Will I love The End?

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… show more.

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 as… show more.