A review by rooafza
The End: The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler's Germany 1944-45 by Ian Kershaw

4.0

Gotterdammerung 1945 . A litany of horrors unto the end. Ian Kershaw attempts to understand the reasons for the continued German resistance after the monumental defeats on the Eastern Front after which defeat was inevitable. There are none except the death drive.

Instead of suing for peace and loosening their grip, the nihilistic sadists of the Nazi High Command and their collaborators descended into an orgy of murder against their enemies and force their own population into a suicide pact. The worst part, from reading the footnotes, is the realization that the vast majority of the perpetrators survived the post-war tribunals and ended their lives in peace as accountants, bankers and so on.