Berlin at War: Life and Death in Hitler's Capital 1939-45, Roger Moorhouse, Bodley Head, 2010, 432p, 38 photographs, ISBN 9780224080712, £25-00.

In the popular mind Berlin will be seen as the capital of the Third Reich, at the heart of Hitler's aggressive and repressive regime. Roger Moorhouse has researched the ‘mood' and behaviour of the people of Berlin during the Second World War. Of course, as he points out, before Hitler managed to circumvent democracy in 1933, Berlin was a huge city with strong communist and socialist factions, and a substantial Jewish community, and so it was never really going to be as enthusiastic about Hitler's regime as perhaps other parts of Germany.

What Moorhouse has done, however, is to explore individual accounts and other documentation to find out what was happening, and how people in Berlin were feeling, at a very local and personal level. What emerges is very different from the stereotype. We are given an exceptional revelation into what was taking place at the heart of the Third Reich. Evidence of anti-Nazi graffiti being daubed on railway trucks as they were being shunted into Berlin is one minor example which caught my attention, as did the evidence that, possibly, a majority of Berliners were listening, wholly illegally and in increasing numbers, to the BBC as the war became more protracted. A very specific example which proves that they were doing so is related to the fact the BBC regularly announced the names of captured prisoners on a day-by-day basis, thus allowing ordinary German families to know which personnel were safe, albeit that they were in captivity. As it was illegal to listen to the BBC, if a Berliner heard the name of a relative of a neighbour or friend on one of the lists on a broadcast, they would tell their neighbour or friend that they had dreamt that the relative was safe, and when the recipient had heard that a number of people had had the same dream, they would be very reassured! People in Berlin at the time, in the black humour of war-time, would wryly comment that they were indeed fortunate to be able to do so much ‘dreaming'. There is even evidence from Moorhouse's research that quite senior Nazi officials were listening to the BBC, despite the prohibitions, because they preferred the breadth of musical entertainment provided as compared with the racially-narrowed fare on German radio stations.

As is frequently the case, such detailed local research has provided entirely novel insights into what was happening in war-time and war-torn Berlin, to a degree overturning the popular stereotype of how this city at the centre of the Third Reich might be perceived.

Naturally this book also encompasses much related to the wider military campaign, from the optimism of spring 1939 to the realisation of total defeat in 1945, insofar as Berlin was involved, such as the evacuation of children, and the movement of forced labour and migrant workers.

In this extraordinarily interesting book, Roger Moorhouse also describes how most of the city centre was devastated by Allied aerial bombardment and the Russian attack from the East, thereby  revealing to anyone who enjoys and loves the delights and grandeur of modern-day Berlin, the degree to which reconstruction and regeneration has occurred.