The End

The End: Hitler's Germany 1944–45 is a 2011 book by Sir Ian Kershaw, in which the author charts the course of World War II between the period of the failed 20 July plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler in July 1944, by Claus von Stauffenberg, until late May 1945, when the last of the Nazi regime's leaders were arrested and the government dissolved. Kershaw looks for answers to the question of why Germany did not capitulate when there was no chance of victory, especially as Hitler had said "Wars are finally decided by the recognition on one side or the other that the war can't be won any more." At the time he said this Germany was waging war on two fronts and was heavily outnumbered by both the allied forces and those of the Soviet Union. On the Eastern Front alone the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe were outnumbered eleven-to-one in infantry, seven-to-one in armour, twenty-to-one in field artillery and twenty-to-one in airpower. Or, as Kershaw writes, why did they continue the fight when Germany had been "battered into submission, its economy destroyed, its cities in ruins, the country occupied by foreign powers"? An estimated 49 percent of German military losses occurred during the last 10 months of the war in Europe, and Kershaw discusses that if the assassination attempt had not failed how many lives might have been spared in both civilian and military casualties.The book has received widespread acclaim since publication with favourable reviews in The Daily Telegraph, The New York Times, the Irish Times, The Financial Times and other sources. Kershaw has said this will be his last book on the Nazi regime and that this particular period had been an "unresolved issue" for him as he had never written on the final stages of the war, and that "There is about Hitler personally, and the Nazis in general, a sort of cultism that attracts fascination".