LONDON: It had been obvious to ordinary Berliners for months, if not years, despite Goebbels’ propaganda, that the war was lost. By early January 1945, any German hopes of holding its western front had disappeared after the collapse of the Ardennes offensive, while the momentum of the Russian advance in the east could not be disguised even by the most devious Nazi propaganda. Soviet armies stretched from the Baltic to Romania and had rolled the Wehrmacht back throughout 1944. The same was inevitably going to happen in 1945.

The Red Army outnumbered the Germans along parts of the eastern front by as many as 10 to one. The Germans had no answer to the Russian’s robust T34 tank which was supported by Soviet air supremacy. Marshal Zhukov’s and Konev’s tactics were simple — they concentrated overwhelming force at selected bridgeheads and drilled corridors through the German front, isolating the German armies who had to fall back or risk being encircled.

It was only a matter of time before the inevitable denouement. In Berlin, the letters LSR (LuftSchutzRaum) on air-raid shelters were recast to mean ‘lernt schnell russisch’ — ‘Learn Russian quickly’. In the street friends greeted each other by saying simply: ‘Survive.’ Yet the scale of the brutality and futility of the fighting over the next four months, until Hitler took his life on April 30, would shock even the battle-hardened Berliners. For those of us who, until now, have not known the full details, the account of those months is profoundly shocking.

No society could have gone through the experience of 1945 without deeply embedded, perhaps unhealable wounds. A number of German friends have told me that their fathers, especially those who served on the eastern front, remained so traumatised, shamed and horrified by the experience that they lived the rest of their lives as broken men. The lesson for their children was unmissable: never again must Germany make the same mistakes; never again must it commit armies to foreign soil.

This was war as it had never been fought before, with a different scale of barbarism and intensity to the fighting in the West. The Russians were avenging the terrible crimes that had been perpetrated by the German armies as they had occupied the Soviet Union; three million dead Russian soldiers, 20 million dead civilians and untold incidences of summary executions, torture, slave labour and rape.

Now those atrocities were returned in kind. Beevor’s account of the Russian armies closing in on Konigsberg, the capital of East Prussia, with T34 tank columns mowing down lines of German refugees and German women systematically raped, sometimes many times over, is one of the most harrowing in a book that never pulls its punches.

In Hitler’s bunker, the atmosphere became more surreal, with Hitler fantasising about phantom armies or disunity among his enemies that might relieve Berlin. In moments of lucidity, he would concede that the war was lost and plan his suicide so that it would have the maximum propaganda effect afterwards. But for the most part, he was given to prolonged rages and psychotic suspicion of all around him.

The military situation meetings became farcical; physically, Hitler was as shattered as his country. As elite Soviet units surrounded the Chancellory, its inmates, anticipating certain death, resorted to drink and debauchery. Illogical and evil in its pomp, fascism died the same way.

It was not until May 8, immediately after the war ended in Europe, that the Soviet propaganda machine released details of Auschwitz, a depravity beyond depravity. Here, not only Jews in their many thousands had been gassed, but Soviet prisoners of war had been sent to their death through exposure to temperatures well below zero. For the Red Army, this was yet more confirmation of what they already intended. They would take no prisoners.

The first four months of 1945 cast their shadow today. The Israeli soldier who left the message on the wall in Jenin that he had no other land is linked directly to the death camps Zhukov’s soldiers discovered that January. History is unforgiving. We cannot change the past, but one of the achievements of contemporary Europe is the refusal to allow it to condemn the present — and to build a polity and society that is fireproofed against the madnesses of fascism and communism.

Some Eurosceptic writers last week blamed the EU for the resurgence of the extreme Right. They could not be more wrong. The EU’s ambition to break with history is our defence against that fascist menace. —Dawn/The Observer News Service.