Beevor has been a visiting professor at the School of History, Classics and Archaeology at
Birkbeck, University of London, and at the
University of Kent. He was the 2002-2003
Lees-Knowles Lecturer at the
University of Cambridge. His best-known works, the best-selling
Stalingrad (1998) and
Berlin: The Downfall 1945 (2002), recount the Second World War battles between the
Soviet Union and
Nazi Germany. They have been praised for their vivid, compelling style, their treatment of the ordinary lives of combatants and civilians, and the use of newly disclosed documents from Soviet archives.
Berlin proved hugely controversial in Russia because of the information it contained from former Soviet archives about the mass rapes carried out by the
Red Army in 1945. He was criticised for "lies, slander and blasphemy" against the Red Army by the Russian ambassador at the time,
Grigory Karasin, and was frequently described as "the chief slanderer of the Red Army" by
Kremlin-supporting media. Numerous Russian academic theses and books have been published that dispute his claim as exaggerations, misattributions, or direct citations of propaganda used by
Joseph Goebbels, including
The Red Army “Rape of Germany” was Invented by Goebbels by the Russian author Anatoly Karlin. His
The Spanish Civil War (1982) was later re-written as
The Battle for Spain (2006), keeping the structure and some content from the earlier work, but using the updated narrative style of his
Stalingrad book and also adding characters and new archival research from German and Russian sources. Beevor's book
The Second World War (2012) is notable for its focus on the conditions and grief faced by women and civilians and for its coverage of the war in East Asia, which has been called "masterful". Beevor's expertise has been the subject of some commentary; his publications have been praised as revitalising interest in Second World War topics and have allowed readers to reevaluate events such as from a new perspective. He has also appeared as an expert in television documentaries related to World War II. his works had been translated into 35 languages, with more than 8.5 million copies sold. In August 2015 the
Yekaterinburg region considered banning Beevor's books, accusing him of Nazi sympathies and citing his lack of Russian sources when writing about Russia, and claiming he had promoted false stereotypes introduced by Nazi Germany during the war. Beevor responded by calling the banning "a government trying to impose its own version of history", comparing it to other "attempts to dictate a truth", such as
denial of the Holocaust and the
Armenian genocide. In January 2018 Beevor's book about the
Battle of Stalingrad was banned in Ukraine for its description of war crimes committed by Ukrainian nationalists collaborating with Nazi forces (namely the execution of children). The official in charge of the decision, Serhiy Oliyinyk, denied the event in question and called it a "provocation" likely emanating from Soviet sources. Beevor refuted the claims of an alleged anti-Ukrainian bent in the book, and pointed out that the source for the passage in question was an
Abwehr officer named
Helmuth Groscurth, demanding "an immediate apology from Oliyinyk and a reversal of the decision by the 'expert council.'" He has also written for
The Times,
The Telegraph and
Guardian, the
New York Times,
Washington Post,
The Atlantic,
Foreign Affairs,
Le Monde,
Libération,
Le Figaro, as well as
El País and
ABC in Spain. ==Other activities==