Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #108196 in Books
• Published on: 2007-08-30
• Binding: Hardcover
• 608 pages

Sunday Times
'Stafford's gripping and moving book ... is an epic panorama of the death throes of Nazism, and makes brilliant use of the individual stories of ordinary people caught up in extraordinary events'

Observer Review
'Endgame 1945 isn't a footnote to history. It's the last chapter in a book from which to learn before another volume opens'

The Times
`Gripping and moving, Endgame 1945 makes brilliant use of the individual stories of ordinary people caught up in extraordinary events'

Customer Reviews

Imperfect but still gripping
This is an unusual book, and it both succeeds and fails in its goal of painting a picture of the last days of the Second World War. David Stafford has taken the personal memoirs, letters, and recollections of about a dozen people and tried to produce a tableau showing what life was like away from the biggest stories.
He relates the the handful of experiences with sympathy and illustrates how big politics affected real lives. The result is an interesting look into some areas that the history books have neglected, which helps to bring the real history alive. And it's quite a page turner, because reading about other peoples lives during a time of hellish upheaval, skilfully woven into a single narrative, is a sure-fire good read. This is a history that doesn't stop at the end of the war but shows how conquered became occupied and imprisoned became liberated. It's a fresh angle to a well-covered subject, and Stafford manages to conjure quite a vivid picture which casts new light on an old subject. The author does an excellent job of keeping the reader informed about the background and the bigger picture of politics and history which helps to flesh out the personal stories.
The most interesting bits are the tales of Nazi-hunting, rescuing fascist loot, fraternisation with the enemy and life in the concentration camps, much of which is written without relying directly on the chosen memoirists. There is also the fascinating tale of Mussolini's last hours, the moment when Lord Haw-Haw is shot through the buttocks and the truly amazing story of a convoy of VIPs kept as hostages by the Nazis, who were shunted around the Third Reich until their designated execution day, when their ingenuity and bravery proved more than a match for their guards.
The problem comes in that the book's foundation - the ordinary stories of a handful of ordinary people - doesn't quite work.
All of Stafford's memoirists are likeable individuals, thoughtful, intelligent characters who are trying to make the best of a bad lot. But their similarities point to one of the book's shortcomings: despite trying to paint a picture of the last days of the war, the personal memoirs cover only one fraction of the canvas. With one exception, all the people whose stories are told are from Britain, America, Canada or New Zealand. The exception is a rather aristocratic German woman imprisoned because her diplomat father fell foul of the Nazis. This leaves the stories of ordinary French, Russian, Polish, Finnish, Greek and German people completely untold. And it's not just the observers that are all rather similar but their observations as well: they are all so nice and sensitive. And because the emphasis is on real accounts from ordinary people, some of the stories are, well, a little dull. For example one diarist is parachuted into Austria just as the war is ending. A tremendous start to a great yarn, one might think. But no, he gets lost and ends up staying with a farmer's family. It's perhaps a little harsh to say it, but maybe the reason that his story remains untold is because it is not really a great story.
Given the starvation, rape, looting, executions, treachery and death-marches going on at the time, I think there would have been room for a much greater variety of experiences, even from completely ordinary people.
That's not to say that all the stories are boring: for the most part, Stafford writes well and some of the vignettes are very engaging and insightful. But he could have whittled this 600 page book into a much finer work of oral history and had room for even more stories.
Another problem is that Stafford has shuffled all the stories like a pack of cards. The chapters are split into weak themes with even weaker chronology, so that he is constantly chopping back and forward between earlier and later dates. That would be fine in more skilled hands, but on several occasions here it leads to repetition, as the author has to recall an earlier passage to anchor the next bit.
Despite my criticisms, I confess to having been gripped by the book. It's not perfect, but still definitely worth a read.

War, what is it good for...
This isn't a book I'd usually buy or read, but after reading a couple of reviews I thought I'd check it out. This is a book for the general reader, rather than the academic historian. While his writing style is solid rather than particularly exciting or inspiring, David Stafford does a solid job of story-telling & some impressive research has gone into compiling & editing the narratives of the protagonists. This is mainly a "ground-up" rather than a "top-down" account of the closing stages of WW2 in Europe. Having said that, its view is very much from the Western side of the fence. The Soviet army & people bore the brunt of the fight against Nazism, so its a pity there's no first hand input from anyone on the Soviet side here. Equally, I'd like to have heard more from the civilian side, both in the occupied countries & Germany itself.

Much of what we see & hear now abt this period concentrates on the big set pieces like D-Day & the Battle for Berlin/Hitler's Bunker, & (quite rightly) the Holocaust. Naturally this book has to concern itself with the last days of Berlin, but much of the book's power comes from the stories of other campaigns which aren't so well known to most people. I've always been interested in the Italian phase of the war, as my uncle Leslie was killed at the Anzio landings. Rather than go over familiar ground like the battle for Monte Cassino, DS uses the story of Geoffrey Cox to recount a chilling tale of the deadly & relentless grind through Italy - I could practically feel the cold & mud at times. A lot of this was totally new to me - for example, the narrowly-avoided war between Allied Forces & Tito's partisan army at Trieste.
When I was growing up in the 50's/60's, everyone's parents had been involved in the war in some way - now WW2 is as distant from us as WW1 was in the Sixties. This makes these accounts even more important. The narrators include a journalist, a radio-reporter, various front-line soldiers (British, GI & Canadian) & a German mother interned in the camps, with her children in the hands of the SS.
As indicated by the book's subtitle, "Retribution" is a major theme in the book. Its totally understandable how people would want revenge & rough justice for Nazi collaborators, but DS takes the story further to show how the mania for vengeance nearly got totally out of hand in France & Italy, leading to serious social problems. For the soldiers & reporters, it was the discovery of concentration camps all over Western Europe that inspired a raging hatred of their enemy & an unforgiving attitude towards the German civilian population. Again, I knew vague images of French women with shaven heads, but hadn't realised the intensity & widespread nature of the settling of scores.
Another of the book's strongest aspects is in evoking the plight of the millions of refugees & "displaced persons" all over the Continent, particularly throught the story of Francesca Wilson with UN refugee relief agency. Recent insane outbursts in Europe like the Balkan Wars put refugees on our tv screens again, and given the misery, devastation & un-mendable lives left
behind by these wars, its almost impossible to imagine the same things on the scale they were at the end of WW2.
As I read the book, I had to keep reminding myself that these soldiers were mostly very young men at the time, in their early 20's. Its salutary to wonder how we'd have coped if flung into the kind of cauldron described in this book. I had plenty of "lump-in-throat" moments reading this, but one of the saddest bits comes very near the end, with GI Robert Ellis leaving the war, in his words "...embittered in many ways & ambivalent about the army & whether the horror we had experienced & the losses undergone - whatever the iniquities of the Hitler & Japanese regimes - were worth the price paid?"
Its chilling to contemplate the experiences that could make a man feel that way.
At its best, this is a powerful & thought-provoking book, & anyone reading it can only come away with an enhanced admiration & respect for the WW2 survivors around us.

Some fascinating personal stories
David Stafford has unearthed a number of amazing personal stories here that I had not read in previous books on this subject.

Particularly poignant is the story of Fey Von Hassel, who's father was one of the Hitler Bomb Plot conspirators and she is imprisoned as a result and separated from her young children.