Anthony Beevor's Epic new history of World War II

There is little doubt that these are the golden years of World War II research, as literary giants stalk the bookshelves and ferret out whatever essential truths can be discovered about that cataclysmic contest. We who find this war inexplicably and endlessly fascinating are lucky to live during such a time, and to have such a writer as Anthony Beevor to illuminate the darkness with his prose.

Weidenfeld & Nicolson £25

The Second World War, By Anthony Beevor

War story: Grisly tales of man's inhumanity to his fellow man

Roger Moorhouse

Sunday 03 June 2012

Antony Beevor has done a great deal to popularise history. Having played a key role in convincing both public and publishers alike that the subject could be sexy, he has been at the forefront of history's much-vaunted boom of recent years.

Now, after a succession of highly successful books tackling aspects of the Second World War, his new book is a single overarching volume about the entire conflict, from the Battle of the Atlantic to Pearl Harbor; from the first skirmishes at Khalkhin Gol to the grim denouement of Nagasaki.

The result is a handsome, yet rather daunting doorstop of a book. But happily, its 800-odd pages fly by with considerable speed, as Beevor warms to his task, being especially strong on grand strategy and on the experience of ordinary soldiers. The narrative never flags and the myriad pieces of this intricate kaleidoscope are pieced together with exemplary skill.

There are many memorable moments. Beevor opens with the astonishing story of a young Korean soldier taken prisoner by the Americans in Normandy, who had been dragooned by the Japanese before passing through Soviet hands and into Hitler's Wehrmacht. It's an example that seems to typify one of Beevor's leitmotifs: the utter lack of control that those affected by war – soldiers and civilians – had over their lives.

Throughout, he spares the reader little in his searing accounts of man's inhumanity to his fellow man, while simultaneously uplifting us with tales of stoicism or individual heroics. There are a few eye-opening revelations – not least that 60 per cent of Japanese military deaths were caused by disease and hunger, and that, in combating the latter, an organised policy of cannibalism of PoWs and native populations was carried out. The story was so gruesome that it was deliberately excluded from the war crimes trials that followed 1945.

Beevor does well to give due weight to the Pacific theatre, but he sensibly shies away from any spurious "holistic" approach, preferring to treat the Pacific and European theatres as almost entirely separate entities. Indeed, he tends to avoid modish novelties or grand reinterpretations of the conflict, presenting instead a lively, engaging and unashamedly narrative retelling of the vast, complex, global story of the war.

This is a splendid book, erudite, with an admirable clarity of thought and expression. For a summary of the Second World War – who did what to whom, when and why – the general reader would need look no further.

Given such praise, it is perhaps churlish to offer a note of criticism. Yet it is hard to escape the impression that, in tackling such a vast subject, Beevor has been obliged to sacrifice too much of the very aspect that had become his stylistic trademark: the telling anecdote, the poignant aside, the illuminating vignette. The result is that the book – for all its excellence – appears to lack some of the pizzazz of his earlier offerings.

Beevor's Second World War is sure to reach a wide and appreciative audience – and deservedly so. But, such are the stellar standards that Beevor has set for himself over the past decade or so, that one fears that there are a few of his most dedicated readers who might be just a tad disappointed.

Roger Moorhouse's Berlin at War: Life and Death in Hitler's Capital is published by Vintage (£9.99)

Anthony Beevor's epic history of World War II

The end in Germany, 1945

A new book details just how prevalent suicide was in Germany as the Red Army came rolling through in 1944-45. There were also suicides in the west as Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels terrified the populace with allegations of abuse by the Americans and British (the stories about misbehavior of French troops were based in some fact), but for the most part the Germans did not buy into that hysteria. With the Red Army, however, there was no need to exaggerate; the wholesale rape and murder by Russian troops was all too real.

Germany: Book reveals Third Reich was undone by its own propaganda

Josef Goebbels and wife Magda committed suicide in 1945 after poisoning children (Getty)

By ALLAN HALL
Published on Friday 1 June 2012 00:00

THE wave of suicides among Nazi party leaders and army generals at the end of the Second World War was triggered by fear of Soviet reprisals which the regime’s propaganda stoked to fever pitch, according a new study.

Allied to this paranoia of revenge was the prospect of chaos across the country which “ordered German minds” feared following the days of revolution and poverty at the end of the First World War, it says.

Suicide in the Third Reich is a book out this week in Germany – the first of its kind – that sets out to find the answers to one of the biggest examples of mass suicide in history.

As a reich meant to last 1,000 years imploded, the hierarchy of the Nazi party began preparing for its doom. Propaganda chief Josef Goebbels died along with his wife Magda, who poisoned their six children.

Heinrich Himmler, the SS overlord, killed himself by biting on his cyanide capsule after being captured by British troops

Luftwaffe chief Hermann Goering took the same way out before he was to be hanged at Nuremberg; so did labour chief Robert Ley, Holocaust organiser Odilo Globocnik and eight regional Nazi gauleiters, or governors.

Added to those were 53 generals, hundreds of lesser-ranked officers, thousands of minor Nazi bureaucrats – and, of course, fuhrer Adolf Hitler.

The knock-on effect on ordinary people reached its zenith in April 1945 when 3,381 Berliners took their own lives.

Author Christian Goeschl spent years researching the phenomenon, asking why a civilised people could so easily fall into a “cult of death”.

He pins some of it down on the fear that swept Germany as a result of the propaganda pumped out about “subhuman Russians” descending on the country.

For years, the Germans had been fed a diet of half-truths and outright lies about the fate that would befall the country if it fell to the Soviets.

“These stories of the ‘cruel Russians’ did much to strike fear into many hearts,” said Mr Goeschl. “The fear grew as stories of mass rapes, which were true, committed by Russians on German women as they advanced reached the ears of the hierarchy.”

Mr Goeschl studied Weimar Republic (1919 to 1933) suicide rates; these also climbed as the democratic society crumbled.

He went on: “I believe it was an outbreak of anomie in 1945, that is a lack of social norms, the breakdown of social bonds between an individual and their community ties, with fragmentation of social identity and rejection of self-regulatory values.

“Many men committed suicide in Germany in the 1930’s because they had no work, no prospect of work, no self value.

“In 1945, the chaos which many feared would envelop Germany was too much for them.”

Original review in the Scotsman