In Europe

Helmut Goebbels shouted. That wasprobably the sound of the shot with which Hitler took his own life.’ Eva had already swallowed a cyanide capsule. On 1 May, Joseph and Magda Goebbels committed suicide as well; the children were each given a capsule in their sleep. Along with a colleague, Junge – disguised as a man – was able to escape from the bunker and make it past the enemy lines.
    Virginia Irwin asked Major Kovaleski whether Berlin was the biggest battle he had ever fought in. ‘He smiled and said sadly: ‘No. We have seen bigger battles. We lost our wives and children in them.’ And then the major told the story of the strange staff he had gathered around him. Each and every officer on it had lost his entire family to the Germans.’
    The diary of the anonymous woman of Berlin was only published in Germany after her death, almost sixty years after the Battle of Berlin. The book was an immediate success, and rightly so, because it is recognisable, intelligent and evocative. At the same time, however, it is a document full of blind spots, and that is probably characteristic of the people of Berlin in those days. Nowhere is there a glimmer of understanding concerning the cause of all this Russian brutality. Major Kovaleski knew exactly why he was fighting in Berlin. Many of the young Soviet soldiers carried a photo of Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, the young female partisan who had been tortured and hanged by the Germans in 1941. The words ‘For Zoya’ were also written on Soviet tanks and planes.
    To our Berlin diarist, the war seemed merely a lightning bolt of fate. When her Gerd shows up at her door, totally unexpected, on Saturday afternoon, 16 June, they look at each other ‘like two ghosts’. She is feverish with happiness, but it soon turns out that they have become complete strangers to each other in the months that have passed. When she tells him how she and the pharmacist's wife had survived, by keeping a Russian officer as their ‘steady boyfriend’, he becomes angry: ‘You've become shameless bitches, all of you in this house.’ She shows Gerd her diary, which fills three notebooks by then, all of it written for him. He grows increasingly cool, asks her what the abbreviation ‘Schdg’ means. ‘I had to laugh: “Well,
Schändung
[rape], of course.” He looks at me as though I have lost my mind, says no more. He left yesterday. He and a comradeof his are planning to wander the countryside, to go and visit his comrade's parents in Pomerania. He's going to try to find food. I don't know if he'll ever come back.’
    And this is how the anonymous diary ends, on Friday, 22 June, 1945. ‘No more entries. And I am not going to write any more, the time for that is over …’

Chapter FORTY-EIGHT
Nuremberg
    FOR MARTHA GELLHORN, THE MEETING WITH THE RUSSIANS AT Torgau meant the end of the war. That same week, on 30 April, 1945, her colleague Lee Miller took a picture of herself for
Vogue
, sitting in the bathtub of Hitler's apartment in Munich, her GI boots beside the bath; finished, over and out, the most wonderful photograph of the liberation ever.
    For Anna Smirnova, who had lived through the siege of Leningrad, that spring was the loveliest of her life. ‘My husband was alive, I was expecting a child, everything was going to be all right.’
    The Polish communist Vladislav Matwin attended the victory parade on Red Square. ‘A Russian officer was marching with a captured German flag, and he swung that thing over the street like a broom, flap, flap, at every step. And there were forty officers doing the same thing. It was the most festive day of my life.’
    Victor Klemperer had liberated himself long before: early the same morning, after he had survived the bombardment of Dresden and found his wife again, he decided to take off his yellow Star of David and await the end of the war as a ‘normal’ German refugee. Eva removed the star from his jacket with a penknife.
    Winrich Behr spent the final months of the war serving under Field Marshal Model, a typical Prussian military man who carried the adage ‘generals do not involve themselves in politics’ to its logical extreme. On 21 April, 1945 they found themselves in a forest, with the Americans close by. Model said: ‘I'm not going to walk out of these woods with my hands up, not after thousands of my men have died following my orders.’ He sent Behr away, ostensibly to scout out the surroundings.‘When I came back, he had put a bullet