Most men are capable of rape, war historian claims

The best-selling history writer Antony Beevor said yesterday that his extensive research on the Second World War had forced him to conclude that most men could be rapists in extreme circumstances.

Speaking at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, the author of Berlin: The Downfall 1945 said he used to dismiss the feminist claim that all men were rapists. But the stories told by survivors of the Nazi collapse and in diaries and accounts of the time made clear the potential for violence in virtually all men.

"I found myself acknowledging that perhaps most men could be rapists in extraordinary circumstances of chaos and collapse – and above all, if they had a gun and there was no likelihood of retribution," Beevor said. "When one sees the fragility of civilisation in extreme circumstances ... I fear that is the only conclusion you can draw."

In Berlin in 1945, there had been some cases of officers attempting to exert discipline but they had found it difficult. In some instances, they had been denounced for doing so by Smersh, the counter-intelligence service, he said.

Rape was so widespread that there was a common joke in Russia after the end of the war about a Red Army officer who returned home to his wife and found himself unable to have sex, Beevor said. The punchline was that he told her to get dressed and offer resistance.

But the Allied forces were not excluded from such atrocities. There was evidence that French soldiers were responsible for a series of rapes in Stuttgart. The British army appeared to have been rather better behaved, but Beevor said he had received some letters from former British soldiers saying that rape often went unpunished.

And such behaviour was not confined to the Second World War , he said. "It's what we have seen in the Balkans and other places in Europe."