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| Endgame, 1945: The Missing Final Chapter of World War II
Hardcover
Author: David Stafford
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Release Date: 2007-11-12
ISBN-10: 0316109800
ISBN-13: 9780316109802
List Price: $26.99
Average Customer Rating:
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To end a history of World War II at VE Day is to leave the tale half told. While the war may have seemed all but over by Hitler's final birthday (April 20), Stafford's chronicle of the three months that followed tells a different, and much richer, story.
ENDGAME 1945 highlights the gripping personal stories of nine men and women, ranging from soldiers to POWs to war correspondents, who witnessed firsthand the Allied struggle to finish the terrible game at last. Through their ground-level movements, Stafford traces the elaborate web of events that led to the war's real resolution: the deaths of Hitler and Mussolini, the liberation of Buchenwald and Dachau, and the Allies' race with the Red Army to establish a victors' foothold in Europe, to name a few. From Hitler's April decision never to surrender to the start of the Potsdam Conference, Stafford brings an unprecedented focus to the war's "final chapter."
Narrative history at its most compelling, ENDGAME 1945 is the riveting story of three turbulent months that truly shaped the modern world.
Depends what you're looking for
| Customer Rating: | If you're looking for a miltary-centric exposition of the last days of world war 2 in europe, you'll be disappointed with this. There is no discussion of which force did what, when and why. There are no maps with thrusts and front lines, offensives and retreats, battles.
What it is is a chronicle of aftermath. The aftermath of conquest and defeat, death camps and the implosion of two countries (Italy and Germany) from within the massive conflagration they initiated. Carrying the narrative is a number of real people caught up in the maelstrom of the defeat of the axis powers. These range from the daughter of Ulrich Von Hassell, who carries the burden of sippenhaft (family debt) for her father. This involves losing her children, trips through camps as an inmate with other prominent nazi prisoners like Schacht and encounters with the SS. Other major characters include a New Zealander in Italy, An American soldier in Italy as well, A Canadian in Holland during the Hunger Winter, an english commando in northern germany, a british journalist and an english refugee worker. These characters move within the framework of the nazi downfall and subsequent capture of the major Nazi criminals.
As a historical work, it is similar to the approach adopted by Max Hastings and others to use individuals to characterize and personalize the greater events happening around them. It creates a narrative where the typical reader can understand, visualize and imagine themselves in place of the individual, like good fiction. Of course this is entirely non-fiction of course.
As a read I found it a compulsive page turner, enlightening, yet at the same time a savage indictment of the Nazi criminality in world war 2, particularly with regard to the jews and other minorities. There are no punches pulled here and any Germanophile should read this work. In ways its a difficult read from that perspective, but a necessary one. It doesn't sugar coat the truth, rather shines a bright light on the fading days of the 3rd Reich and the doomed peoples of all races drawn into the Nazi psychotic madness.
So, a great read, but not a light one. It's not dry history or an all encompassing work on the downfall. Rather it involves characters that are typical, doing extraordinary things in a very dark time. And it's not so much about military things, as the impact and effect of these things on ordinary people. So its a rich human story with redemption for some, loss for others, revenge and forgiveness and cold indifference. There is no simplistic, reductionist or revisionist glorification here. Denunciation of a most evil regime is a central theme, but seen through the eyes of those sent to destroy it and those destroyed by it. That my grandparents lived through the hunger winter in occupied Holland seemed to add it an extra poignancy. |
Descriptive end of the Nazi regime...
| Customer Rating: | | I've found many similarities between this book and Antony Beevor's haunting tome "The Fall of Berlin 1945". Although "Endgame 1945" ups the ante and surpasses Beevor with its far richer character development. I've found it to be profoundly moving and an accurate witness to the unimaginable horrors created in the death throes of the Third Reich. |
Endgame, 1945: David Stafford brutal portrait of a Europe in hell during the last days of World War II
| Customer Rating:  | In the beginning of this outstanding account of the last days of World War II there is a gripping quotation from General William Tecumseh Sherman:
"I am sick and tired of war. It's glory is all moonshine...War is Hell."
If you still doubt that lesson then you should read this book. Stafford focuses on nine individuals, their stories and how their personal biographies were intertwined with larger events as the war in Europe drew to an end in the spring of 1945.
We see Robert Ellis an American soldier undergoing the horrific final battles in Northern Italy. British commando Bryan Samain goes through Germany in a journey bearing an affinity to Dante's travels in the lower reaches of hell. Francesa Wilson was a British woman who worked in several refugee camps in Europe. She ministered to countless Jewish victims of the holocaust . New Zealander Geoffrey Cox participated in the battle between Tito's communist and the allies over Trieste on the Adriatic. This is a little known event to most Americans proving most illuminating.British BBC reporter Robert Reid was married with children. His letters home are filled with insight on his adventures with George S. Patton's Third Army. American soldier Leonard Linton was present at the Postdam conference giving us a good insight on postwar Berlin which was a city of grey death and despair. Fey von Hassel was a German aristocrat who married a rich Italian. She was imprisoned at Dachau following the Nazi execution of her father who had been involved in the plot to murder Hitler in July, 1944. She is separated from her children by the Nazis. At the end of the book we see her happily reunited with them and her husband.
This is a book running with blood, murder, starvation and cruel death.
Millions died in the unspeakable cruel concentration camps. We hear German women who were among the approximately two million who were raped by Soviet forces. The Nazis were worse than barbarians who looted killed and destroyed even past the official surrender of their forces on May 8. 1945.
War is an horrific experience which ruins peoples and civilization. This book is a brilliant retelling of terrible times in European and world history. Stafford draws good pictures of the big men: Churchill, Stalin, FDR and Truman but it is the stories of the ordinary people changed in unexpected ways that makes this a memorable story. This book is destined to become a classic of World War II reportage. |
Still missing
| Customer Rating: | | I am clearly going against the grain of other reviewers. Stylistically, this book reads like a true-crime story. While the individual stories are for the most part very interesting, they don't begin to write the final chapter on the war in Europe. The last 25 pages of Herbert A. Werner's "Iron Coffins" do a better job of conveying the scope and scale of immediate post-war Europe. I finished the book still looking for a lot more. |
Small stories from a big war
| Customer Rating: | | Most educated Americans know, in general, what happened on the battlefields of WWII from Normandy to V-E Day. This extremely excellent book, while giving a broad overview of thr "big" events, tells us a multitude of "little" stories about different people caught up in living during the last months of the war. They are fascinating tales, and even more so for being true. We go along the roads of Germany with troops, see the opening of the concentration camps, spend time imprisoned, and in general wait out the war itself. This book is an effort to show the triumph of the human will to survive, even though surrounded by tragedy. I'm extremely glad that I read it, and I hope that it reaches a very wide audience! |
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