Stay Alive: Berlin, 1939-1945

Ian Buruma's father, Leo, was a Dutch law student who refused to sign a loyalty oath to the Nazi regime. Threatened with reprisals against his family, he was sent to Berlin, where he spent nearly two years as a forced laborer. The book weaves Leo's wartime letters, discovered after his death in 2020, with diaries, memoirs, and interviews to reconstruct daily life in the capital of Nazi Germany from 1939 to 1945. Buruma traces how Berliners, Jews, foreign workers, resisters, and Nazi officials lived and made moral compromises as the city was reduced to rubble around them.

The war began on September 1, 1939, with a staged deception: Agents of the SS, the Nazi paramilitary organization, disguised in Polish uniforms attacked a German radio station at Gleiwitz, leaving behind murdered concentration camp prisoners as fake evidence. Hitler claimed Germany had to respond to Polish hostility, but anti-Nazi insiders such as Helmuth James von Moltke, a young aristocratic lawyer, noted empty streets and glum foreboding. Berliners adjusted to blackout orders, food rationing, and a ban on foreign radio. Jews faced far harsher restrictions, forced into cramped "Jew houses," stripped of possessions, and excluded from bomb shelters. Buruma introduces his relative Hedwig Ems, a Jew ordered to surrender her belongings, and Leon Szalet, a Polish Jew arrested on the eve of Yom Kippur and transported to Sachsenhausen, where ordinary citizens joined in mob violence against the prisoners.

Cultural life continued as a tool of state policy, with propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels encouraging entertainment to maintain morale. Famous artists faced a defining dilemma: whether to leave or stay. Thomas Mann departed and condemned those who remained; Wilhelm Furtwängler, the celebrated conductor, stayed because he believed music transcended politics, a position Goebbels exploited. Buruma observes that staying in a criminal state always came with a price.

Through 1940 and 1941, German military victories brought fleeting euphoria, but the mood darkened. The first serious raids by the Royal Air Force (RAF) in late 1940 shattered Berliners' sense of invulnerability. Hermann Goering, head of the Luftwaffe (German air force), had boasted no bomb would reach Berlin. The Nazi ideal of the Volksgemeinschaft (national racial community) was promoted through every channel: radio request concerts, newsreels, and public celebrations. The antisemitic film Jud Süss became a hit, provoking anti-Jewish demonstrations.

The invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 marked a decisive turn. The campaign stalled in the Russian winter, and casualties mounted. On September 1, Jews over six were ordered to wear a yellow Star of David in public. By year's end, more than 7,000 Berlin Jews had been deported, and suicides surged. The movie star Joachim Gottschalk died by suicide alongside his Jewish wife and young son rather than submit to Goebbels's order to abandon them. Marie Jalowicz, a young Jewish woman forced to work at the Siemens factory, removed her star and went underground. After Pearl Harbor, Hitler declared war on the United States and told senior Nazis that "the world war is here, and the annihilation of the Jews must be the necessary consequence."

On January 20, 1942, 14 senior officials met at a villa on the Wannsee to formalize the logistics of genocide. Mass killings were already underway; the conference settled administrative procedures. Goebbels pressed to make Berlin Judenrein (cleansed of Jews), but factories still needed Jewish labor. Throughout 1942, deportation trains left for Auschwitz, Sobibor, and other killing centers. The journalist Ruth Andreas-Friedrich and her resistance group, Uncle Emil, worked to support Jews facing persecution. Christabel Bielenberg, a British-born woman married to a German lawyer, could offer only two days of refuge to a Jewish woman who begged for shelter. Erich Kästner, the author of Emil and the Detectives, was banned from publishing but secretly wrote the script for Münchhausen, a fantasy film with subversive lines about state inquisitions that opened in March 1943, four weeks after the German surrender at Stalingrad.

Goebbels's declaration of "total war" at the Sportpalast in February 1943 marked a peak of collective hysteria. The Great Factory Action on February 27 rounded up Jews at their workplaces; more than 7,000 were sent to Auschwitz within weeks. At Rosenstrasse, Mischlinge (people of mixed Jewish and non-Jewish ancestry) and Jews in mixed marriages were held; when their spouses staged a protest, the prisoners were released. Thousands went underground as "U-boats," surviving without papers or ration coupons. Jewish "grabbers" (Greifers), coerced by the Gestapo (the Nazi secret police), hunted down fellow Jews; the most notorious, Stella Goldschlag, pretended to be a sympathetic U-boat before betraying her victims.

Massive RAF raids devastated central Berlin through late 1943: The Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church burned, the Berlin Zoo was badly hit, and rumors spread of escaped animals in the streets. Leo, who had arrived at a Berlin brake factory in May 1943, wrote home that his neighbors' camp had burned and Dutch students had been killed. In 1944, American bombers joined the British in round-the-clock raids. Comic actor Heinz Rühmann's nostalgic comedy Die Feuerzangenbowle (The Punch Bowl) offered escape into an idealized Germany and became an enduring classic.

On July 20, 1944, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg placed a bomb under Hitler's conference table at his East Prussian headquarters, but the briefcase was nudged behind a heavy table leg and Hitler survived. The reprisals were savage: More than 5,000 people were executed. Moltke, sentenced to death for his beliefs rather than his actions, told his wife that the judge was right to identify the core issue as the choice between God and the Führer.

In the final months, Berlin collapsed into chaos. The Volkssturm, a people's militia of old men and teenage boys, was mobilized for a hopeless last stand, while SS units roamed the streets hanging deserters from lampposts. Goebbels commissioned Kolberg, a film glorifying suicidal resistance; Rühmann began shooting a movie without film in the camera, an apt metaphor for the regime's delusional state. In April, 2.5 million Soviet troops assaulted Berlin. Hitler married Eva Braun in his bunker on April 29 and shot himself the next day. Goebbels murdered his seven children with cyanide and died by suicide on May 1.

Soviet soldiers entered basements across the city, greeted sometimes with relief and sometimes with terror. The dreaded phrase Frau komm! (woman, come here!) signaled mass sexual violence: Hospitals estimated more than 100,000 women were raped. Leo, sheltering in Dahlem, was nearly executed when soldiers found a pistol but was saved by an English-speaking Russian officer. The war ended with formal surrenders on May 7 and 9. Survivors remembered the sudden silence, the singing of birds in the ruins, and the sound of women passing buckets of rubble as the first stage of rebuilding began.

In an afterword, Buruma traces the fates of key figures. Andreas-Friedrich died by suicide in 1977, disappointed by Germany's refusal to face its past. Furtwängler was acquitted by a denazification court. Actor Heinrich George was imprisoned by the Soviets in Sachsenhausen and died in 1946. Marie Jalowicz stayed in East Berlin and became a professor. Horst Selbiger, a Mischling survivor, was denied compensation by a postwar judge who cited a Nazi-era medical opinion. Buruma concludes with a tribute to Berlin's confrontation with its history: Stumbling stones bearing names of deported Jews, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, and the excavated Gestapo cellars testify, he writes, that "looking history in the face without flinching is an essential condition for redemption."