Customer Reviews

Last Train From Berlin: An Eye-Witness Account of Germany at War

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3 star:		(1)
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Howard K. Smith's 60 year old writing has an urgent, compelling feel which seems very relevant to our times. With personal anecdotes, facts and figures he illuminates the seduction of the German middle class into Nazism and their eventual betrayal and ruination by Hitler's policies. The internal fracture between eager industrialists who got on board with Hitler and the older, more conservative, landed gentry & industrialists who didn't like Hitler, but feared Bolsheviks even more, parallels the conflict between the established Prussian officer corp and the up and coming Wehrmacht and SS organizations. All this while the country began to bleed dry because of Hitler's crazed decision to attack Russia. Civilians endured huge hardships and shortages while at the same time Germany's military machine almost won the war. Smith's book is outstanding in that it gives the texture of daily life for Germans and how they resisted in small ways but ultimately rationalized the war under the renentless pounding of Nazi propaganda . Vivid descriptions of harrassment by the Gestapo of Smith and others in the foreigh correspondent sector. He emerges as an outspoken advocate for social change in the USA as well. easy, engaging read.

Howard K. Smith does a great job of describing his experiences in detail about his time spent in Berlin during the first few years of World War II.

During the final two-thirds of the book, the reader is a companion to Smith as he describes his increasingly darkening experiences in Berlin, culminating with his departure to Switzerland on the day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Following the bombing, the Germans wouldn't allow anyone to leave the country, so Smith just made it.

My two chief complaints about the book:

1. It ends too early. There are pictures of the author visiting Berlin in 1950 touring the burned out Reichstag, but no details about that. It would have been delightful to read about that, and his impressions of defeated Germany, since Smith spent so much time in Berlin.

2. He doesn't add quite enough personal thoughts to his book. For instance, he met the woman that would eventually become his wife in Germany? and there is no mention of it (there's a picture of both of them in the Berlin Tiergarten). A little more of a personal touch would have rounded out the book nicely.

However, these are minor complaints about a solid and throught-provoking book.

This is a tense, realistic 1942 view of Nazi Germany from journalist Howard K. Smith (1914-2002). A CBS reporter in wartime Berlin from 1940-1941, Smith describes life in Nazi Germany, and how people there coped under a totalitarian system waging aggressive war. Readers see how so much of Germany's Middle Class and industrialists were seduced by Hitler. Smith doesn't conceal his contempt for Nazism - such reportorial sentiments helped lead to his exit, as had occurred eariler with reporters like Dorothy Thompson and William L. Shirer. This book's name stems from Smith taking the last train to Switzerland hours before Japan attacked Pearl Harbor - had he left one day later he'd have almost certainly been stopped, held as an enemy detainee, and perhaps disposed of. As it was, this Louisiana native was land-locked in Switzerland for nearly three years, where he continued reporting and wrote these stellar pages. This is a solid narrative about a tragic time and place by a very capable journalist.

I picked up this book ,just a few days ago.I always have had great respect for Howard K. Smith,so reading this book was truly a voyage through history. one has to keep in mind that the book was written before anyone knew the WWII outcome, hence it reinforce the excellent and accurate analysis of the writer,and his prophecies. I am sorry ,he did make it more personal,but that was his call.
My mother, a swiss neutral, who traveled through Germany and Berlin at the time, still living today, feels that Berlin was a bit different from the rest of Germany, in the sense,that anti nazi feelings ,although a very very small minority ,were kept to oneself,and was more preponderant in Berlin. No one would dare speak his mind ,but to a well trusted foreigner. Your life was on the line.
HKS did reconfirm these facts.
A must read to historical buff of this era.
Very good book ,indeed.

Some might consider this book "dated", but if you are a fan of WW II, you will find this book entrancing...Written as the storms of war were gathering, HKS portrays what his life was like as a reporter in Berlin in those days...By luck, he managed to escape just in time...It has become a classic...

I read this book, here in Brazil.This book shows, how bad was the life, in Berlin, during the two first years of World War II.In fact, the author himself compares Berlin of 1939-1941 to a cadaver:grey and ugly.
Some failures of this book:
1-At the beggining of this book, the author claims, that Hitler never gave nothing good to germans.I'm not a nazist, but until the war, Hitler gave full employement and national pride to the germans.Hitler didn't dominated Germany just with Gestapo, but with economic growing.In fact, in 1938 , nazi Germany was the world number one producer of aluminium and number two(after USA) of steel.
2-Being published in 1942, this claims that nazi war production was in decline since 1941.In fact, only after summer of 1944 german war production fell.
3-This book "forgets" that former Soviet Union was behind the money to nazi party.

Even with these (and others) defects, this book remains usefull.The main lesson of this book is that nazism was terrible, even for the germans. Seeing how bad was life in Berlin in these times, I become scare , even to think how terrible was life in places such as Poland, at that times.

The author makes the Germans sound as though they were forced to follow Hitler at gunpoint when the reality was quite different. Recently very well respected historians such as Ian Kershaw have indicated that Hitler had about an 80% approval rating from the German people. In other words, Hitler was loved by the Germans. The German admiration for Hitler only started to decline in large numbers after the German army's defeat at Stalingrad in 1943 which is a year before Smith's book was published, thus proving that Smith's whole angle of thinking is incorrect. However, I have heard rumors that Smith was secretly a Communist so if this is the case he wasn't concerned with objective truth during his reporting in Germany, but rather his goal was to make Communist propaganda which always involves the spreading of numerous falsehoods. A much more balanced book by an American reporter in Nazi Germany is John McCutcheon Raleigh's 1940 Behind The Nazi Front

http://www.amazon.com/Behind-Nazi-Front-McCutcheon-Raleigh/dp/B0007J3IAS/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1290155352&sr=1-2-spell