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Although this book was and still is published anonymously, in 2003 the author was identified as Marta Hillers, a journalist who had died two years previously at the age of 90. She was cultured, well-travelled, multilingual, and 34 years old when she wrote this diary, which covers only 58 days. It was first published in 1954, in English, then four years later, in German. They really hated it in Germany.

Wiki quotes a German author Hans Magnus Enzensberger about the book’s reception and it’s worth repeating here :

German readers were obviously not ready to face some uncomfortable truths... German women were not supposed to talk about the reality of rapes; and German men preferred not to be seen as impotent onlookers when the victorious Russians claimed their spoils of war. The author's attitude was an aggravating factor: devoid of self-pity, with a clear-eyed view of her compatriots' behavior before and after the Nazi regime's collapse, everything she wrote flew in the face of the reigning post-war complacency and amnesia.

After that she would not allow the book to be published again. (She had been abused by a whole new bunch of people.) So it had to wait another 50 years, until her death, and a new translation, and then, only then, could people take the harsh truth she was recording.

We, her present readers, have to deal with the fact that Marta Hillers worked for the Nazis throughout the war but, as Wiki says, kindly I suppose, “she was probably not a member of the Nazi Party�.

In Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, in Liaisons Dangereuses, and a thousand other epistolatory novels, the reader’s credulity is strained by the characters continually finding the time in their busy adventures to write a detail-crammed account of the exciting events of the day. It’s one of those literary devices that has always seemed completely unrealistic to me. But this book appears to prove it can and has been done just like that. During the longeurs between being bombed, scavenging for food and being attacked by Russian soldiers, Marta Hiller writes with pinpoint immediacy and with remarkable fluency.

A TRUTH ABOUT WAR INSTEAD OF THE USUAL EVASIONS AND EUPHEMISMS

Here is the truth � soldiers, all of them, from commanders down to the lowly infantry, who conquer enemy territory regard the rape of women as their right. They don’t even stop to consider the concept of rape. It’s not rape to the soldiers, it’s payback, for what the enemy did to their sisters, daughters and wives, maybe, but also, mostly, it's just because they want to. There is no such thing as military discipline in the chaos of an advancing front line. In most cases there is a deliberate policy of allowing wholesale rape, for various reasons � let the men blow off some steam, relax, take a little pleasure; and let the enemy feel our wrath.

You heard about the sack of Rome, the fall of Troy, the collapse of the Third Reich, all these big yet soothingly distant words � sack, fall, collapse. But this diary gives you the hour by hour of what actually happens when an invading army fights through your city street by street, and engulfs your own street. Then what happens to the civilians? If you’re female, you are expecting to be raped. Maybe you can stash your daughter in some hideyhole. Maybe you can dress as a man. Maybe you can use make-up to make yourself look older! (That’s ironic, right?) The older ones - over 50, say - can be glad for their faded looks. All other females expect their turn will come. It usually doesn’t come by rough seizing, what happens is that a couple of soldiers just turn up at your door, push it open, and invite you to sit down for a couple of friendly drinks. They're smiling, they're happy souls, look, they have brought vodka, there's no reason to become alarmed. Or, one will turn up unannounced around ten at night, looking for a place to sleep. It’s your bed he has in mind, not the sofa.

What Marta does, and what we imagine other resourceful women doing, or trying to do, is, after the first onslaught by drunken squaddies, find herself a protector, an officer type, who she will allow to rape her regularly on the understanding that he will keep others away. This works until the hurly-burly of the war drags her first Russian officer away; she has to get a new one pronto, or the squaddies will be back. And so it goes.

Outside , the war is still on. And we have a new morning and evening prayer : “For all of this we thank the Fuhrer�. A line we know from the years before the war, when it was printed in praise and thanksgiving on thousands of posters, proclaimed in speeches. Today the exact same words have precisely the opposite meaning, full of scorn and derision. I believe that’s what’s called a dialectic conversion.

When civil society was restored, this treatment of women as sex slaves faded away; when the German men came back to Berlin and elsewhere, and patched together their domestic life, they didn’t want to hear a single word about what had happened in their absence. The whole subject of rape was buried by mutual consent. Just, in fact, like the crime of child abuse � neither the victim nor the perp ever wants to talk about it.

I can’t recommend this book, it’s beautifully written, but it’s just so grim. Men will be depressed to get so strongly the sense that the soldiers were thinking of course we will have sex with these women! What, are you crazy? You would too if you were here! This is our reward for our heroic fighting! Anyway, it’s just a bit of fun � why all this squawking? and women will be reminded why their mothers told them never to live in a war zone, in case they had forgotten that useful advice.