It is not often that I seriously worry, halfway through a book, whether I can face going on to the end of it. I did with this one. My reason was not that it isn’t good. It is magisterial. But I was already feeling saturated with sickening inhumanity and senseless slaughter and it was increasing with every page.
There have been plentiful studies of the end of the war against Germany but few that see it entirely from the inside, as it crumbled, collapsed and finally imploded in probably the biggest saga of national doom ever recorded.
And a doom richly deserved, you may well be thinking. So did I. But the distinguished historian, Sir Ian Kershaw, seeks to answer a more complicated conundrum.
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