Inside Hitler's Bunker : The Last Days of the Third Reich

Rating:
Summary: From destruction to autodestruction
Review: Joachim Fest's book is a pregnant reconstruction of Hitler's last days and the end of the Third Reich based on the latest testimonies of the people who were with him in the Berlin bunker.

Fest sketches summarily the historical background (the Versailles Treaty, the Weimar Republic), but gives a sharp analysis of Hitler's character: his racism and cynical enforcement of the law of the strongest. The vanquished had to be annihilated or enslaved: 'Apes trample to death all those who don't belong to their community'.
Until the end Hitler believed in an alliance change (that Great Britain and the US would turn with him against the bolsheviks).
When he saw that the war was lost, he ordered the annihilation of the whole of Germany and its population.
Even on the ruins of the Third Reich his lieutenants continued to fight for his succession.

This is a short but impressive tale about the madness of power.
Not to be missed.

Rating:
Summary: The last days of Hitler.
Review: Personally, I like this author and I have a few of his books. This one was an average read because in a brief 200 pages, Fest describes the last days of Hitler. Trevor Roper's book even though ancient gives a better picture of the last days of Hitler than Fest's book. In Fest's book, one gets glimpses of Hitler in his last days of life. Gone are the great expectations of German Empire, and one can get a glimpse of the crazy man who led Germany for 12 years. Fest gives only glimpses of Hitler and life in the bunker. One cannot get a definitive account of all the activities of that period. One can get a better image with Trever Roper's book.
I enjoyed some of the information in this book, but definitive it is not. There are better books out there than this, so if one wants a summary, this is a nice book. However if one wants a more through book, they should look elsewhere.

Rating:
Summary: No Footnotes? Say What?
Review: Personally, I'm not a big fan of having a tremendous amount of footnotes in a book. Then again, any book of history that doesn't contain any is immediately suspect. Generally speaking, "historians" who don't use footnotes are either: 1) Elderly; 2) Egotists; 3) Lazy; or 4) Glorified journalists.

Here's Joachim Fest's reason for not using footnotes in his book "Inside Hitler's Bunker":

"This volume contains no footnotes. Every citation or incident mentioned can be traced to a source, however. I decided not to use footnote references because of the hopeless confusion in the statements and testimony of the witnesses, much of which can no longer be cleared up. Too often a reference would have to be compared with one or more differing statements or descriptions."

In other words, this book is historical fiction. It's still worth reading, but then again, lazy, unaccountable scholarship should not be tolerated, especially for a subject as important as this one. Was Fest hoping that, because he wrote an acclaimed biography of Hitler, that he was therefore an "expert" and could get away with this sort of thing?

Sure, I'm not blind to the fact that there are so many contradictory accounts concerning Hitler, that the logistics of unravelling the truth about his reign are formidable. Then again, that is what HISTORIANS do. Surely at least a FLAVOR of the problems in writing this sort of book might have been attempted to be conveyed in a few judicious notes.

Rating:
Summary: No Footnotes? Say What?
Review: Personally, I'm not a big fan of having a tremendous amount of footnotes in a book. Then again, any book of history that doesn't contain any is immediately suspect. Generally speaking, "historians" who don't use footnotes are either: 1) Elderly; 2) Egotists; 3) Lazy; or 4) Glorified journalists.

Here's Joachim Fest's reason for not using footnotes in his book "Inside Hitler's Bunker":

"This volume contains no footnotes. Every citation or incident mentioned can be traced to a source, however. I decided not to use footnote references because of the hopeless confusion in the statements and testimony of the witnesses, much of which can no longer be cleared up. Too often a reference would have to be compared with one or more differing statements or descriptions."

In other words, this book is historical fiction. It's still worth reading, but then again, lazy, unaccountable scholarship should not be tolerated, especially for a subject as important as this one. Was Fest hoping that, because he wrote an acclaimed biography of Hitler, that he was therefore an "expert" and could get away with this sort of thing?

Sure, I'm not blind to the fact that there are so many contradictory accounts concerning Hitler, that the logistics of unravelling the truth about his reign are formidable. Then again, that is what HISTORIANS do. Surely at least a FLAVOR of the problems in writing this sort of book might have been attempted to be conveyed in a few judicious notes.

Rating:
Summary: Don't Waste Your Time
Review: Please do not waste your time nor your money on this book. There are far better ones available if you wish to learn about Hitler's last days in the bunker. There is no new information here. And it is rather "skimpy" at that. Check out James P. O'Donnell's "The Bunker" or the "The Last Days of Hitler" by Anton Joachimsthaler. Both are rather extensive and far more interesting.

Rating:
Summary: Chilling
Review: The last days of the Third Reich are, too me, the most fascinating. At that point in it's monstrous history, the Reich was stripped bare, free of any still existing innocent facade. The concentration camps were discovered, the Nazi elite began turning against itself, and the cornerstone of the entire state, Adolf Hitler, was revealed to be the destructive psychopath that the world has always suspected. All of this drama and desperate revelation was contained, in the final days, within a very small geographical area, that of the Fuhrer Bunker underneath the the Nazi capital Berlin. There, a small group of mostly fanatically loyal Nazi's presided over a long deserved funeral, with their increasingly unstable Fuhrer leading the way to nihilistic doom. As author Joachim Fest points out, there has been relatively little investigation to this seminal days, as so much of the history is hidden in the destruction and political greed that soon followed the death of Hitler. Fest steps into the gap, bringing in as much of the scholarly account available. It is a small book, but it's effectiveness and readability overshadows its relatively short length.

The struggle for the survival of the Reich began in January 1945. After the failure of the Nazi offensive in the Ardennes, Allied forces began to pour over the western frontier. In addition to this failure, the massive Red Army continued to smash through Nazi armies, drowning the increasingly poorly equipped German forces in a flood of iron and men. Hitler, against the advice of all of his military advisors, continued to press for no retreat, causing the massive encirclements of German forces on both fronts. The barrel of German manhood started to empty, as the Wehrmacht was reduced to recruiting old men and 15 year old boys. Even more fascinating was the breakdown of Reich society, something that Fest points out on numerous occasions. The lies of Nazi victory that had been fed the German people for years were being exposed as total fabrications, causing the drastic erosion in civilian and military morale. Fanatic Nazi's fight against this tidal wave of malaise with increasingly drastic action and propaganda, as whole geographical areas were described as traitors and thousand of summary executions were carried out. As armies began to approach Berlin, the Reich defense became even more panicked and disorganized. I was surprised how badly managed the defense of Berlin actually was, considering the massive amounts of Soviet dead that occurred in the storming of the Nazi capital. Fest writes of the almost comic failure to coordinate the many components of city defense with very effective descriptive ability.

The other side of the story is the tale of the bunker itself. There, a motley collection of the Nazi elite braced for their ultimate failure. Amazingly, the elite, all around the country, still schemed and moved against one another, making overtures to the allies or attempting to escape the grip of Hitler, who still has the loyalty of his personal SS retinue. The competition that Hitler had cultivated amongst his immediate subordinates came back to haunt him as dissension and mis communication ruined any hope of an effective resistance to the double invasions. Hitler himself, trapped in the suffocating surrounds of the subterranean bunker, began to show signs of absolute mental breakdown. The methamphetamine injections he had been taking for years began to finally destroy his mind, driving the Fuhrer into wild and frantic rages. Yet, even in the depths of his mania, he still retained the hypnotic power he had always enjoyed over those ever loyal to him. They would still follow his orders and try to understand his mad commands, which now concerned phantom armies and secret weapons that did not exist. The horrific opera came to an end as the Red Army bashed its way closer and closer. The atmosphere of the bunker because suicidal, and many, including Hitler and his new wife, Eva Braun, took their own lives. The game was over.

Fest uses all the available sources, and his book is probably the most complete you are going to find. Unfortunately, there are still mysteries and inconsistences concerning aspects of the story, such as Hitler's method of suicide. The book is very informative and gives a great description of just the overall atmosphere of the failing situation. Hitler himself is a portrait in degeneration, as he fully embodies the evil mantle that we have of him today. One of the most effective parts of the book is Fest describing how Hitler eventually became obsessed with the idea of destroying everything, in an almost wanton manner. While I felt some parts of the book took away from the scholarly direction and message of the work, overall, it is an excellent albeit short study of Hitler and the violent dissolution of his empire.

Rating:
Summary: Meticulously researched; compellingly written
Review: This compact, gripping true story will have you mesmerized with its detail. Kudos to the translator, too, for an excellent job.

The claustrophobic life inside the Bunker...the cruel devastation of war...the mania of a brutal dictator. It's all hair, brutally forthright and shockingly objective which makes it all the more terrifying.

Today, in a new world of war, it is especially interesting and eerie to read a true tale such as this.

Rating:
Summary: Meticulously researched; compellingly written
Review: This compact, gripping true story will have you mesmerized with its detail. Kudos to the translator, too, for an excellent job.

The claustrophobic life inside the Bunker...the cruel devastation of war...the mania of a brutal dictator. It's all hair, brutally forthright and shockingly objective which makes it all the more terrifying.

Today, in a new world of war, it is especially interesting and eerie to read a true tale such as this.

Rating:
Summary: An Authentic Look inside the End of the Nightmare
Review: We have our own evils to contemplate in the twenty-first century, but the demon Hitler will forever occupy those who study the evils of the twentieth. It may be that we need reassurance that he is really and permanently dead, because the story of his end has been told many times. There was room, however, for a comprehensive summary of Hitler's last days, and we now have one, told by a German who is a historian of the Third Reich and a reporter. Joachim Fest, in _Inside Hitler's Bunker: The Last Days of the Third Reich_ (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), has pulled together evidence and drawn a dramatic picture of those final days, and the immediate aftermath. It won't be the last volume to examine this extraordinary subject, but it should be the current reference for anyone interested in it.

Hitler had known that the war was lost; he said as much four years before the Russians started to close upon Berlin. After the Ardennes offensive failed, Hitler had returned to Berlin, where the air raids drove him for refuge into the bunker he had prepared for himself and his cronies. It was more than thirty feet below the ground, about twenty reinforced rooms with few furnishings, even in Hitler's private rooms. Each room had a naked lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. The water system was untrustworthy, ventilation was bad, and diesel exhaust often pervaded the inside. It was grim, and even Goebbels avoided the rooms as much as possible because they caused a "desolate mood." The night before his death, Hitler married Eva Braun. Retiring to his room with her, he used a pistol and cyanide to bring their ends about. In the bunker's canteen, the inmates sought relief from all the weeks of tension and danced to boisterous music over the loudspeakers. An orderly had been sent up to ask for quiet, since the Fuhrer was about to die, but no one paid any attention. The drinking and dancing only continued.

There were famous reports that Hitler had survived, reports that the tabloid press made much of during the next decades; there were plenty of conspiracy theories. The Russians found a body that looked like Hitler, and insisted that they had his corpse. It was just the sort of end he had not wanted, however, and he had taken precautions to make sure it did not occur. A ration of gasoline was obtained, and the two bodies were cremated near the exit of the bunker. What happened to the remaining dust can only be guessed at; artillery shelling and flamethrowers turned the area even more chaotic. Some of Hitler's henchmen followed him in suicide, some fled. Fest's book gives a rough description of the subsequent battle for Berlin, but this is mostly a ghastly story of awful gloom within a grotesquely unnatural cave. It is a short book, in a readable translation, accompanied by vivid and shocking pictures, unrelieved by any light anecdotes or instances of individual heroism. Fest's explanation of Hitler's motivation ("like a gang leader, he pursued a course that never went beyond the idea of killing and looting") is satisfactory, but perhaps no one can explain how with no coherent version of where he was leading Germany he could have been so staunchly supported for so long. When Fest writes that Hitler's ashes wound up tamped into bombardment-plowed ground, "among chunks of blasted concrete and heaps of garbage," it is clear that he has satisfaction that Hitler got the end he deserved.