Book Review - The End by Ian Kershaw

The End : Defiance and Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 1944-45  by Ian Kershaw

New York: The Penguin Press, 2011              ISBN 9781594203145

"German military losses in the last phase of the war were immense, as high in the last ten months of the war as in the four years to July 1944. Had the attack on Hitler's life in July succeeded and the war then promptly brought to an end, the lives of around 50 per cent of the German soldiers who died [in the war as a whole] would have been saved."

This startling and sobering statement appears toward the end of Kershaw's book, which is an attempt, by one of the current era's great war historians, to understand why Germany did fight on until almost total destruction, far beyond any hope of victory or indeed ability to influence the victor's activities in any way. It is a question that hangs bloodily over the last, most destructive months of the European war, and one to which there is no simple answer, as Kershaw shows us.

What he does show is a complex interaction of events, personalities, military and governmental structures that precluded any one person from driving events toward surrender. Of course there was one person who could have done it, but Hitler was the one person who could never consider surrender, even after he understood that all was lost. He could never countenance a Germany defeated, so if Germany was to be overrun, it was better in his mind that it was totally destroyed. There was no-one in the hierarchy, either military or civil, who could stand up to him. The structure of Hitler's Germany was such that there was no power-base available to anyone other than Hitler, no other structure that could compete with his charismatic hold on power. Those high up in the Nazi system all owed their legitimacy to him, so if he went, so did their power. Many of them also realised that they were so compromised by their crimes that they had no future in a non-Nazi Germany, and therefore tied themselves more tightly to Hitler in the last days.

The military was bound to fight on for different reasons. Certainly for some the oath of loyalty to Hitler held sway, but even for those who were indifferent to the Nazis, once the war came to German soil they felt a duty to fight for their country, if not for the political rulers of it. Generals become Generals because they obey orders, and by-and-large this is what they did, sometimes questioning tactics, but never the overall decision to fight on. 

As for the rank-and-file, and the civilians, no rebellion came from them either. They were more concerned with survival through the maelstrom, and as Kershaw points out, terror from their own. In the last few months of the war the Party used brutal means of suppression to ensure compliance with the decision to fight on, with flying courts-martial executing straggling soldiers, and Nazi courts sentencing to death those civilians that dared to question or disobey.

The Nazi regime - the "thousand year Reich" - in reality was a personality cult around one man, a man who, if he couldn't be victorious, wanted to take everything down with him. As Kershaw writes, "Hitler's mass charismatic appeal had long since dissolved, but the structures and mentalities of his charismatic rule lasted until his death in the bunker. The dominant elites, divided as they were, possess neither the collective will nor the mechanisms of power to prevent Hitler taking Germany to total destruction. That was decisive."

Kershaw as always presents his arguments with aplomb, and this dense book (with over 100 pages of notes and a comprehensive bibliography) is well thought-out and highly readable.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - The Goebbels diaries : the last days

The Goebbels diaries : the last days by Joseph Goebbels - edited, introduced and annotated by Hugh Trevor-Roper, translated from the German by Richard Barry

London : Secker & Warburg, 1978                                                ISBN 0436179660


What can one write about Joseph Goebbels? The eminence grise of the Nazis, the little club-footed Propaganda Minister was in some ways the most active, fiendish and successful of the motley crew of thugs and murderers who made up the leadership of the Third Reich.

Goebbels had literary pretensions in his youth, and began writing a diary in the '20s. Various parts of his diary have been found from time-to-time: some of the diaries from the mid-war years (1942-43) were found and published not long after the conflict: these diaries covering the last eight weeks of the war were discovered in the '70s and published then. Unbeknownst to the West, the Soviets had a copy of the whole diary in their archives, and this has recently been published in a full scholarly edition (in German).

...the last days covers the period 27 Feb to 9 Apr 1945. Goebbels by now was dictating his diary to a stenographer, and the first part of the day's entry was a military situation report, followed by Goebbels' comments. And it is these comments that form the interesting part of the diary.

Like many diaries, there is some repetition of themes - Goebbels by now no doubt was under a lot of stress, and his comments are a mixture of brutal reality, cynicism, wild and unrealistic hope and banality ( for example one of the entries discusses a proposed new tax system for the Reich in some detail).

One gets a real sense of Goebbels from the pages of this book; utterly unscrupulous, cynical, manipulative and smart. Some of his conclusions seem prescient now - his take on the political wiles of Stalin were spot on, as was his view that the War meant the end for Britain's status as a major power. Some of his other points are fairly well off the mark - he attacks the Allies for their bombing raids, destruction of historic places and failure to feed those remaining as barbaric,and yet these were exactly the things that the Nazis had been doing in Europe and beyond from 1939. He constantly refers to the frictions between the Allied powers, stating that if Germany could hold out they would eventually fall apart, without grasping the larger point that the Allies would never disconnect from each other until Nazi Germany had unconditionally capitulated.

He is aware from reports of the collapse of German morale, but thinks his power of rhetoric is enough to bring them back again. He is coming to the conclusion in these pages that the Nazis are no longer listened to - something he puts at the feet of people as diverse as Ribbentrop, Ley, and other functionaries - never himself.

His most vicious barbs are saved for Goering and the Luftwaffe - he grasped that it was Germany's failure in the air war that sealed her fate, and during the time of these diaries he spends much time trying to reorganise the Luftwaffe and get Goering dismissed.

What is also clear direct from Goebbels' mouth is that he was fully aware of The Holocaust.

This book is a fascinating insight into the thinking of one of the maddest most barbarous regimes in history - Goebbels saw his diary as a "world historical" document, and indeed it is -just not in the way he intended.

Chilling and fascinating at the same time, this is worth a read - as would the whole diary if it's ever published in English.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell