Sir Antony Beevor

After more than half a century, how can you be sure that as you sit down with somebody that they are actually telling you what happened?

Often they're not, and it's certainly true that those who'd read lots of official histories, particularly of Russian soldiers and veterans, were basically uh filtering all of their experiences through what they'd read afterwards. And that, of course, is no good at all. But what was interesting was that the women were very different, because they hadn't read the official accounts, and their memories were far more reliable. At the time, the women had kept their mouths shut and their eyes open, and the men had been so humiliated by the Stalinist system that now they were in control of history. They were the ones who were able to tell us foreigners, you know, what happened. But in fact, of course, it was a totally censored, a totally expurgated version of what had happened.

I have read that it was a book that took a significant personal toll upon you. What happened?

Well, it was such an appalling story. The Berlin Book is about the terrifying collapse of the Third Reich, but also it includes the the mass rapes committed by the Red Army on German women as they advanced on the capital. … I really did have a little bit of a nervous breakdown at the end. I'm never going to forget the face of my editor when I sort of collapsed in tears in her office and felt I just not that I couldn't go on because by then I was fairly close to the end, but whether I was going to be able to sort of keep it all going and so forth.

Why do you think we choose to read it, given that the facts are often abhorrent?

I think we are fascinated by evil. We have to understand it in some ways. Why are men compelled, in so many cases, to be cruel, to carry out these uh appalling acts? And yet, at the same time, the great lesson of history must be you cannot generalise. I mean, not every Russian soldier was a rapist. Um particularly Jewish officers did what they could to save German women, and they had more reason for revenge than anybody. Not all German soldiers in in the Soviet Union were war criminals. The vital duty of the historian is to fight that sort of categorization, that generalization.

What have you come to understand about humanity through documenting human suffering?

Thank God there are moments of joy, warmth, even in the worst times. I remember when writing about some Russian women who were prepared to massage the frostbitten feet of German soldiers, hoping that some mother somewhere might do the same for her child, her son. And so you know that you cannot generalise and that war brings out, obviously, the very worst in people, but it can occasionally bring out the best in people. I'm not suggesting that as an argument for war, far from it. It's very much the opposite. But it does show that you can never really make automatic moral judgments.