SKIRMISHER

From popular history, I think we all know what the German Nazis usually did to the nations they occupied. The atrocities were so unspeakable that for many decades, post-Nazi Germany had difficulty to come to terms with its war-time barbarities.

An anonymous diary, penned by a German female journalist, gives us the view from the other side–a horrifying, heartbreaking account of what visited the German population when the victorious Soviets came there in 1945.

Berlin at the end of war, the diarist, describes, was a city full of women and children waiting to be raped and murdered.

The savagery the diarist describes is breathtaking:

“Suddenly his finger is on my mouth, stinking of horse and tobacco. I open my eyes. A stranger’s hands expertly pulling apart my jaws. Eye to eye. Then with great deliberation he drops a gob of gathered spit into my mouth.”

As Salon describes it:

In unsparing prose that brooks no pity and assigns no blame, the diarist calmly describes the disintegration of the German capital. Her diary begins less than a week before the Soviets entered the city, hastily scrawled by candlelight in a basement shelter.

The world hated the Germans in the decades after the last war. But we also learned that extreme cruelty can be committed by just about anybody–remember Pol Pot, Idi Amin, or places like Bosnia or Rwanda? A Woman in Berlin does not necessarly absolve Germany of its war-time sins, but just serves as a biting reminder that there are many sides to human cruelty, and usually you don’t really know which side you’re on.

THE RAPE OF BERLIN [Salon]

Stumble it!