A cultural collision took place in Germany in 1945, between societies whose experience of the Second World War was light years apart. What the Soviet and German peoples did, as well as what was done to them, bore scant resemblance to the war the American and British knew. There was a chasm between the world of the Western allies, populated by men still striving to act temperately, and the Eastern universe in which, on both sides, elemental passions dominated. Although some individuals in Eisenhower's armies suffered severely, the experience of most falls within a recognizable compass of what happens to people in wars. The battle of Arnhem, for instance, is perceived as an epic. Yet the entire combat experience of many British participants was compressed into a few days. Barely three thousand men died on the Allied side. Among British veterans of northwest Europe, Captain Lord Carrington remembers with consider able affection his service with the Grenadier Guards tank regiment: "We'd been together a long time. It may sound an odd thing to say, but it was a very happy period. We were young and adventurous. We were winning. One had all one's friends with one. We were a happy family." I do not extrapolate from this that British or American soldiers enjoyed themselves. Few sane people like war. But many found 1944-45 not unbearable, if they were fortunate enough to escape mutilation or death. Hardly any Americans felt the hatred for the Germans which Pearl Harbor, together with the Japanese cultural ethic expressed in the Bataan Death March, engendered towards the soldiers of Nippon.

It is a somber experience, by contrast, to interview Russian and German veterans. They endured horrors of a different order of magnitude. It was not uncommon for them to serve with a fighting formation for years on end, wounds prompting the only interruptions. The lives of Stalin's subjects embraced unspeakable miseries, even before the Nazis entered the story. I have met many people whose families perished in the famines and purges of the pre1941 era. One man described to me how his parents, illiterate peasants, were anonymously denounced by neighbors as counterrevolutionaries, and shot in 1938 at a prison outside Leningrad--the modern St. Petersburg. A woman listening to our conversation interjected: "My parents were shot at that prison too!" She employed the commonplace tones one might use in New York or London on discovering that an acquaintance had attended the same school.

After she spoke, another woman said darkly: "You shouldn't talk about things like that in front of a foreigner." In Russia, there is no tradition of pursuing objective historical truth. Even in the twenty-first century it remains difficult to persuade a fiercely nationalistic people to speak frankly about the bleaker aspects of their wartime history. Almost all important research on the wartime era is being done by foreigners rather than Russians who--led by their president--prefer to draw a veil across Stalin's years. Some twenty-seven million Soviet citizens died in the war, while combined U.S., British and French combat fatalities amounted to less than one million. Yet respect for the achievement of the Red Army does nothing to diminish repugnance towards Stalin's tyranny, entirely as evil as that of Hitler, and towards the deeds that were done in Russia's name in eastern Europe. The Americans and British, God be thanked, inhabited a different universe from that of the Russian soldier.

As for the Germans, a few years ago I stood in front of a television camera on Hitler's rostrum at Nuremberg and said how much I admired the courage with which the postwar generation had confronted the Nazi legacy. After we finished filming our researcher, a young German woman who has worked on many documentaries about the period, intervened. "Excuse me," she said. "I think you are wrong. I believe our people are still in denial about the war." I have since thought a great deal about what she said, and concluded that she is partly right. Many young Germans are extraordinarily ignorant about the Nazi period. Some older ones seem less troubled by historic guilt today than when I first began meeting their generation, a quarter of a century ago. It is as if the horrors of the Nazi years were committed by people quite unrelated to the law-abiding pensioners who now occupy comfortable urban and suburban homes in Munich or Stuttgart, Nuremberg or Dresden, citizens in good standing of the European Union.

A woman described to me how, in May 1945, she stood with her terrified mother and siblings in a village on the Baltic when two Russian officers burst in. One began to harangue them in fluent German about the crimes of their country in the Soviet Union. "It was so awful," she said, "having to listen to all this, when we knew that we had done nothing wrong." It was hardly surprising that she felt this, as a teenager back in 1945. It seems surprising that her view was unchanged in 2002. There is a growing assertiveness in Germany about the war crimes of the Allies. I share the view of German historians, such as Jorg Friedrich, that the British and Americans should more honestly confront their undoubted lapses, some of them serious. For instance, more than a few Germans were hanged in 1945 for killing prisoners. Such behavior was not uncommon among Allied personnel, yet it seldom, if ever, provoked disciplinary action. New Zealanders massacred medical staff and wounded men at a German aid station in North Africa in June 1942. No one was ever called to account, though the episode is well documented. The British submarine commander "Skip" Miers systematically machine-gunned German survivors after sinking their ships in the Mediterranean in 1941. Any captured Nazi U-boat commander would have been executed in 1945 for such action. Miers, by contrast, received the Victoria Cross and became an admiral.

I suggested to Jorg Friedrich in a television debate, however, that it might be wise for a German to hesitate before saying anything which implies a moral equivalence between Allied excesses and the crimes of the Nazis. I admire the attitude of Helmut Schmidt, Germany's former chancellor, whom I interviewed about his wartime service as a Luftwaffe flak officer. Asked his opinion about the behavior of the Red Army in East Prussia, he responded: "You will never hear me, as a German, say anything that suggests a comparison between what

happened in East Prussia and the behavior of Germany's army in the Soviet Union."

Some of Hitler's old adherents remain impenitent, of course. Interviewing a former Waffen SS captain at his home, I noticed on the wall of the lounge his medals and unit badges, which twenty years ago would have been discreetly closeted. After listening to his remarkable tale, I said, intending irony, that he seemed to have enjoyed his experience as a soldier. "Ach, they were great days!" he exclaimed. "The two biggest moments of my life were taking the oath to Hitler's bodyguard in 1934, and Nuremberg in 1936. You have seen the films--the searchlights, the crowds, the Fuhrer? I was there! I was there!" Another proud veteran of Hitler's Leibstandarte inquired whether I might be interested in helping him to write his memoirs.

The vast majority of men and women who witness great events recall these solely in terms of personal experience. I met a German woman whose anger about the occupation of her house by GIs, the casual theft of cherished possessions, remained as great in 2002 as it had been in 1945. It would have been meaningless to suggest that she should set her grievances in the context of the mass murder of the Jews, the devastation of Europe, the destitution of millions. Only personal experience possessed real significance for her.