The End

Starred review from July 4, 2011
Kershaw, author of the definitive biography of Hitler, is unsurpassed as an analyst of the Third Reich's inner dynamics. His latest work addresses a question as significant as it is overlooked. The Third Reich fought to a self-destructive finish--something rare in war's history. Kershaw's narrative approach establishes the nuances of "an integrated history of disintegration." It begins with the aftermath of the July 20, 1944, attempt on Hitler's life: the final internal turning point for the Nazi regime. It continues through German reactions to the Wehrmacht's summer collapse in the west and the Red Army's autumn penetrations into Germany, through the ephemeral optimism generated by the Ardennes counter-attack, to the final overrunning of the Reich and the regime's desperate response of unprecedented domestic terror. Kershaw makes short work of the argument that German resistance was sustained because of Allied demands for unconditional surrender. Nor did the people back the regime from conviction. The majority of Germans had no alternative. Raw terror, an officer corps willing to fight for the homeland, and Hitler's demonic personality were the Reich's sustaining pillars--and its instruments of self-destruction. Kershaw's comprehensive research, measured prose, and commonsense insight combine in a mesmerizing explanation of how and why Nazi Germany chose self-annihilation.

July 1, 2011

The Third Reich was dead, but it wouldn't lie down.

By January 1945, with the failure of the Ardennes offensive, it was clear to the German leadership that the war was lost. The customary and rational course of action would have been to sue for peace on whatever terms could be obtained. Instead, Germany elected to fight on to the point of national obliteration. Hitler was determined to resist to the end and take the country down with him, but award-winning historian Kershaw (Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution, 2008, etc.) seeks to explain why the rest of the nation followed him into the abyss, and how it was possible to hold the armed forces and the German economy together until the fall of Berlin. This is an astonishing story well told by the reigning English-speaking master of Third Reich history. On one level, it is a gripping narrative of desperate actions taken to shore up the battle lines with replacements of men and materiel from ever-shrinking resources; the militarization of the populace to defend, however ineffectively, "fortress cities"; improvised adjustments to transport to compensate for smashed rail lines and overrun factories; and wanton murders and pointless forced marches of evacuated prisoners. But Kershaw also deftly explores the policies and attitudes that kept Germans struggling on with the war effort after all hope was gone, and prevented organized opposition to continuing the war from coalescing in the military or elsewhere. At its core, this is a story of people great and small in the grip of an enormous catastrophe brought down upon them by their charismatic (though by then widely despised) leader; unable to do anything about it individually or collectively, they just kept doing their jobs, however hopeless or absurd they appeared. Whether motivated by duty, terror, inertia, wishful thinking or denial, soldiers fought and civilians worked, generals went on attempting to comply with impossible orders and bureaucrats issued directives of stunning irrelevance because they could see no practical or honorable alternative.

A carefully considered and powerfully told saga of a national suicide.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

April 15, 2011

A multiaward winner for his studies of Hitler's Germany, particularly his two-volume study of the Fuhrer himself, Kershaw returns with an intriguing question: Why and how did Germany hold out for so long before surrendering? Patriotism and officer loyalty to the monster who conferred authority seem to have been a part of it. Essential reading for anyone interested in history; I'm really anticipating this one.

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from August 1, 2011
By September 1918, Germany's military position on the Western Front had severely deteriorated, and political turmoil, military demoralization, and the abdication of the kaiser soon followed. Kershaw, an acclaimed expert on Hitler and the Third Reich, asks why this collapse did not happen to Hitler's Germany during 194445, when the military situation clearly was hopeless? Instead, German soldiers and civilians struggled and endured to the bitter end. That question lies at the center of this superb examination of the final defeat of Hitler's tyranny. Military affairs play a part, but Kershaw's narrative concentrates on the mechanics of Nazi administration, civil and military, and efforts to keep the state functioning. The chief functionaries in this task, referred to by Kershaw as the quadrumvirate, were Himmler, Goebbels, Bormann, and Speer. Kershaw describes in fascinating detail their maneuvers as they jockeyed for power and influence with Hitler. Some of Kershaw's conclusions will be hotly debated. Nevertheless, this is an excellent portrait of the regime's death throes.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)