Scenes from the End: The Last Days of World War II in Europe [Hardcover]

Frank Edward Manuel (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 2000

Frank E. Manuel was a 34-year-old intelligence officer during the final American push into Germany in April 1945. This memoir recounts those last frantic weeks of the war, conveying the essence of the time through a montage produced from transcripts, letters, and memory. Manuel's take on the collapse of the Third Reich, and the Americans' part in it, is decidedly unheroic and unsentimental. He portrays a shattered Europe where the black market rules and an entire population is in transit; where former Nazi sympathizers are desperate to cover their tracks; where Americans rush to judgment; and where the prospect of a Russian takeover looms. "Military historians have assembled a picture of the grand design, creating the myth of an official history, but fragments may be closer to the chaos of experience in war." - from the book

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In the waning weeks of World War II, a 34-year-old American intelligence officer found himself in Germany. Fluent in German, Yiddish, and French, Frank E. Manuel interrogated captured soldiers, from the grunts to the high commanders. Many broke down immediately:

PFCs and lieutenants and generals who talked and talked and talked, beat their gums until you had to shut them up, wept, whined, and tried to use the interrogation chamber as a confessional box, laying bare their souls to the first sympathetic auditor to whom they could speak without fear of reprisal...

Others were clearly made of sterner stuff, such as a young sergeant who demanded a direct order from a captured field marshal before he would reveal his secret mission.

Manuel blends snatches of interrogations; overheard conversations between German civilians, combatants, and American liberators; and his own observations. The result is choppy and disjointed, with little sense of a narrative. The author argues that this is by design: "Military historians have assembled a picture of the grand design, creating the myth of an official history," he writes, "but fragments may be closer to the chaos of experience in war before it has been subjected to cleansing."

Compiled from notes written immediately after he returned home from the war and letters written to his wife, Scenes from the End is a series of snapshots that, viewed together, provide an accurate picture of the dismal final days of World War II. --Sunny Delaney

From Publishers Weekly

Interviewing prisoners of war as an intelligence officer during the closing days of WWII provided Manuel, a journalist and historian,with an unusual view of the conflict. Social, cultural and moral disintegration are the subjects here, not combat, and this account, based on excerpts from letters and notes Manuel wrote at the time, constitutes "a documentary record" of his feelings and observations. Whether during the Battle of the Bulge or in Alsace or Germany, the interviewees cling to beliefs that a new weapon will still bring victory. They alternately fend off or embrace responsibility, and express bitterness toward their leaders and relief that the Americans (and not the Russians) have finally arrived. Most often, the prisoners serve as illustrations that hunger and survival usually take precedence over dignity. Throughout, there are problems of judgment facing Manuel. Some are immediate and specific: is an eccentric with wild claims one of the valued scientists to be shipped to America or a madman to be left for the Russians? Others border on the cosmological: does justice demand that the vanquished be punished or assisted? The young Manuel, who had been a journalist during the Spanish Civil War, sees "sloppy romantics" who "slobber over the vanquished," and feels like an accessory to injustice for treating the guilty with some respect. The mature Manuel, looking back, sees in himself the "sentiments of superior virtue that besmirch all victors." With stream-of-consciousness prose more literary than journalistic and observations more layered and nuanced than chronological or even logical, this book is a brief glimpse through relatively sophisticated eyes of humanity stripped of the cloak of civilization. (Feb.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 135 pages
• Publisher: Steerforth Press; 1st edition (January 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1883642558
• ISBN-13: 978-1883642556
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.8 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.5 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,378,843 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars an unconventional, engrossing and essential book, March 25, 2000

By 

amy (Vermont) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Scenes from the End: The Last Days of World War II in Europe (Hardcover)

I'm writing to offer a retort of sorts to the review below. While it's true Manuel's style is unconventional, and therefore unexpected, I found it stunning, engrossing and to great effect, and I think this will be considered an essential book on WWII for a long time to come. Manuel, an esteemed historian, author of many academic books and winner of a National Book Award explains of his unique approach, "Military historians have assembled a picture of the grand design, creating the myth of an official history, but fragments may be closer to the chaos of experiece in war before it has been subjected to cleansing." I can think of no other book that plunges the reader into the situation more authentically or cconveys a purer sense of the dizzying conditions under which real history unfolds. To have such a book appear at this late date is remarkable and of great value.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A new approach to a often told story, February 21, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Scenes from the End: The Last Days of World War II in Europe (Hardcover)

I usually prefer great war fiction like The Triumph and the Glory or The Thin Red Line to non-fiction military topic books, but Scenes From the End is so well done that I just had to take the time to give it a good review. Compellingly told and rich in vivid passages about life and death, courage, betrayal, submission and surrender in the gotterdammerung that was Europe in 1945 it richly deserves five stars!

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Literate Description of end of War., February 22, 2001

By 

John P. Rooney "John" (Massachusetts) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Scenes from the End: The Last Days of World War II in Europe (Hardcover)

Scenes From The End by Frank E. Manuel, published by Steerforth Press, 2000.

If you are looking for the usual reminiscences where an old soldier describes his Sherman tank cracking a curbstone in Prague in 1945 and seeing the same crack in 1995, then this book is NOT for you. Manuel's present memoirs, on the end of World War II in Europe, are written in a literate style by a man literate, not only in English, but also in French, German and Yiddish. Frank E. Manuel begins his book with the Battle of the Bulge, but he really does not see much action. The central theme of his book is not, however, about military action, but rather the feelings and motivation of the enemy soldiers he interrogated. The POWs ranged in rank from private to general. Mr. Manuel describes their attitudes and personal attributes when captured. A particularly notable chapter is Chapter 8, entitled, "A Houseful of Generals", where , in a the town of Weilheim, many of the German generals and their staff decided to stop running from the advancing American armies. This chapter is a literate rebuttal of the German offer to become allies with the Anglo-Americans to keep the Mongol-Bolsheviks out of Western Europe. Of course, this offer was rejected, and Frank Manuel states, "We wanted the Germans to say that they were ashamed of themselves", p. 97. His next-to-last chapter is on his encounter with Admiral Horthy, Regent of Hungary, when he and the Admiral are transported to General Patch's headquarters. He describes the Admiral's ineffectual attempts to break with his German allies, as the War comes towards its end. The quote Mr. Manuel uses is, "Was konnte ich denn machen?", in English, "What could I do?" These are the words he also uses to end this chapter.

Throughout this book, Frank Manuel is well aware of his own Jewishness and how others could identify him as being a Jew. The author senses that old Admiral Horthy knew that he was Jewish, and Horthy gave a monologue on "...his protection of Hungarian Jews and his refusal to participate in their round-up by the Nazis". P. 120. The author also relates how Polish officers questioned him, in Yiddish, about being a Jew. But, in all of this, Frank Manuel is not, as far as I can read, defensive about being Jewish. In describing the fate of the Poles, he states that "...they would wander the earth like the Jews and the Irish". P. 71. In this single line, the author shows a deeper understanding of the many diasporas (Irish, Jewish or Polish) than many who believe in a monopoly of persecution, suffered only by their own kind. This book is well worth your time.