'An Act of Blasphemy' : That's what Russians think of a new account of the fall of Berlin to the Soviet Army in 1945. It is an ugly tale indeed.(Berlin: The Downfall 1945)

It is early April 1945, and the Red Army has fought its way almost to the gates of Berlin. Defeat is inevitable. Inside the city, the Berlin Philharmonic stages a last performance. On the program: Wagner's Gotterdmmerung, the Twilight of the Gods. As the audience leaves, uniformed members of the Hitler Youth hand out cyanide capsules to any Berliners who prefer death to the apocalyptic horrors ahead.

They had plenty to fear, according to Antony Beevor's new account, "Berlin: The Downfall 1945." (490 pages. Penguin.) Intent on revenge for Nazi atrocities in the Russian motherland, the invaders were in no mood to spare the civilian population. At times, warplanes machine-gunned the columns of refugees that slowed their advance. Looting and random killings were commonplace. And so was rape. In the closing months of the war and its immediate aftermath, at least 2 million German women were victims. In Berlin, the figure may have topped 100,000. According to a doctor cited by Beevor, as many as 10,000 died as a result, mostly by suicide. The last great struggle between fascism and communism is the stuff of epics: a cautionary story of the dehumanizing effects of ideology and war at its most awful. But national sensitivities have complicated the historian's task. Russians have preferred to forget the seamy underside of victory; Germans have felt constrained by their own war record from openly denouncing Russian crimes. Beevor's account is the product of a four-year trawl through the archives of both sides and a rich mix of other firsthand sources. The result is an even-handed appraisal of the facts--and a compelling narrative. In the two weeks since its publication last month, the book has sold 70,000 copies, placing it at the top of British best-seller lists. That may be just the start. Beevor's previous book, an equally chilling narrative of the battle for Stalingrad, sold half a million copies worldwide.

By most standards, it's unlikely best-seller material. Beevor, who spent four cold-war years as an officer in the British Army, is a respected military historian with no taste for the merely sensational. Indeed, to avoid charges of peddling what he calls the "pornography of terror," he has kept the nastiest details for a separate Web site. His achievement is to match the prosaic accounts of troop deployments with their fearful impact on front-line soldiers and civilians. Even by the standards of the eastern front, the fighting in and around Berlin had a desperate intensity, leaving tens of thousands ...