A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

(C) 2003 Penguin Books For over 60 years, the narrative of the last chaotic months of World War II in Europe has been dominated by the Battle of Berlin and the fall of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich in the spring of 1945. The last 100 days of the war against Nazi Germany were full of drama and tragedy for soldiers and civilians on both the Western and Eastern Fronts as the Allied and Soviet armies attacked Hitler’s battered armies. But even as the anti-Nazi coalition was on the verge of certain victory, dissension between the Anglo-American allies and their Soviet counterparts planted the seeds of a new conflict – the Cold War. Since the 1960s, many authors – including Cornelius Ryan and John Toland – have covered the tumultuous events that led to Hitler’s downfall in books such as “The Last Battle” and “The Last 100 Days.” These books, which are based on eyewitness accounts by military and civilian participants, follow the “you are there” style popularized in Ryan’s classic 195...

It is spring, 1945.  Almost six years have passed since Adolf Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939 and began history's largest and bloodiest conflict, the Second World War. Once, Hitler's Third Reich -- which he had boasted would last 1,000 years -- dominated most of Europe and parts of North Africa. Now, having committed the biggest blunders of his 12-year reign of terror -- the invasion of the Soviet Union in June of 1941 and his ill-considered declaration of war on the United States six months later, Germany's Austrian-born Fuhrer watches his Nazi empire shrink as first his conquered territories in Western and Eastern Europe are liberated by the advancing Allies, then his vaunted defenses are broken and German towns and cities find themselves occupied by the Soviets in the east, the Anglo-Americans in the west. Even the mighty Rhine River -- Germany's "moat" -- is no longer an effective defensive barrier against General Dwight D. Eisenhower's Al...