Book Review: 'The End: The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 1944-1945'
© 2011 Penguin Press On September 8, 2011, Penguin Press published the first edition of Sir Ian Kershaw's The End: The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 1944-1945. It is an in-depth scholarly look at the psychological, political, and socio-cultural factors that allowed Adolf Hitler's Third Reich to resist the Allied onslaughts on all fronts (the West, the East, and Italy) during the last 10 months of World War II in Europe. Written by the renowned author of a two-volume biography of Hitler and other books about Nazi Germany, The End: The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 1944-1945 tackles a subject that, at best, is only tangentially covered in other works that focus on the military campaigns that took place between July of 1944 and the spring of 1945 or, in Max Hastings' pithy phrase, "bunker porn" that describes in lurid details, the last 10 days of Hitler's wretched life in Berlin. In retrospect, it is amazing that a r...