Why did I love this book?
Ian Kershaw is among the world’s foremost scholars of Nazi Germany and of twentieth-century Europe, and I had read his two-volume biography of Adolph Hitler.
Still, I must admit I was a bit skeptical in approaching this book, which explains why Germans continued to fight when it was clear that the war was lost. Given everything we know about the insanity of the Nazi regime, the answer to this question seemed self-evident. Boy, was I wrong!
Kershaw masterfully elucidates the multiplicity of perspectives, as well as the ideological, institutional, and even personal factors, that contributed to the German people’s descent into oblivion following the failed attempt on Hitler’s life in July 1944. Kershaw manages to shed new and fascinating light on what we thought was a familiar story.
2 authors picked The End as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
Named Book of the Year by the Sunday Times, TLS, Spectator, Sunday Telegraph, Daily Mail and Scotland on Sunday, Ian Kershaw's The End is a searing account of the final months of Nazi Germany, laying bare the fear and fanaticism that drove a nation to destruction.
In almost every major war there comes a point where defeat looms for one side and its rulers cut a deal with the victors, if only in an attempt to save their own skins. In Hitler's Germany, nothing of this kind happened: in the end the regime had to be stamped out town by…