The author died in England in 1978 her brother, a London businessman, prepared this diary for publication. Christabel Bielenberg and a great selection of related books, art and collectibles available now at. Her clear-eyed account of life in wartime Germany is gripping. The Berlin Diaries 1940-1945 of Marie Missie Vassiltchikov by Vassiltchikov, George Ed. Transferred to Vienna as a Luftwaffe nurse, Vassiltchikov made a daring escape from the advancing Red Army. Her friends included active anti-Nazis as well as SS officers and members of Germany's social elite, many of whom, according to the author, loathed Hitler but were paralyzed by their obedience to authority and fear of reprisals.
The reader experiences the Allied saturation bombing of Berlin from a German point of view (it only steeled the nation's morale). Calmly and unflinchingly, she records the moral, physical and political atrocities that unfolded around her. Her secret wartime diary, written in fluent English, is a remarkable document alive with history, passion and truth. Taking a job with the German Foreign Ministry, this emigree worked closely with underground resisters who launched an abortive plot to kill Hitler. The family left Russia in 1919, and Missie grew up in Germany, France and Lithuanian, where her father's family had owned property before the Revolution. Born of aristocratic Russian parents, Vassiltchikov was 24 when, her family scattered, she fled, penniless, from Lithuania to Berlin. Marie Vassiltchikov was a White Russian princess born as the fourth and youngest child of her princely family in the last waning days of the Czarist regime in. Marie 'Missie' Vassiltchikov - later Mrs Peter Harnden - was born in St Petersburg in 1917, the fourth child of Prince and Princess Illarion Vassiltchikov.
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