Book review: Savage Continent, By Keith Lowe

"There is no morality… only survival." In cool, measured language, Lowe shows how the horror of World War II not only persisted long after the fighting but actually intensified. Soviet soldiers raped almost 200,000 German women.

Drunkenness and looting followed liberation in cities like Hamburg, where police were hung when they tried to intervene.

The still-disputed number of Germans who died in Polish "punishment camps" was somewhere between 40,000 and 100,000. A mesmerising book.