Antony Beevor: Berlin: The Downfall, 1945

By DAVID LAWRENCE

A joke doing the rounds in Berlin at Christmas 1944: "Be practical - give a coffin". It was humour born of desperation. Berliners, bombed by the Americans by day and the British by night, had a strong sense of impending doom.

The greatest fear was not of the Allies approaching from the west. Another joke was that optimists were learning English and pessimists were learning Russian.

Himmler was less in touch than some civilians. "I don't really believe that the Russians will attack at all," he declared. "It's all an enormous bluff." That when four million Soviet troops were poised in Poland to invade what one propagandist called "the lair of the fascist beast and the blonde witch".

Unfortunately for the German people, Hitler, who was spending much of his time gazing at a portrait of his hero Frederick the Great hanging in the bunker, was more inclined to listen to rosy fiction than face harsh facts.

This is a natural sequel to Beevor's best-selling Stalingrad. In February 1943, he writes, an angry Soviet colonel collared a group of emaciated German prisoners in the rubble of Stalingrad. "That's how Berlin is going to look," he yelled, pointing to the ruined buildings all around.

It is the story of the Red revenge for what Hitler's soldiers did to the Motherland - the "noble fury" of Soviet soldiers as they slaughter, loot, gang-rape and burn - and the frenzied death throes of the Third Reich.

Instead of merely recounting terrible tales of what Ivan did to Gretchen, Beevor tries to explain the mass violation of an estimated two million women, many of whom killed themselves, in terms of state-repressed sexuality, revenge for the crimes of the Wehrmacht, right of conquest and even collective rape as a bonding process among soldiers.

The mentality of some Russian officers astounds. A major told a British journalist that his soldiers were raping women in their 80s - "much to these grandmothers' surprise, if not downright delight".

And a general was surprised to find German children crying "in exactly the same way as our children cry".

Yet there were spontaneous acts of kindness amid the brutality.

The ex-soldier writer makes sense of the chaos of battle (in more strategic detail than some readers may require) and puts it in revealing personal, political and social contexts.

His research of Russian archives discovers that the eagerness of the breathtakingly duplicitous Stalin to reach the German capital before the British and Americans had much to do with the equipment and uranium at the city's atomic research establishments.

Ironically, it was unlikely he would have succeeded without the Lend-Lease trucks provided by the US.

The battle for Berlin resounds with echoes of the battle for Stalingrad.

Two tyrants - one obsessed with racial genocide, the other with political genocide - engage with a fanatical ferocity and no discernible regard for their countrymen's lives.

Hitler's maxim at Berlin - "not one step back" - is the same as Stalin's at Stalingrad.

Again Hitler cannot accept military realities and refuses to evacuate encircled troops.

General Chuikov, who led the defence of Stalingrad, takes the surrender of Berlin.

It's a less compelling read than its predecessor. The desperately close fight for Stalingrad was crucial to the outcome of the war, while there was little doubt who would triumph at Berlin, no matter what Goebbels might dream up. Its account of the suffering, though, is just as harrowing.

As Beevor says, the human tragedy is beyond the comprehension of everyone who didn't live through it. But he creates an unforgettable impression.

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* David Lawrence is a Herald subeditor.