Anthony Beevor: The most awful B-movie imaginable

Military historian Antony Beevor is following up his huge success with Stalingrad with an account of the dying days of the Third Reich and the fall of Berlin.

"The connection between Stalingrad and Berlin is so strong that it was inevitable that I would write about Berlin next. Stalingrad was the furthest point of the German advance, and after it fell the Soviets promised revenge and that the war would not end until its army reached Berlin.

"When people say, 'I'm so looking forward to your new book', I reply, 'I have to warn you, it's a really awful story.' In many ways the fate of the women and the girls in Berlin is far worse than that of the soldiers starving and suffering in Stalingrad. It shook me, I can assure you, to discover the extent of the rape by Russian soldiers of German women [130,000 attacks are estimated in Berlin alone], and I was shaken to the core when I discovered in the archives that the soldiers were raping the Russian and Polish women and girls who were coming out of the concentration camps too.

"That completely undermined the notion that the soldiers were using rape as a form of revenge against the Germans. By the time the Russian army reached Berlin, soldiers were regarding women almost as carnal booty; they felt because they were liberating Europe they could behave as they pleased.

"Having always in the past slightly pooh-poohed the idea that most men are potential rapists, I had to come to the conclusion that if there is a lack of army discipline, most men with a weapon, dehumanised by living through two or three years of war, do become potential rapists. That is very frightening, because one starts to realise that civilisation is terribly superficial and the fa?ade can be stripped away in a very short time.

"During Albert Speer's original interrogation by the Americans, he was irritated by the way that people were so interested in the ending of National Socialism, and he asked, 'Why does history always emphasise terminal events?' Well, there's actually a very good reason for doing that--nothing shows the reality of a regime better than the way it collapses. That reveals the most about the people at the top and shows the psychology on which it was built. With the Third Reich one realises that it was a fa?ade, and as it crumbled there was very little behind it.

"At the end of the war, Hitler was basically out of his mind, and it was almost as if he was determined to lose. In Stalingrad I wrote about his compulsion to increase risks, but by this later stage you can see that he had loaded the odds against himself to such an extreme degree that you almost wonder whether he was actually just longing to end it.

"What came out more and more at the end of the war was the unbelievable incompetence and irresponsibility of the Nazis. Hitler was far more interested in fantasy. When he knew the end was coming, he stayed in Berlin because it had to take place with blazing buildings crumbling down--like Eva Braun, he was obsessed with cinema. The awful thing is that one sees the Second World War as the most awful B-movie imaginable, with the deaths of thousands of people caused by people not in touch with reality."