Ahoy - Mac's Web Log

Kershaw. Ian. The End The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 1944-1945. The Penguin Press New York. 2011.

This tour de force by History Professor Ian Kershaw lays out Germany fighting for its very existence. It gives reasons for a continuation of the war against the Allies. All appears lost, but  the regime kept  on resisting, controlling the German people through fear, and the death penality handed down by the Gestapo, and carried out so often.

Sometimes, the rather turgid prose needs persistence on the part of the reader, but then the rewards gained outweigh this point.
 
For anyone wishing to understand why Germany continued to fight on when the Allies  were flooding into Germany from the west, and the Russian threat from the east was very real, I commend this work.
 
An immense amount of research has been undertaken to produce this outstanding work, meticulous in documenting its many sources, Ian Kershaw as always, is one of our best historians, and probably the best who takes WW2 Germany as his subject.