, Effi, both battling for own lives in or near Berlin, are told in harrowing, day-to-day detail. Effi's underground existence and resistance activities are engaging and have the ring of authenticity, but it is Paul's story, as a young soldier with the shattered German defense forces around the capital that is really grabbing. Paul's metamorphoses from Hitler Youth true believer to political atheist bent on simple survival convincingly evolves as the Soviets move closer to Berlin and the Third Reich implodes.
This is an exciting story by a writer in top form. You will find it at least on a par with Furst, Steiner, Kerr and Shriner. Highly recommended.
Thanks to #SohoPress updates, I learned about David Downing--and now that we've lost Philip Kerr, Downing is my go-to author for WWII Berlin. Kerr gave us Bernie Gunther, David Downing writes about John Russell. Bernie is a PI, Russell a journalist. Because Russell has ties to Russia from his embrace of communism in the 1920s, he has useful connections to the Russians who are, in Potsdam Station, encroaching on Berlin. Russia under Stalin has dimmed Russell's youthful idealism, but he still knows how to work his contacts, as any good journalist does. In Potsdam Station, Russell is in the position of trying to unite his family, to determine--as Germany falls--what the next move should be--and this book moves between his journey to Berlin to reunite with Effie and Paul--and the independent journeys those two characters are on. I was born in 1944, and as a school kid in the 50s, I was tapped to be part of the solution to US' inferiority in the space race. As a result, I did not study history--it was considered a "frill." In retrospect, that ignited my love of history as an untapped field of study that has lasted a lifetime. I also feel that when I was in school, a true perspective on the horrors of WWII hadn't emerged. Emotions in the period immediately following the war ran high, but they also fragmented the picture of what actually happened. Reading authors like Downing gives me insight into that period. While I was reading this book, I was also watching #BabylonBerlin on Netflix. The portrait that emerges of Berlin between the wars and after WWII is fascinating--and horrible. David Downing writes with clarity and specificity. If you haven't read his books yet, start with the first, Zoo Station, and keep reading.
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