Liberty & Horror

AN ALMANAC OF LIBERTY, by William O. Douglas (409 pp.; Doubleday; $5.50), is remarkable chiefly because it takes one of the year's pleasantest publishing ideas and turns it into a bore. Almanac-browsing is a lost pleasure to most Americans, and this attempt to revive it looks promising--until the reader actually starts to browse. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, prolific writer about his rambles in the Far East, has struck off 366 little devotional essays on American liberty for the "common man's" year (which seems always to be leap year). Author Douglas almost immediately slogs down in pompous, naive paragraphs about public libraries, workmen's compensation, irrigation. Notwithstanding a few well-phrased obiter dicta on civil rights, he simply does not have the Alma-knack.

A WOMAN IN BERLIN, Anonymous (319 pp.; Harcourt, Brace; $4), is the stark diary of a genteel blonde who tells about her experiences during the Russians' nightmare conquest of Berlin. These experiences come down to one thing: rape. Singly and in groups, the Russians prowled through the rubble-strewn city in search of women. After being raped four times in two days, the anonymous author of the diary decided to find a strong wolf to protect her from the pack. Protection came at the customary price, first from a lieutenant, then from a major (of whom she eventually became quite fond). When the savage wave of rape ended and women met to talk, the first question was not "What happened?" but "How often?" Intent throughout on survival, the blonde diarist wound up singing, "What doesn't kill me makes me stronger." Her diary is a vivid document of conquest and defeat, and a telling demonstration of how most Germans feel about Russians and why.

THE BORMANN LETTERS, edited by H. R. Trevor-Roper (200 pp.; British Book Centre; $3.75), a selection from correspondence between Hitler's mysterious "Brown Eminence" and his wife, is a fascinating document of the dreadful Nazi Utopia. They demonstrate with many expressions of endearment ("My dearest Mummy-Girl") that Martin Bormann (still missing after years of Allied search) was a human being--if a horribly peculiar one. The Bormanns raised a perfect Aryan family of nine, taking care that "none of our children gets depraved and diseased by the poison of Christianity." One day in January 1944, Bormann jubilantly informed his wife that he had succeeded in seducing the actress "M." "Lucky fellow!--now I . . . feel doubly and unbelievably happily married." Gerda Bormann responded like a true Nazi consort. "You will have to see to it that one year M. has a child, and the next year I, so that you will always have a wife who is mobile." She urged that bigamy be legalized "as at the end of the Thirty Years' war." But the war did not last 30 years. After performing the last rites at the Fuehrer's funeral pyre in beaten Berlin, Bormann disappeared. His wife died in the Italian Alps a year later. For all their anti-Christian indoctrination, seven of their children have become Roman Catholics. The eldest, Hitler's godson, is training to become a priest.

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