History gives victims a final voice

LIKE a malignant tumour, war contaminates everything it comes into contact with. The longer it is left to fester, the deeper and broader and more venomous the infection. Intelligent hindsight - history - may see the inevitability of its end but those caught up in it are often blind. For leading Nazis, delusion was their most potent elixir. Even as the Allies converged on Berlin, flattening everything in their way, the psychopaths in Hitler's bunker continued to send thousands to the slaughter, including members of Hitler Youth who were dispatched on bicycles to tackle Soviet tanks, in the deluded belief that the war could still be retrieved. "Even the Japanese," notes Antony Beevor, "did not expect their kamikazes to ride into battle on a bicycle."

By the beginning of 1945, however, the denouement must have been obvious to all but the completely blinkered. After the collapse of the Ardennes offensive, the German military was in disarray and any hope it had of holding its Western front had evaporated. In the name of humanity, surrender would have been the sane thing to do. But sanity was a quality denied to those who had led the world to this pass.

In any case, it was a time for revenge, especially among the men of the Red Army whose losses in repelling the German invasion of Russia and the sacking of Stalingrad two years earlier had been stupendous. With Berlin the ultimate prize, marshals Zhukov and Konez drove their armies forward at a ferocious pace in a quest for glory and a pat on the back from Stalin. In the face of such an onslaught, the Germans, military as well as civilians, were, by and large, defenceless. The Luftwaffe lacked fuel and aircraft and the army was vastly outnumbered in both men and tanks. Hitler himself cowered in the bunker, a shrivelled, pitiful, nervous wreck who, terrified of suffering a similar indignity to that of Mussolini, whose body was hung upside down in public, took the cowardly way out and popped a cyanide pill.

For countless ordinary Germans, however, even that merciful relief was not an option. They knew the Russians were coming and rightly feared the worst. While there have been many detailed accounts of the last days of the war, notably the late John Erickson's The Road To Berlin, what has been lacking until now is an insight into how the victors, and particularly the Russians, behaved.

Antony Beevor, in the sequel to his peerless account of the defence of Stalingrad, manages in a swirling, sober, relentless narrative to relate how Berlin fell from a military point of view, while simultaneously showing the hideous retribution visited upon individuals so casually abandoned and sacrificed by their leaders.

Not surprisingly, even today in Russia, this is not a comfortable subject for discussion. In his preface, Beevor writes: "Extremes of human suffering and even degradation can bring out the best as well as the worst in human nature." And to be fair, his book does describe random acts of kindness. But they are buried in a rubble of debasement, in which human beings behaved not like animals - for what animals would behave in such a manner? - but crazed criminals.

Using Russian and German archives hitherto unexplored and unexposed, as well as the firsthand testimony of observers such as Vasily Grossman, the novelist and war correspondent, Beevor uncovers stories of rape and murder on a scale that is nauseating.

Females were raped without compunction or regard for age or physical condition. Drunk on anything from alcohol to chemicals, Soviet soldiers were often incapable of performing and used bottles instead. "A number of victims were mutilated obscenely," reflects Beevor. Some raped women begged to be shot. "Russian soldiers do not shoot women," they were told. "Only German soldiers do that." Young girls blackened their faces and hobbled like cripples to avoid molestation but it made no difference. One Soviet major told a British journalist: "Our fellows were so sex-starved that they often raped old women of 60, 70 or even 80 - much to these grandmothers' surprise, if not downright delight."

And so it went on. Soldiers, vast numbers of them ignorant peasants who could not comprehend why Germany had invaded their impoverished country, were not punished for rape, though officers occasionally tried to in vain to intervene and introduce discipline. They were punished only if they caught venereal disease from victims. Rape, in Stalinist euphemisms, was referred to as an "immoral event". According to one modern Russian historian, "Negative phenomena in the army of liberation [rape in other words] caused significant damage to the prestige of the Soviet Union and the armed forces and could have a negative influence in the future relations with the countries through which our troops were passing." Chief among those countries, says Beevor, was Poland. But the ravaging troops were nothing if not indiscriminate, raping Ukranian, Russian and Belorussian women and girls released from slave labour in Germany.

Soon, too, the women developed their own way of talking about what had happened to them, saying: "I had to concede." One, with a touch of pride at what she had endured, said she had been forced to "concede" 13 times. That, though, was highly unusual. Many women were traumatised, others became catatonic, still others committed suicide, taking their children with them, cutting their wrists if they had no rope.

With the notable exceptions of Anne Frank and Edith Velmans, the testimony of children who experienced the second world war has remained unheard. Many of the major museums and archives related to Jewish or Holocaust history, says Alexandra Zapruder, have very few or no diaries at all in their collections. Nevertheless, she has collected the diaries of 15 young people from various sources, most which have never been published before, and is convinced more will emerge.

Zapruder likens the diaries to "a fragment of an ancient pot that we turn over in our hands to admire for its beauty". That may be too precious a reading. For the diaries - from France, Germany, Lithuania, Poland and other parts of Europe blighted by the Nazi plague - display a robust, practical attitude to life without recourse to self-pity or tortured introspection. Nothing, though, can deny the fact that something terrible is gathering and that the consequences could be grave for everyone of Jewish descent.

At least ignorance offered hope, as in Peter Feigl's diary, which he wrote for his parents "in the hope that it will reach them both in good health". This was written on 27 August 1942. The likelihood, says Zapruder, is that his parents were murdered in Auschwitz a little over a week later. Knowing that makes Peter's diary doubly poignant. Days pass and he prays and waits for news which does not come. "If only I knew where you are," he writes on 20 September. "What is happening to you?" Day after day, he simply writes: "Nothing."

In May 1944 he escaped from France to a camp in Switzerland. Considering himself a Catholic, he refers to Jews there as "kikes", a reference he later described as "shameful". For him, like countless others, the fall of Berlin may have brought the war to an end and heralded peace. The quest for peace of mind would be another matter entirely.

BERLIN: THE downfall, 1945 by antony beevor(VIkING, (pounds) 25)

SALVAGED PAGES: YOUNG WRITERS' DIARIES OF THE HOLOCAUST

EDITED by alexandra zapruder(yale university press, (pounds) 25)

Copyright 2002
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.