The mass rapes made me conclude that the feminists must be right: all men are rapists, once society's brakes are off. I wish all the atrocities could be blamed on Stalin, but I think we are dealing with a much more sinister phenomenon: the heart of darkness that lies at the centre of humanity. Beevor attempts an argument that Stalin had turned the Soviet Union into a repressed society, and that this was the pent-up tsunami that overwhelmed eastern Germany in 1945. There were many moments when I felt physically sick and deeply pessimistic about human nature. Here indeed was the Ragnarok, or mythical last battle, that the Wagner-obsessed Hitler fantasised about. Since Soviet casualties were always higher than those of the Nazis, we must be talking several million dead on the Eastern Front in 1945. Some scholars say that German war dead alone for the first four months of 1945 topped one million. The one disappointment in a splendid book is that Beevor does not provide total casualty figures for the battle or the campaign in eastern Germany from January 1945. For this book is to all previous attempts what the first half hour of Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan was to all previous war movies: it simply makes them obsolete at a stroke. In the case of Antony Beevor's magnificent volume, another Ryan comes to mind. Ever since Cornelius Ryan's The Last Battle, nearly 40 years ago, the two-week battle for Berlin from 16 April to has fascinated historians.
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