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Title: Berlin Diaries, 1940-1945 by Marie Vassiltchikov ISBN: 0-394-75777-7 Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 01 April, 1988 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.74 (19 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: A captivating piece of work
Comment: I am now 80% through reading this book and I can't put it down. It is an amazing description of the day-to-day life of a well-connected Russian princess who lived in Berlin from 1940 til the end of the war. The people that she met and lived with come alive through the description of her thoughts and actions on an almost daily basis. The author knew almost everyone who was worth knowing in Berlin during that period. How she survived the bombing and the Nazi purge of the conspirators who attempted to kill Hitler in July 1944 are most interesting.
Rating: 5
Summary: Bombed in Berlin
Comment: There is no need to write a lot on this book: my co-reviewers have given excellent details and reasons to read this excellent memoir on the life of the elite in Berlin through the war and the pesky bombs that disrupted their pursue of any little happiness that they could seek. Among interesting details you can find that oysters were not on ration cards. This by itself speaks volumes..... If I chime in is to say that as the son of French folks that got bombed during the war, Miss Vassiltchikov allowed me to get a new perspective to all those tales of woe that I grew up with. If non German folks suffered a lot, it was no picnic for the Germans either, and perhaps a lot of them did not really measure what was really happening to the world as they knew it. This book has a very curious effect: on one hand one blames further the German elite that failed to stop Hitler; on the other hand one does wonder up to what point this elite was in large part a victim too. For better or for worse history belongs to the death camp victims as well as to the airhead elite of Germany. The reason one needs to read this book.
Rating: 5
Summary: Bombs, plots and Total War
Comment: Missie Vassiltchikov was an aristocratic Russian who was living in Berlin at the beginning of World War 2. At the time the war started Missie was a habitué of the diplomatic party circuit and friends with many of the German aristocrats of her parents class.
Missie, through her experiences in exile valued people on their own intrinsic worth and not based on their nationality and she proved to be a good judge of character. Many of her German friends were involved in the 20th July 1944 plot to kill Hitler and finish the war. Missy herself was lucky to escape the death squads that combed Germany afterwards and her diary chronicles the deaths of many of her close friends. It also clearly portrays the horror of living under the allied air raids against civilians, especially in Berlin, in the closing years against WW2 where luck, rather than good judgement, was a more assured method of survival.
Missie brings home the fact that "total war" is a horror for all involved and that there were 'good guys' and 'bad guys' on both sides of the conflict, but in the end it was the ordinary civilians who paid the greatest price for the folly of their leaders. Possibly one of the areas that is an eye opener is the closing days of the war. An area little touched on in movies or documentaries. We get to see some of the human costs of the disgraceful Yalta agreement that the allies signed with Stalin and the starvation and ruin that prevailed in Europe the years after the war. For a civilian insight into the war on the continent this book is first class along with her sister Titania's autobiography.
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Title: Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent, 1934-1941 by William L. Shirer ISBN: 0801870569 Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press Pub. Date: 01 April, 2002 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
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Title: When I Was a German, 1934-1945: An Englishwoman in Nazi Germany by Christabel Bielenberg ISBN: 0803261519 Publisher: University of Nebraska Press Pub. Date: 01 October, 1998 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
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Title: The Fall of Berlin by Anthony Read, David Fisher ISBN: 0306806193 Publisher: Da Capo Press Pub. Date: 01 April, 1995 List Price(USD): $18.50 |
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Title: I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years 1933-1941 (Modern Library (Paperback)) by Victor Klemperer ISBN: 0375753788 Publisher: Modern Library Pub. Date: 01 October, 1999 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: Nuremberg Diary by G.M. Gilbert ISBN: 0306806614 Publisher: Da Capo Press Pub. Date: 01 September, 1995 List Price(USD): $18.50 |
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