Berlin Diaries, 1940-1945 by Marie Vassiltchikov

I have taken relations between Jewish Germans and non-Jewish Germans as a case study because of the enormous quantity of primary source material and because so many historians have commented on the issue. The chief interest of this dissertation is how historians select their sources and how they use the evidence they find in their sources. Therefore, it is logical to assume that this is where we see history done at its best. It is the events which are extraordinary.Of all fields of historical enquiry, Germany’s Third Reich is perhaps the richest in sources and historiography. And the bombing: 600,000 people lost their lives in Germany compared to 62,000 in Britain during the Blitz. This is probably one of the best first-hand records of that time that exists. Missy gets caught up in the conspiracy to kill Hitler which failed after the bomb attempt on July 20, 1944, after which the arrests and widening circle of executions began. He was no Nazi, he wanted to kill Hitler, he just got caught up in his role in the war from which there was no escape - except death. She grieves the death of one young friend, a Luftwaffe pilot who shot down 63 American planes. Her male acquaintances from her former life are in the German, French, British, Italian and American armies and she just hopes they'll all survive the madness. She's a moral person in a crazy upside-down world but just gets on with things. She obviously doesn't like the Nazis but she works for a branch of the Foreign Ministry and likes some of her bosses and hates others. It is not retrospective, written at leisure in hindsight: it's a record of the war in triumphant and then losing Germany day by day as seen from the eyes of an apolitical young woman. What sets it apart from most other works of its kind is that the author ('Missy') a young exiled White Russian aristocrat more or less exiled in Nazi Germany has to make a living and deal with events as the war becomes ever more menacing and encroaches on the lives of herself and her sister Tatiana and their wonderfully large and diverse circle of friends and relatives, who seem to be fighting or suffering on all sides in the war. It's just a record of what happened every day.

I thought I had made a mistake when I started listening to this diary: date, three or four sentence entry next date, another short entry another date, another short entry, etc., etc.

Berlin Diaries, 1940-1945 by Marie Vassiltchikov