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By Root 1233 0

very elderly men and women? My own answer is that it forms a fascinating, almost indispensable part of the jigsaw, so long as one recognizes its limitations. It would be absurd to rely upon oral evidence for facts and dates. The remarks of many Russian veterans are still deeply coloured by national pride. A reluctance persists to discuss issues which are perceived as national embarrassments. For instance, I asked every Russian Jewish veteran I met about their experience of anti-semitism in the Red Army. All denied its existence, which defies credibility. Likewise, I would not care to offer on oath in a court of law the evidence of some German veterans with heavy consciences.

What personal recollection does for me, as a writer, is to clothe with the flesh and blood of humanity the dry detail of official records and written narratives. At their best, personal memories give a sense of how people thought and behaved, and marginal details of experience which are unrecorded in any official file—the discomforts of a certain tank, what men did in off-duty hours, how they felt about their allies and their enemies, vivid snapshots of personal recollection. Some witnesses, of course, weave fantasies. Others are highly selective about what they choose to remember or to recount. Any experienced researcher develops some instinct about these things, but it would be naive not to acknowledge that a few witnesses’ untruths probably survive into my published narrative. If this is so, I do not believe that they are of a character to significantly distort the text. I never rely upon unsupported oral testimony to make a case on a matter of substance.

A key point, it seems to me, is that it is wrong to suppose that written evidence possesses an intrinsic reliability absent in oral testimony. The scientist Solly Zuckerman once told me that when he wrote his memoirs he researched the minutes of important wartime meetings he had attended in the British Public Record Office. These documents, he said, bore scant relationship to his own recollection of what took place. They merely reflected the personal prejudices of whoever was responsible for keeping the record. It does not matter here whether Zuckerman’s memory was correct or the minutes of which he was so sceptical. The point is that written “evidence” about matters of life and death, which all documentation about the Second World War is, should be treated with at least as much caution and scepticism as interviews with witnesses. Over the years, I have encountered extraordinary deceits in official war diaries and suchlike, often designed to achieve post-facto rationalization of what was, to those who took part, merely a “cock-up” which cost lives. Many wartime military commanders exercised a baleful influence upon the writing of their country’s official histories after 1945. I am an unstinting admirer of Winston Churchill, but his history of the Second World War is wildly unreliable. The essence of all these things is, of course, to strive for a balance of evidence.

This book’s sources reflect a mingling of official records, published accounts, unpublished narratives and oral testimony, as detailed below. I have given references for all original or unpublished material, and for direct quotations from published authors. I have not given sources for oft-published and familiar quotations from leading figures and material in the public domain, which seem redundant.

INTRODUCTION

“Some twenty-seven million”: Antony Beevor, The Fall of Berlin (Viking: 2002).

“Perhaps the annihilation”: Victor Klemperer, To the Bitter End (Phoenix: 2000), p. 443.

CHAPTER ONE: TIME OF HOPE

“Allies of a Kind”: I have borrowed this heading from the title of my friend the late Christopher Thorne’s magnificent work on wartime Anglo-American relations, which should be compulsory reading for anyone studying this theme: Allies of a Kind (Hamish Hamilton: 1978).

“he considered the Russians ‘so foul’ ”: Quoted Sir John Kennedy, The Business of War (Hutchinson: 1957), p. 147.

“So we had won after all!”: Winston S. Churchill,