sections:
The final days of the Second World War, and the first few weeks of peace, in Europe as experienced by those who were there. Based on letters, diaries, and personal memoirs, the book begins with Hitler’s fateful decision to fight to the end in his Berlin bunker, and ends with arrival of American and British forces in the shattered capital of his Third Reich several weeks later. It covers such dramatic episodes as the deaths of Mussolini and Hitler; the final stages of the campaigns in Italy and Germany; the myth of the ‘Final Redoubt’; the race for Trieste and the Baltic; the hunt for Nazi war criminals, scientists, and looted art and gold; the capture of leading Nazis; the lootings, rapes, and killings of the post-liberation phase; the struggle to impose law and order in occupied territory; the liberation of the concentration camps and the fate of their inmates and millions of displaced persons; and the eventual arrival of western forces in Berlin on the eve of the Potsdam Conference.
book reviews
- Toronto Globe & Mail
"a gripping story of a dark time, powerfully told." - Sunday Telegraph
“...superb but grim...Stafford’s skilful narrative...Stafford brilliantly weaves his individual human stories into the wider picture...” - London Review of Books Books of the Year
“a harrowing account of the end of World War Two in Europe. Stories of remarkable courage and implacable cruelty combine to create an unforgettable portrait of a continent all but destroyed by war.” - Mail on Sunday
“...the story is so expertly told by historian and intelligence expert David Stafford. While never losing sight of the sweeping historical perspective, he makes it intimate and compelling by describing it largely through the eyes of nine very different individuals.” - Sunday Express
“...harrowing masterpiece of modern history...” - Sunday Times
“...Stafford’s gripping and moving book...makes brilliant use of the individual stories of ordinary people caught up in extraordinary events.” - Scotsman
“...a seamless, urgent and richly textured history.” - Noble Frankland (former Director of the Imperial War Museum), Spectator, 26 May 2007
"Stafford skilfully provides a connecting framework for a narrative of almost Tolstoyan proportions [and is] to be congratulated on his even-handed treatment of a subject which, in the depths of its almost incredible inhumanity, brutality, violence and scale, beggars the imagination and which only a writer of the first calibre, strongest nerve and monumental intellectual stamina could tackle." - Christopher Silvester, Daily Express, 31 August 2007
"Stafford proves himself the master of a dazzling and complex narrative, providing us with sufficient detail about the various main characters, drawn from their letters and diaries, to fix their humanity against a panoramic background of abysmal inhumanity…" - Peter Preston, The Observer, 26 August 2007
‘David Stafford … weaves an often majestic tapestry of testimony from the anguish of those who survived Belsen, those who liberated Berlin and those whose fate we hear far less of… Time and again, you sit up and take notice in ways that more conventional history lets slip… The success of Stafford’s method, using ordinary men with ordinary voices … is to make such testimony still moving and urgent six decades on… You know what war was like, is like and will be like again. You see the mistakes and evasions. You look into the depths and shudder….. - BBC History Magazine
“...an engaging and illuminating read...a most readable account.” - Spectator
“…a writer of the first calibre, strongest nerve and monumental intellectual stamina…” - Max Hastings, Daily Mail
“David Stafford, a practised chronicler of World War II… has assembled a remarkable gallery of human stories- heroic, tragic, squalid, moving- for his book, which reminds us that victory, even in a ‘good’war, iis almost as bitter as defeat… [his] book is a vivid reminder of the misery that persisted across Europe long after the shooting stopped in 1945.” - Allan Mallinson, Times
“…fascinating… The purpose of this book is to put a human face on the bewildering scale of death and devastation. David Stafford does it most compellingly.’
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