Book description
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The last months of the Second World War were a nightmarish time to
be alive. Unimaginable levels of violence destroyed entire cities.
Millions died or were dispossessed. By all kinds of criteria it was
the end: the end of the Third Reich and its terrible empire but also,
increasingly, it seemed to be the end of European civilization itself.
In his gripping, revelatory new book Ian Kershaw describes these
final months, from the failed attempt to assassinate Hitler in July
1944 to the German surrender in May 1945. The major question that
Kershaw attempts to answer is: what made Germany keep on fighting? In
almost every major war there has come a point where defeat has loomed
for one side and its rulers have cut a deal with the victors, if only
in an attempt to save their own skins. In Hitler's Germany, nothing of
this kind happened: in the end the regime had to be stamped out town
by town with a level of brutality almost without precedent.
Both a highly original piece of research and a gripping narrative,
The End makes vivid an era which still deeply scars Europe.
It raises the most profound questions about the nature of the Second
World War, about the Third Reich and about how ordinary people behave
in extreme circumstances.
IAN KERSHAW is the author of
Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris;
Hitler 1936-1945: Nemesis;
Making Friends with Hitler;
and
Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions that Changed the World, 1940-4
.
Hitler 1936-1945: Nemesis
received the Wolfson History Prize and the Bruno Kreisky Prize in
Austria for Political Book of the Year, and was joint winner of the
inaugural British Academy Book Prize. Until his retirement in 2008, Ian
Kershaw was Professor of Modern History at the University of Sheffield.
For services to history he was given the German award of the Federal
Cross of Merit in 1994. He was knighted in 2002 and awarded the Norton
Medlicott Medal by the Historical Association in 2004. He is a Fellow of
the British Academy, and was the winner of the Leipzig Book Prize for
European Understanding 2012.
