Scholars are, with good reason, wary of popular histories of the Third Reich. Berlin at War, however, is a work of popular history that scholars can welcome. I call it popular history not merely because it is produced by a commercial press and a polished British writer, but because it is not aimed at specialists. It is clearly written, assumes little prior knowledge, and avoids bold interpretations in favor of individual stories set against a lightly sketched backdrop of World War II and the Third Reich.
Moorhouse's subject is the experience of ordinary people who spent all or part of the war in the German capital. His main sources are first-person accounts of life in Berlin. He has drawn them from many places, included unpublished memoirs in archives as well as recent interviews he conducted with elderly survivors; however, he draws his most colorful anecdotes mainly from well-known accounts such as those of William Shirer, Howard K. Smith, Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, Ursula von Kardorff, and Christabel Bielenberg. He also makes good use of the SD's Meldungen aus dem Reich. Factual errors are few and minor.
Moorhouse divides his material into seventeen thematic chapters. Some cover rather well-known topics, including architecture, propaganda, rationing, bombing, the Gestapo, the resistance, and the deportation of the Jews. Others delve into less-known material, such as blackouts, radio, the evacuation of children, and burials of the dead. A good example is his chapter on foreign workers. Moorhouse bases it largely on extensive research by the Berliner Geschichtswerkstatt, making this work accessible to a wider public.
Moorhouse's attempt to present World War II through the eyes of Berliners is a task fraught with potential controversies: To what extent did they support the regime? How much did they know? But he treads lightly across historiographical minefields and largely succeeds at his goal. Although the result will not be entirely satisfying to some scholars, it is never ignorant or tendentious. Some readers will be surprised by Moorhouse's portrayal of the apparent normality of most Berliners' lives amid war and dictatorship. He stresses, more than some historians, Jewish and non-Jewish Berliners' ignorance about the ultimate fate of the Jews. He does not produce much evidence of tremendous enthusiasm for the Nazis (in line with the consensus view that Berliners were less likely to be Nazis than most Germans), nor does he paint a picture of overwhelming repression in the daily lives of non-Jewish Germans who avoided resistance activities. He does take note of the surprisingly small number of Gestapo agents active in the city, lending support to the claim that denunciations and other voluntary support kept the machinery of repression humming. He also underscores an important point to explain the lack of dissent even in the last trying years of the war: “The Nazi state delivered on its promises” (p. 334), particularly by building bunkers, maintaining welfare services, and generally doing an impressive job of cushioning the blows of bombing.
The chapters on such topics as the Jews and the bombing, like the rest of the book, assemble examples and quotations to paint a vivid portrait of people seeking to maintain life and sanity amid growing horror. This is a determinedly sober treatment of material that lends itself all too easily to sensation. The book's final chapter, on the last days of the war, may cover well-trodden ground, but it is worth reading as a grim and gripping account of a city suffused with the stench of death. As all remaining illusions were shattered, the Third Reich's promises of martyrs' glory were revealed as the grin of a skeleton. Moorhouse never resorts to that sort of dramatic metaphor, however. Instead, he leads readers carefully into the depths of destruction.
