Book Review: 'The End: The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 1944-1945'
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| © 2011 Penguin Press |
In retrospect, it is amazing that a regime such as Hitler's Greater German Reich withstood the devastating effects of a war on four fronts that it had brought on itself in September of 1939. By July 20, 1944 - Kershaw's chosen takeoff point for his narrative - the Allied forces under the command of Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower had established a beachhead in Normandy and were in the process of breaking out into open country in France. Rome had fallen to Allied armies marching up the "boot" of Italy, and American and British bombers based in the Mediterranean were bombing not only targets in Southern Germany and Austria, but also the oil fields in Romania, Hitler's only major source of oil for his war machine. In the East, Soviet forces were in the process of annihilating Army Group Center and liberating vast swaths of Eastern Europe, including parts of Russia, Ukraine, and eastern Poland that Germany had conquered three years earlier during Operation Barbarossa. In the air, the Royal Air Force struck at German cities during the night, while U.S. Army Air Force bombers attacked targets in the Reich in daylight.
Throughout much of history, conditions such as those have usually resulted in a nation-state's capitulation to its enemies once the populace and military leadership realizes that resistance is futile. In World War II, only two of the major belligerents (Germany and Japan) saw themselves on the brink of total and utter defeat, yet resisted almost to the bitter end. Many historians and World War II buffs wonder: How did the Nazis convince themselves, and the German people, that the only alternative to peace was to fight on even though it meant the total destruction of the nation state?
Countless books have been written about why Nazi Germany lost World War II, yet remarkably little attention has been paid to the equally vital question of how and why it was able to hold out as long as it did. The Third Reich did not surrender until Germany had been left in ruins and almost completely occupied. Even in the near-apocalyptic final months, when the war was plainly lost, the Nazis refused to sue for peace. Historically, this is extremely rare.
Drawing on original testimony from ordinary Germans and arch-Nazis alike, award-winning historian Ian Kershaw explores this fascinating question in a gripping and focused narrative that begins with the failed bomb plot in July 1944 and ends with the German capitulation in May 1945. Hitler, desperate to avoid a repeat of the "disgraceful" German surrender in 1918, was of course critical to the Third Reich's fanatical determination, but his power was sustained only because those below him were unable, or unwilling, to challenge it. Even as the military situation grew increasingly hopeless, Wehrmacht generals fought on, their orders largely obeyed, and the regime continued its ruthless persecution of Jews, prisoners, and foreign workers. Beneath the hail of allied bombing, German society maintained some semblance of normalcy in the very last months of the war. The Berlin Philharmonic even performed on April 12, 1945, less than three weeks before Hitler's suicide.
As Kershaw shows, the structure of Hitler's "charismatic rule" created a powerful negative bond between him and the Nazi leadership- they had no future without him, and so their fates were inextricably tied. Terror also helped the Third Reich maintain its grip on power as the regime began to wage war not only on its ideologically defined enemies but also on the German people themselves. Yet even as each month brought fresh horrors for civilians, popular support for the regime remained linked to a patriotic support of Germany and a terrible fear of the enemy closing in.
Based on prodigious new research, Kershaw's The End is a harrowing yet enthralling portrait of the Third Reich in its last desperate gasps.- Dust jacket blurb.
The book focuses mainly on the inner workings of the Third Reich on the home front, and specifically on the Nazi Party leadership. In addition to Adolf Hitler, whose obsession with the Kaiserreich's humiliating surrender in November 1918 was a main motivating factor for not ending a war that even he knew was lost, The End focuses on the power struggle between four of Hitler's minions: Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS and chief figure behind the regime's engine of terror; Joseph Goebbels, the Nazis' Minister for Propaganda and Hitler's principal spokesperson and ideologue; Albert Speer, the ambitious young architect and Minister of Armaments who kept German industry going during the last months of the war; and Martin Bormann, the sinister Party Secretary who controlled who had access to the Fuhrer - and who did not, thus wielding more power than the average leader's chief of staff.
Kershaw also examines how the regime, to its last gasps of life, was determined to destroy "enemies of the state." Socialists, Jews, slave laborers, Soviet POWs, LGBQ prisoners, and German dissenters - especially those with any connection to the July 20 bomb plot against Hitler - were marked for death even as Hitler himself prepared for his own demise in his underground bunker. With chilling detals, Kershaw reveals the cruelty and hatred of the Nazis toward anyone - including women and children who posed no danger to its existence - it labeled an "enemy of the Fatherland."
The End avoids in-depth coverage of the various military campaigns that took place between July 1944 and May of 1945. It only mentions the military aspects of the war as background to what the leadership of the Reich and its citizens experienced at the time. For instance, Kershaw spends some time describing the boost in German morale during the early days of Hitler's Ardennes Counter-Offensive of December 1944, and the resulting tumble it took when the Allies recovered from the initial blows and gradually erased the salient in their lines that gave the campaign its popular name: the Battle of the Bulge.
The book naturally covers the panic that millions of Germans living in East Prussia experienced when the Soviets first reached the outermost provinces of the Fatherland in the East. Although the regime controlled the press and the media, many ordinary Germans knew of the atrocities their soldiers had committed in Russia, Poland, and the Baltic States and were aware that the Soviet Army was hell-bent on revenge. Kershaw devotes several chapters of the book to the largest mass migration in history as millions of men, women, and children left their lands, many of which had been traditionally German for centuries, to escape the advancing hosts of the Red Army.
The End is a well-written and informative book, but it is not meant for a reader who reads more "personal experiences of World War II" works such as Cornelius Ryan's The Last Battle or Antony Beevor's Berlin: The Fall 1945. It is meticulously reseatched and reveals much about the repressive and bloodthirsty Nazi regime and the iron-tight grip it held on the average German citizen, but it is not exactly a casual read. The tone is scholarly; not dry or boring, but at the same time it's not as easy on the eye or mind's ear as a World War II book written by the late Stephen E. Ambrose or any other popular historian, like Beevor or Max Hastings.
Still, if you want to understand why the Nazis held out even when many generals in the Wehrmacht understood the jig was up, The End: The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 1944-1945 has the answers. On that basis, I recommend it. Four out of five stars.
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