They had plenty to fear, according to Antony Beevor’s new account, “Berlin: The Downfall 1945.” (490 pages. Penguin.) Intent on revenge for Nazi atrocities in the Russian motherland, the invaders were in no mood to spare the civilian population. At times, warplanes machine-gunned the columns of refugees that slowed their advance. Looting and random killings were commonplace. And so was rape. In the closing months of the war and its immediate aftermath, at least 2 million German women were victims. In Berlin, the figure may have topped 100,000. According to a doctor cited by Beevor, as many as 10,000 died as a result, mostly by suicide. The last great struggle between fascism and communism is the stuff of epics: a cautionary story of the dehumanizing effects of ideology and war at its most awful. But national sensitivities have complicated the historian’s task. Russians have preferred to forget the seamy underside of victory; Germans have felt constrained by their own war record from openly denouncing Russian crimes. Beevor’s account is the product of a four-year trawl through the archives of both sides and a rich mix of other firsthand sources. The result is an even-handed appraisal of the facts–and a compelling narrative. In the two weeks since its publication last month, the book has sold 70,000 copies, placing it at the top of British best-seller lists. That may be just the start. Beevor’s previous book, an equally chilling narrative of the battle for Stalingrad, sold half a million copies worldwide.
By most standards, it’s unlikely best-seller material. Beevor, who spent four cold-war years as an officer in the British Army, is a respected military historian with no taste for the merely sensational. Indeed, to avoid charges of peddling what he calls the “pornography of terror,” he has kept the nastiest details for a separate Web site. His achievement is to match the prosaic accounts of troop deployments with their fearful impact on front-line soldiers and civilians. Even by the standards of the eastern front, the fighting in and around Berlin had a desperate intensity, leaving tens of thousands of German and Russian soldiers dead. When the battle abated, the Red Army turned its attention to the civilians. To be sure, some front-line units heeded orders and showed restraint, but many behaved with indiscriminate brutality. Even Russian and Jewish women, freed from labor or concentration camps, were raped. At one maternity clinic, victims included nuns, pregnant women and mothers who have just given birth. Beevor reckons a “substantial minority” were gang-raped.
The blame lies partly with poor discipline and alcohol. Beevor notes that the Russians were even drinking chemicals plundered from industrial laboratories. But the curious attitude to sex in Stalin’s Russia also played a part. In the regime’s attempt to “deindividualize” the citizen, sexuality was suppressed–only to explode in primitive and violent forms. Yet Beevor’s general conclusion is bleaker still. “[The mass rapes] tend to suggest that there is a dark area of male sexuality which can emerge all too easily in war where there are no social or disciplinary restraints,” he writes.
It’s a dismal view of humanity that could be numbing over 490 pages. But Beevor gives plenty of all-too-human detail to enliven the narrative. To avoid rape, German women dab their faces with red spots to suggest typhus. Safe behind the line, Goring stretches a map over his face and falls asleep during one of Hitler’s drawn-out strategy conferences. A war correspondent asks a Berlin zookeeper whether a gorilla killed in the bombardment was fierce. “No,” he replies. “She just roared loudly. Human beings are much fiercer.”
On the strength of Beevor’s research, that’s a fair judgment on both armies. Though much of his account is well known in Germany, he shouldn’t expect a sympathetic readership in Russia. Indeed, post-war generations have grown up with the idea of the Red Army soldier as an emblematic figure of Soviet virtues. Whatever the changes in the political climate, the events of 1945 are still the heroic climax of the “Great Patriotic War.” No wonder the Russian ambassador to London recently condemned the rape allegations as an “act of blasphemy.” Or that the Russian authorities have restricted access to the state archives since the free-for-all that followed the collapse of communism. As Beevor points out, Germany addressed the question of its own guilt only after its postwar economic miracle had taken effect. Russia is still waiting for its miracle.
