The historian Antony Beevor tells Keith Lowe why his next book will confront one of the last taboos of the Second World War
Guide to the underworld: Antony Beevor has a knack for choosing controversial subjects at the right moment Photo: Andrew Crowley
Antony Beevor has sleepless nights. When I met him recently at his west London home, he confessed this in a matter-of-fact way, and neither of us sees anything unusual in it. We each take it for granted that any historian who immerses himself in the study of the Second World War, as both of us have for most of our working lives, is bound to suffer occasional bouts of disturbed sleep.
His own insomnia, he tells me, tends to hit him only during intense periods of research, or when he is preparing to write about some of the more disturbing aspects of the war. “Of course, you mustn’t let it get to you straight away because you’ve got to get the facts down accurately,” he says. “But it will get to you a few nights later. In the middle of the night, you’ll suddenly wake up, and it will be there at the back of your mind.”
Certainly, many of the subjects Beevor has covered have been dark. His history of the battle of Stalingrad, which catapulted him to international fame in 1998, described one of the most bitterly fought campaigns of the Second World War. He admits that some of the accounts he discovered, particularly of soldiers starving in the snow, still haunt him today. His subsequent book about the battle for the German capital, Berlin: The Downfall 1945, described the rape of German women on a vast scale – a subject that repeatedly drove him to tears. Most recently, The Second World War described in sickening detail the way that some Japanese soldiers in south east Asia not only cannibalised their dead, but even reared and slaughtered prisoners of war to be eaten. More
