Caught between Hitler and Bomber Command – the Berliners’ cruel predicament
Can you be a true, thoroughgoing patriot and still want your country to lose in a war? It’s a dilemma that faced countless thoughtful people in the past century who lived under totalitarian regimes, and I know is torturing many Russians today. It’s the stark question at the centre of Ian Buruma’s subtly nuanced and beautifully written book about the lives of Berliners in the second world war as their city was being destroyed by a combination of aerial bombardment and the manic cruelty of their own leaders. Buruma follows disparate groups of Germans – some ardent Nazis, a very few silent dissidents, a small number of surviving Jews and
