Berlin Diaries, 1940-1945

Also, the parties that Missie attends are hosted or attended by some of the most powerful and influential people during the second world war.

Later on though, she is bombed out of house and home... the true reality of living in Germany under the constant destruction, fires, bombing, low flying "enemy" planes, and never being able to go back to how you once lived shines through. She is not a Nazi, she hates the Reich, and gives a great unbiased account of what it was like to live in Berlin during the war. It is a perspective that you've never heard before.

She is friends and co-worker of many of those who attempted to kill Hitler, and supports them. She watches as people she loves and respects are thrown into jail and killed for being associated with those who tried to kill Hitler, and grieves that he wasn't killed.

This is a great book. I've read as many books as I can about the holocaust experience from a Jewish perspective, and though Missie doesn't mention the Jews hardly at all (they shielded the Berliners from what was going on in the death camps) this is still a great book for me. The way the Jew were killed is horrid, and this sounds bad, I don't mean it, but WWII was more than that, believe it or not. She tells a different point of view.

I've read it about 3 times, I am now on my fourth. It is fascinating to watch as Missie changes from aristocrat to a red cross nurse, trying to survive as best she can.

get this book. You won't regret it. It is a true sotry of the death of everyone's lives in Europe because of the war.


Bombs, plots and Total War   February 20, 2004
K. Maxwell (Perth, Australia)
18 out of 19 found this review helpful

Missie Vassiltchikov was an aristocratic Russian who was living in Berlin at the beginning of World War 2. At the time the war started Missie was a habitue of the diplomatic party circuit and friends with many of the German aristocrats of her parents class.

Missie, through her experiences in exile valued people on their own intrinsic worth and not based on their nationality and she proved to be a good judge of character. Many of her German friends were involved in the 20th July 1944 plot to kill Hitler and finish the war. Missy herself was lucky to escape the death squads that combed Germany afterwards and her diary chronicles the deaths of many of her close friends. It also clearly portrays the horror of living under the allied air raids against civilians, especially in Berlin, in the closing years against WW2 where luck, rather than good judgement, was a more assured method of survival.

Missie brings home the fact that "total war" is a horror for all involved and that there were 'good guys' and 'bad guys' on both sides of the conflict, but in the end it was the ordinary civilians who paid the greatest price for the folly of their leaders. Possibly one of the areas that is an eye opener is the closing days of the war. An area little touched on in movies or documentaries. We get to see some of the human costs of the disgraceful Yalta agreement that the allies signed with Stalin and the starvation and ruin that prevailed in Europe the years after the war. For a civilian insight into the war on the continent this book is first class along with her sister Titania's autobiography.


A Different Perspective on Wartime Germany   March 8, 2001
Schmerguls (Sioux City, Ia USA)
13 out of 18 found this review helpful

The author of these diaries was 23 when the war began in 1939, and canot be blamed for the rise of Nazism. She knew many German aristocrats, including ones who suffered the extreme penalty for opposing Hitler. I found fascinating the account of how life went on in aristocratic circles in Germany while bombs dropped and Hitler ran his terroristic regime. This is another view entirely from Victor Klemperer's monumental volumes entitled I Will Bear Witness, which I read with sheerest fascination on June 11, 1999, and April 7, 2000, since Missy, the author, almost seemed to bear a charmed life. But like Klemperer's diary, time seemed to move so slow as one reads, knowing that not till May 8, 1945 would the ordeal end--and not even then because life in Germany postwar was no bed of roses for some time. If one considers the author as the young woman she was, not one in a position to answer for the rise of Hitler or to impede his ruinous course, the diary is a moving tribute to the human spirit.


War through the experiences of the wealthy   December 31, 2005
Dagmar F. Pelzer (Miami, Florida)
12 out of 14 found this review helpful

People who have not lived through wars forget that even when confronted with death, destruction, loss, and fear, man's survival instinct grasps for pleasure. This is true for the wealthy as well as the poor, however, the pleasures found differ greatly. This book is not about the poor, and readers with a socialist orientation may find it offensive.

Amidst hiding from bombs and fleeing from peril, people celebrated, attended lavish festivities, sought comforts whenever possible. This is about a circle of wealthy and recognized families, European, not just German, from whose midst the would-be assassinator of Hitler sprang. Many of them were hunted by the Nazi regime. This diary of a Russian princess is interesting and spellbinding. It is a very different testimony of a war that left no one untouched.




A Good Primer   January 19, 2000
Paul S.T. Balanon (West Hollywood, CA)
11 out of 14 found this review helpful

While many readers may become fascinated with the book simply because of the author's pedigree, Vassiltchikov unwittingly opens the door of curiosity. Portraying life in wartime Germany as seemingly footloose and carefree (parties at the Adlon Hotel during bombings, for example; or, to even have parties at all with the desperate situation of many around them) gives an astonishing first-hand account of how the "privileged" class viewed and lived the war. Certainly, this is a very interesting read. Quite fast, as a matter of fact. Moreover, the seeds of the nobility resisting Nazism and attendant ideology come through in the diary, but not completely. Many questions begged to be answered after reading this account. How did the nobility react to the rise of Hitler? Why were they not successful in mounting a successful resistance? What did these people believe, fundamentally? Overall, this is a good book. However, it would be well served, that in attempting to understand this period, to follow-up with equally good treatments of nobility prior to and during World War II. Any suggestions?