A Woman in Berlin Anonymous Virago, 311pp, £16.99 ISBN 1844081117 Germany: Jekyll and Hyde Sebastian Haffner Libris, 210pp, £16.95

Strange though it is, our fascination with the Nazi era shows no signs of fading. Scan the shelves of your local bookshop and you will see more swastikas than Union flags, and many more jacket portraits of Hitler than of Winston Churchill. A large part of Channel 5's peak output is devoted to Nazi genocide, to German weapons and battle tactics. Despite my best efforts, I know more about the gearbox in a Tiger tank than the one in my own car.

Even our possible future king has sported a swastika armband. Had he turned up at that costume party as a Chaplinesque Adolf, with comical forelock and moustache, no one would have minded. But Nazi uniforms and insignia resist humour and remind us of the extreme seriousness of the whole Hitler project. Between 1933 and 1945, psychopathology went to the best tailors, and no one jokes about the executioner's fashion sense.

Those of us still attracted to the SS chic and the spectral glamour of the Nazi epoch should read A Woman in Berlin, a heart-rending account of what happens when the day of reckoning at last dawns and even the smartest uniforms are not enough to save you. This harrowing diary is the record of a German woman's ordeal as the Russian armies overran Berlin. It was first published in Germany in 1960 and generated a storm of controversy, one reviewer complaining about the anonymous author's "shameless immorality". During the postwar years of the economic miracle a collective amnesia conveniently ruled. The rape of hundreds of thousands of German women, and the impotence of German men as they watched Russian soldiers rape their wives, were not topics to be remembered at a time when men were reasserting their authority at car-production lines.

The diarist's lack of self-pity, and her clear-eyed view of the survival tactics adopted by the German women around her, still unsettle the present-day reader of what must be one of the most remarkable war diaries ever kept. The author was a 34-year-old, unmarried journalist named Marta Hiller, by her own description "a pale-faced blonde always dressed in the same winter coat". She had travelled once to Russia before the war and picked up a little of the language, which in due course served her well, though it is remarkable that ten years later she remembered enough Russian to calm the violent soldiers about to rape her, and even converse about Marxism with their officers.

Doubts have been cast on the authen-ticity of the diary, and it is hard to believe, as the author claims, that it was jotted down with a pencil stub on old scraps of paper while she crouched on her bed between bouts of rape. The tone is so dispassionate, scenes described in so lit-erary a way, with poignant references to the strangeness of silence and the plaintive cry of a distant bird. We live at a time that places an almost sentimental value on the unsparing truth, however artfully deployed. But the diary seems convincingly real, whether assembled later from the testimonies of a number of women or recorded at first hand by the author.

The diary begins on Hitler's birthday, 20 April 1945, four days after the start of the final Russian assault on Berlin. Two million civilians remained in the city, most of them women and children. The German soldiers defending the author's eastern suburb have withdrawn. As the front-line fighting moves away from them, the women in the diarist's apartment building wait in a state of terror.

Gradually the street below fills with the Russian artillery men and their horses. More concerned about watering their animals, they cautiously eye the German women, but in the evening they start drinking, and the women's ordeal begins. Doors and barricades are kicked aside. On the first day - it's difficult to keep count - the author is raped three times, and then almost daily during the next weeks, as wave after wave of Russian soldiers passes through.

All the women in the building are repeatedly raped, from teenagers to the elderly. The author describes the familiar clank of holstered pistols hung from the bed rail. Many of the "Ivans" are young and shy, and like to lie back afterwards and chat. A few become protective, and revive the traumatised women with parcels of bread and herring.

"What does it mean - rape?" the author asks. "It sounds like the absolute worst, the end of everything, but it's not." Hunger and death are worse. The women show amazing resilience, encouraging those Russian admirers to bring the best food. In the end they survive, clearing rubble all day for a bowl of soup. However, their attitude to their German menfolk has changed for ever. "We feel so sorry for them; they seem so miserable and powerless . . . among the many defeats at the end of this war is the defeat of the male sex."

What is missing from the diary is any acknowledgement of Nazi crimes and any sense of why the Russians are taking so brutal a revenge. There are no references to the mass murder of Russians, Poles and Jews, to the inhuman brutality of the German armies and the deranged creed that drove them on. The author's fiance served in the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front - did he never describe what was happening there? Perhaps her silence is a tacit confession of guilt, but I doubt it.

Germany: Jekyll and Hyde, by the Berlin-born Observer journalist Sebastian Haffner, was first published in 1940, and is an alarm call trying to awaken the British to the unique nature of Hitler and the Nazi regime. Haffner stresses that, for all its advanced science and technology, Nazi Germany is a throwback to more brutal times, and is propelled by non-rational motives. Hitler, he maintains, is an out-and-out psychopath, who plays successfully on the age-old tendency of Germans to see themselves as persecuted, slighted and ill-treated. Anti-Semitism, Haffner believes, serves as a "secret sign and binding mystery among Nazis, like a continuous ritual murder".

Haffner's warnings, published before the attack on Russia, before Auschwitz and total war, are remarkably prescient, though he cannot have imagined the scale of the horror about to be unleashed. We in Britain have seen the newsreels and made endless tours of the charnel house, but we are still fascinated rather than repelled by the Nazi era, as German ambassadors have complained. Is this because we are still searching for an explanation of why the German people, among the most advanced and civilised in Europe, decided to plunge into mad-ness and follow their psychopathic god?

If not, then why are the British, a pugnacious but unmilitary people, so gripped by the Nazi era? I suspect that something is missing from the British sense of themselves. Having spent much of our past fighting wars and building an empire, we are dissatisfied with our cosy lot, with suburbia, good sense and the rule of reason. We want more theatre in our lives, more emotion and even a little more madness. We want to strut and bully, as we did long ago in Africa and India. We want to revitalise ourselves in a burst of the same elective madness with which the German people propelled themselves into a more dangerous future. As we slump in front of Celebrity Love Island and Springwatch With Bill Oddie we may even feel nostalgic for a Nazi Britain that never was . . .

J G Ballard's most recent novel is Millennium People (Perennial)

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