Mike Jones - After Hitler

I'll add a caveat or disclaimer with this as I did provide Mike with some material for this book, notably on the siege of Breslau.

One of the reasons I tackled Festung Breslau as the subject for the book (aside from the human drama and the wealth of source material fairly readily available) was a certain frustration on my part with the obsession with the fall of Berlin at the exclusion of many other dramas and surrenders played out in the final days of WW2 in Europe.

Mike evidently saw the same opportunity - dismissing the observation of Australian war correspondent Alan Moorehead who wrote at the time that "the surrender of Germany came not with a bang but a whimper". It didn't. Nor did it end with Hitler's death; After Hitler covers the period from the Führer's suicide in his Berlin bunker until May 9th.

Hitler's death made Germany's surrender possible, but not immediate. And there was plenty of time for several thousand deaths on the Eastern Front especially before the guns finally fell silent.

If you're acquainted with the author's previous works, you'll know what to expect. The emphasis is on the (in)human story of men and women, great and ordinary, caught in the maelstrom of conflict.

For English-speaking readers, it'll be accounts of happenings on the Eastern Front which will probably be new to them: the fighting in the Courland pocket (pretty much ignored in most English literature) or the Prague uprising (where anti-Soviet Russian soldiers fought with the Czechs, against the Germans) for example.

I said of the Mike's previous book on the Russo-German conflict, Total War, that too much had been crammed into too few pages. Here, however, it's bang on: a rich and bloody tapestry woven into 400 pages.

I'm a bit of an Endkampf nut (400ish books, not counting documents and journal articles...) - and this is a very worthy addition to the body of literature covering the death throes of the Third Reich and the end of WW2 in Europe.

That said, there's still plenty of Endkampf material to milk. It'll be at least a decade before mine is ready though.