Customer Reviews

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

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

 

 

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.

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!

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.

I found the book interesting but one item stuck out as strange. The author talks about interviewing a German soldier named General Otto Hermann Fegelein who gave himself up in the Bavarian Alps. However this same officer was discovered in Berlin trying to escape during the last days of April 1945 and was executed by direct orders of Hitler himself. I do not see how this SS general could have been at two places at once.

In the spring of 1945, Frank Manuel was a 34 year old intelligence officer fluent in French, German, and Yiddish as the American Army pushed into Germany. Scenes From The End: The Last Days Of World War II In Europe begins at about the same time as the Battle of the Bulge, and covers the last few months of combat with the German forces until the surrender of Germany to the Allies. Manuel vividly distills the utter chaos and frequent absurdity of war in its final hour. He is able to provide the reader with a clear and candid sense of what it was like, from anonymous encounters with Holocaust survivors, to the interrogations of captured German soldiers, to an unforgettable car ride with Admiral Horthy, Regent of Hungary, at a time when the Allies had not yet decided wether to regard him as a victim of circumstance or major war criminal. Scenes From The End is a unique and invaluable contribution to the growing body of military memoirs and biographies focused on the World War II European Theater.

I've read hundreds of books about the Second World War and purchased this book assuming I'd learn alot about something my prior readings had missed: what it was like in Germany after the fighting stopped. I was disappointed. The writing was disjointed and confusing. There was no flow to the story. I learned little about that period of time or what it was like to be there. Ultimately, after reading 40 pages and then skimming the next 50 I put the book away. Don't bother buying this book.

If you are looking for a WW2 love story novel, this is not your book. What we have is a moderately detailed account of a US Intelligence officer during the final days of the war in Germany. It is admittedly not easy to follow at times but appears to be an authentic first hand account of the events. It is a quick read and continues to move along well. I recommend it.

According to the biographical summary, Frank Manuel has authored 15 academic works and was the editor of a few more. "Scenes From The End" was his first book for the general public.

The book reads like somebody put a microphone in front of a senile old man with disjointed thoughts with no rhyme or reason and then simply transcribed his thoughts. I found myself agreeing that some of what he wrote to be plausible but without enough credibility to actually believe him.

Two issues come to mind. The first was a reference to Hitler's War Diary on pages 113 - 114. Such a document would be an incredible find that would be reviewed and famous. However, I am not certain such a document ever existed. A Hitler Diary did exist in the early 1980s that caused a huge commotion but that diary was subsequently branded as a forgery.

The one issue that really jumped out at me, however, was on pages 103 - 104 pertaining to his post-war interrogation of a SS General, Otto Hermann Fegelein. Manuel writes -- "The dashing, handsome General Otto Hermann Fegelein, who was married to Eva Braun's sister, was the liaison officer between the SS High Command and German Supreme Headquarters. He had managed to spend the last four days of the war with his wife in a Bavarian Alpine chalet. After this brief precaptivity furlough, he gave himself up, announcing that his life meant nothing to him." What Fegelein said to Manuel during his interrogation was not nearly as interesting as Fegelein being interrogated at all. Although there is some dispute as to what really happened to the man, all accounts I have read about what transpired in the bunker in the last days of the Third Reich indicates that Fegelein was executed on the orders of Adolf Hitler!

The above two examples really shakes the credibility of this already poorly written book and is why I could not even be kind enough to give it two stars. I was left with the question of whether any editor or publisher even took the time to read Manuel's manuscript before making this into a book. If they did and still released the book for public consumption they did this old man a disservice.

I purchased the book and took it with me on a trip to read at my leisure. With anticipation of diving into a great book about a subject I'm interested in I started reading. From the beginning the writing was slow to catch my imagination. I stuck with it, thinking that once I passed 40 or 50 pages the book would pick up speed and not disappoint. I was wrong. Maybe it's Manuel's writing style but it was rambling and disconnected for me. Each subsequent page became a task rather than a pleasure. It isn't intellectually lofty, or technical, but nonetheless cumbersome to read. It starts "flat" and stays that way for all of its 135 pages. I'm sure Mr. Manuel has better writing on display in some of his other work. "Scenes from the End"; however, isn't one of them.

I wasn't impressed with this book. I had expected something broader in scope; something more profound. Instead, I found a rambling set of reminiscences. Manuel was an intelligence officer in the XXI Corps during the closing months of the war in Europe. He provides no original insight into combat operations or how they were affected by the intelligence his unit gathered. Rather, he provides a run-on panoply of impressions and anecdotes, almost without stopping for breath, primarily gleaned from his and others' interrogations. While some are interesting, most are uninspired. This is a slim volume (some 130 pages) that becomes tedious and does little to educate the reader about this tumultuous time other than to provide some insight at the individual level into the befuddlement and desperation of Germans, soldiers and civilians alike, as their world crumbled. If your interest in this period is great, then this book is worth a few minutes. Otherwise, you ought to pass it by.