Do we need another wrist-breaking book about Adolf Hitler, the Third Reich and World War Two? What is there left to say?
To gain attention, any new study has to have a thesis: some fresh angle that previous writers have overlooked or played down. For Frank McDonough it is the insane impossibility that Germany could ever have won the struggle it launched against the combined powers of the US, USSR and the British Empire that was the Führer’s fatal flaw.
McDonough is an academic specializing in Nazi Germany, and he writes clearly and readably, with just enough detail, on the huge canvas that he covers. This book is the second volume of his history of the Reich, beginning at the acme of its triumph in 1940 and ending with its architect’s suicide in the shrunken, troglodyte world of the Berlin bunker. Although McDonough spreads blame for the downfall and the Holocaust beyond Hitler and the SS to the slavishly subservient Wehrmacht, inevitably it is the demonic figure of the Führer with his racial manias who dominates the story.
