Customer Reviews

Endgame, 1945: The Missing Final Chapter of World War II

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is as close to a perfect book as I have recently read on WWII history, particularly on the infrequently covered closing days of the European war.
Seldom do historians write about the immediate repercussions and events that ran concurrent with the disintegration of the Third Reich.
In Endgame, 1945: The Missing Final Chapter of World War II, author David Stafford carefully chronicles these events through the eyes of various personalities involved. Their anecdotes complete an image of Europe in such disarray that paint a picture of near hopelessness.
Stafford captures the emotion of the allied race to Berlin, the ominous possibility of a Nazi Alpine Redoubt and the anticlimactic sigh the war weary world breathed before the loose ends were truly tied off.
Reading this book, one realizes how unfortunate it is that those lessons and tales of World War II so often go forgotten. Everyone has heard, read, or seen in movies the horrors that concentration camps wrought, few writers though re-capture the horror in mental Technicolor like Stafford.
Reading this book validates the cause of freedom worldwide, the sacrifice of so many and appropriately was released on the American observance of Veteran's Day.
Everyone should read this book, but more importantly, everyone should take their time and understand the horrors we both faced and have since overcome.
But a great solid read about the cataclysmic last days of war and hesitant first days peace in Europe.

Excellent historical study of the closing days of WWII in Europe that superbly interweaves the personal experiences of people involved in the chaos. Few Second World War histories have moved me so deeply and made the horror felt by the combatants and civilians who encountered the Holocaust so real. Highly recommended to those with a general interest in the subject and to the scholar also. The author is a fine writer and brings sensitivity and insight to his work.

ENDGAME 1945 is a wide-ranging history of the final days of WW II in that part of Europe liberated by the Western allies along with the immediate post-VE Day period. Populated by a myriad of individuals of various nationalities and depicting events in a variety of locales, David Stafford's impressive chronicle illuminates a period of history poorly served by previous historians.

Much more than a simple battle-by-battle history, Stafford's book interweaves the stories of civilians and servicemen struggling to survive in the chaotic last days of the Third Reich with the larger political developments transpiring in Europe and America along with military developments in the Pacific. The cast of characters in this 581-page book includes well known historical figures (Hitler, Churchill, Mussolini, Himmler), lesser political and military luminaries along with U. S., Canadian and New Zealand soldiers as well as Third Reich prisoners, refugee workers, etc. The picture created by these interwoven narratives is not one of glorious triumph but of chaos, muddied victories, pointless death and destruction, endless political maneuvering, senseless brutality and suffering on a mammoth scale. By VE Day, a needed victory had been won but the resulting peace was problematic with millions of people facing an uncertain future.

Though ENDGAME 1945 jumps back and forth betwen various individuals, the narrative moves along at a fairly steady pace. Stafford's depth of research is reflected in the detailed descriptions of various people, places and events that abound in the book.

ENDGAME 1945 is not pleasant reading at times. Up until the final surrender, various German units, mostly SS, continued to murder and brutalize concentration camp inmates. Reading of the slaughter of so many helpless men, women and children is both sickening and heartbreaking. It makes one hope there is a Heaven and a Hell...and that all such Nazi monsters are residents of the latter!

Given the depth of Stafford's research and the skillful job he does in presenting such a large historical canvas, ENDGAME 1945 may be THE definitive book on the subject! Highly recommended.

Certainly an eye-opening book. It chronicles the carnage and confusion created by the war, the appalling destruction and cheapness of life, and the towering narcissism of Hitler, and it adroitly demonstrates how peoples' lives and fates essentially depended on long linked chains of more or less chance events--the story of Fey von Hassel alone is terrific, almost novelistic. That story and the vivid recounting of Hitler's last days and suicide is probably worth the price of the book.

I want to point out one flaw that jumped out at me, what I think is an example of "history written by the victors." The author devotes a fair amount of space talking about sexual relations between the conquering soldiers and German women. But at virtually every mention, he represents the Russian soldiers as "raping" the German women like wanton criminals, whereas the with U.S. and British troops it's always called "fraternization," with the German women depicted as sex-starved and willing because of the long absence of their men, all more than eager to trade sex for cigarettes. At only one point does he acknowledge that an instance of fraternization between German women and Russian soldiers was mutual, and, on the other hand, he even recounts one vivid story of an American G.I. who had a "kept" German teenage female, a destitute orphan, who he visited repeatedly in her tiny apartment in a bombed-out neighborhood--but he represents the girl as tearfully refusing offers of small amounts of money and the (married) soldier as wholly sincere in wanting her as his "girlfriend," as if his only interest on his repeated visits (as she cooked and cleaned for him) were altruistic and friendly. Even though neither spoke a word of the other's language.

Yeah, sure.

This highly favorable depiction of the behavior of Allied soldiers placed right alongside the repeated indictments of Russian soldiers as never anything but rapists struck me as way too neat and clean--in direct contrast to the picture being painted of the tumultuous confusion in every other aspect of life as the Allies moved into Germany. Certainly, if willing fraternization took place at all, some of it must have taken place with Russians, and, if rape were commonplace, as evidently it was, then some instances must have been perpetrated by Allied soldiers. Stands to reason.

The same authorial attitude spills over into other areas, with Russian soldiers usually depicted as being murderously and indiscriminately vengeful, whereas American soldiers are depicted dispensing the same sort of "rough justice," but in a sort of moral outrage over specific crimes that justify the spontaneous executions to the reader. Again, too white-hat / black-hat for me. These sorts of things left me with reservations about the author's objectivity.

These flaws didn't ruin the book for me--it's still a gripping read and a vivid picture of the end of the war.

As the author notes, many know the war in Europe ended with the surrender of Germany on 7 May, but in reality the shear inertia of the war meant the dying and some of the fighting continued. On top of that, the problems created by the war only began. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of displaced persons, former concentration camp survivors, and the administration of a collapsed nation had to be dealt with in the final days of the war. And, in the area of Trieste, Italy, the Cold War could be claimed to have begun as allied divisions and naval forces deployed to prevent Tito's army from grabbing Italian territory and to force it back into Yugoslavia.

The book is also written well. The method Stafford uses to tell this history is to weave into the historical narrative the lives of several people -- allies and others. This leads to an almost novel-like quality as you follow their lives through the last weeks of the war, while at the same time maintaining historical context.

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.

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!

What separates Endgame from other books on the subject is the approach by which the downfall of Germany's told. The final days are described through the eyes of a dozen or so individuals who represent different countries and contains perspectives of both military and civilians as well as men and women. It's up close and personal. You live the war through their eyes. It's also an account of the end of the war as experienced from the western theatre and becomes a good compliment to other books such as After the Reich.* A welcome change to previous reading, EG lacked the redundancy in statistics and details which continue to hammer the same point home over and over again which are so prevalent in other books. Therefore, I looked forward each night to picking this book up because each time I did there was a difference with what I read from the night before. After reading EG, I came away with the notion that kindness, sympathy, and optimism were present amongst people through the worst of it all and that ultimately Europe, including Germany, would recover and triumph. Juxtaposed with other books which concentrate on the worst of all situations and describe the atrocities to the point of ad nauseam, EG was a welcome change. EG is not the history of the end of the Third Reich rewritten so as not to offend, it's just a better balance of good and evil, hope and despair, which better represents humanity in my eyes.

*In fairness to After the Reich and others, Endgame involves the days leading up to the end of the war and a short period after the fall of Germany, thereby avoiding the nightmarish story of the ethnic cleansing of Eastern Europe detailed in other books. So Endgame shouldn't be an apples to apples comparison when considering other books.

Everybody knows how heavily World War II has been written about, detailed in documentaries and portrayed in film. But all hasn't been covered as well as it should have been. The closing of the European Theater and the early occupation has largely been ignored by most writers and film makers. It's a complex and chaotic story, with Germany and Italy transitioning from intense fighting to collapse, the suicide of Hitler, the release of millions of displaced persons from slave labor camps, concentration camps, POW camps& refugee camps, fleeing Nazis, establishment of civil order, De-Nazification, establishment of some form of basic civil government, establishment of a Military Government & occupation, gathering of evidence for war crimes, feeding a starving populace, etc ALL AT ONCE.

A lot of it was happening on the fly as policies were changing and a new President taking Office just as the war was ending and the invasion with Japan looming.

Many books compress everything past the crossing of the Rhine through V-E Day into a very small space and largely avoid the details of this book.

Like the generation that fought WWII, the people who lived in Europe during the closing of the war- even the kids- are getting elderly and will be lost to death or loss of mental capacity soon. It's a subject that has interested me and this book fills some holes.

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.