Shelf Life. - Review - book review

National Review, June 5, 2000 by Mike Potemra

MEMORIAL DAY, followed by the June 6 D-Day anniversary, will offer a welcome opportunity to relive the heroism of America's mid-century fight against fascism. Those looking for a serviceable overview of the war will enjoy A War to Be Won: Fighting the Second World War by Williamson Murray and Allan R. Millett (Har vard/Belknap, 656 pp., $35), a hand some ly produced volume with clear, understandable maps. It's a concise account of the military (as opposed to the political) dimension of the war and will help readers looking for the basic story of the movement of armies and navies.

Many readers who feel they already know enough background about the war-as well as those more interested in its political and cultural dimensions-will find rewarding material in a couple of other new releases. I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years 1942-1945 by Victor Klemperer (Random House, 556 pp., $29.95) is the second volume of an extremely valuable primary source on life in the Third Reich. (The first volume, also strongly recommended, is now available in paperback.)

The book wins the reader's respect with its very first entry, dated January 1, 1942, and remarkable for its insightful frankness: "It is said children still have a sense of wonder, later one becomes blunted.- Nonsense. A child takes things for granted, and most people get no further; only an old person, who thinks, is aware of the wondrous."

The man who wrote these lines was clearly not a sentimentalist. Klemperer was a Jewish German who had converted to Protestantism and was spared the concentration camps because he had a gentile wife. He provides a ground-level view of the deprivation and harassment of daily life under the Nazi regime, and while he provides an eyewitness account of a major historical event, the bombing of Dresden, it is the small details that are most telling. From August 1942: "At Woolworth's one can buy a toothbrush if one hands in a used one in return." August 1943: "On the way home I was wounded by the abuse of a well-dressed, intelligent-looking boy of perhaps eleven or twelve years of age. 'Kill him!-Old Jew, old Jew!' The boy must have parents who reinforce what he is taught in school . . ."

It took the greatest military crusade in history to overthrow that regime. Just how close a call it was is evident in "This Is Berlin": Radio Broadcasts from Nazi Germany by William L. Shirer (Ove r look, 450 pp., $37.95). These transcripts of Shirer's reports from Berlin from 1938 to 1940 paint a vivid picture of Nazism at its zenith, when vic tory was following victory with seem ing ly un stoppable momentum. Shirer is famous for his 1960 book, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, but reading this new book will give you a sense of how much scarier World War II was before the outcome was known. It makes the heroism of our American soldiers even more striking and proves that there's no such thing as being "on the right side of history." It wasn't history that turned back the Nazi tide, but some very specific individuals, whom we honor at this season of remembrance.