In 1999, Antony Beevor published Stalingrad, his account of the nihilistic battle between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union that was a pivotal event in the second World War. The story combined high-level military strategy, as befits Beevor, a former British army officer, with the pitiless terror visited on the victims of one of the largest and most important battles in history. It was an international bestseller and brought military history into the mainstream of non-fiction publishing. His next book, Berlin: Downfall 1945, about the Battle of Berlin, which ended the war in Europe, drew on archival sources in Russia...