The End

By Ian Kershaw,

Book cover of The End: The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 1944-1945

Book description

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 majorā€¦

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Why read it?

2 authors picked The End as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Ian Kershaw is among the worldā€™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 peopleā€™s descentā€¦

Ian Kershaw is, to my mind, the best historian of Nazi Germany, and his biography of Adolf Hitler will long remain the go-to study of the man. 

So when I saw a book by him, I automatically picked it up and glanced through it. It was riveting. The End explores the unraveling of life and government in 1945 as the Third Reich imploded. 

There are detailed explanations of Nazi decision-making that lay out the twisted logic that had ordinary Germans being slaughtered by the thousands by the Nazis even within hours of the final collapse of the regime. Just asā€¦

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Book cover of Harry and Arthur: Truman, Vandenberg, and the Partnership That Created the Free World

Harry and Arthur by Lawrence J. Haas,

With Franklin Rooseveltā€™s death in April 1945, Vice President Harry Truman and Senator Arthur Vandenberg, the Republican leader on foreign policy, inherited a world in turmoil. With Europe flattened and the Soviets emerging as Americaā€™s new adversary, Truman and Vandenberg built a tight, bipartisan partnership at a bitterly partisan timeā€¦

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