The Last Days Of The Reich:Collapse of Nazi Germany, May 1945 (Cassell Military Paperbacks)

I found this book very interesting. The fall of the III reich is well described in details, hopless situations, retreating armies, Hitler's bunker madness, etc.Everything in this book deserves interest.It was a good introduction to the subject for me and brought a lot of knowledge.Some parts are obviously debatable as pointed out by other reviewers but overall good read.

This is the second book I have read by James Lucas (previously completed Battle Group) and I have to say his style and overall writing is not to my taste. He seems to pick reasonable subject matters and then gets sidetracked very easily.In "Last Days of the Reich" he has tried to lay out the book in a sensible style so the reader can follow what he is writing. However he still seems able to disjoint it very easily. A number of the situations are repeated from previous chapters.You end up feeling that many other authors have covered the same subjects in a far better fashion. The previous reviewer seems to think Lucas is pro German. I think he is is just trying to write from the Germans point of view. I can't comment on Das Reich because I have not read it.Don't buy this expecting a literary masterpiece. If you want to cover the final year of the war in Western Europe then get Armageddon by Max Hastings. If you want to cover the Eastern Front then Berlin by Antony Beevor would be a good start.One final point. The layout and type face of the book in paperback is terrible. It seems as though the publishers have tried to keep the book to a certain length but this is a significant detriment to the book (at least for me)as I would rather they were slightly longer but better produced.

Recently half heartedly bought a copy of this for 50p in a charity shop (all the pages were falling out). Half heartedly because i already have the excellent 'Armageddon' , the even better 'Berlin' by Beevor and 'Germany 1945'.Lucas surprised me in the second chapter reminding us that other cities held out far longer and myth has magnified the battle for Berlin...This book by Lucas however is worth reading -it has short chapters which contain lots of information not covered elsewhere, especially where it has extensive treatment of what happened in Bohemia and ,Czechoslovakia and especially Austria....the eastern front didnt just mean Poland and what happened in Prussia. and more importantly the war did not just stop in Berlin with Hitler's death. Perhaps he comes across as pro-German i would say more anti-communist ...the hapless victims of Czech and Yugoslav vengeance were women and children and civilians and you cant just say they deserved what happened to them.I do like to write a review well before i have finished it as books either grip me or they dont..and this one does.Graphic..am about to read the chapters on Italy and the western front. We are lucky because for us it is history not something we have had to experience.

I would have given this book a single star if it were not for the rare facts that it includes, interesting info not covered elsewhere. I had often wondered what happened to the Croats, Slovenians etc. The fate of Breslau is also covered well. However other reviewers are quite right about the weird bias. Maybe this book is a product of its times. Maybe the author has been leant on by his German wife. Maybe he is a rightist. A contemproary reader now has a gloss on the whole story, because of our knowledge of the break-up of Yugoslavia (It was written in 1982). The seeds of this can be seen in Lucas's narrative. The story of the repatriation of the cossacks has had recent exposure too.Examples of bias:- Stalin is always a 'Generalissimo'. No negative term is used of Hitler.- Lucas wonders why the poor cossacks might be targets of revenge. Could it have anything to do with their vicious repression of the civilan population, torture of partisans, and betrayal of their own comrades?- He wonders why the Sovets are angry after the fall of Breslau. Could it be that as he himself records, 60,000 Russian troops and 28,000 defenders died purposelessly?- In the introduction Lucas pays lipservice to the facts - concentration camps etc. Subsequently he writes as if these are irrelevances. Jews, gypsies etc are never mentioned. Only the suffering of German speakers seems to have value. He seems impervious to the irony that all their suffering is in retaliation for worse crimes.- The demand for unconditional surrender by the Allies is painted as unreasonable several times. He seems to entirely forget that this was one of history's great wars of aggression.Personally, as a student of history (and a pacifist) I am still amazed by the restraint shown by all the allies - and yes, I mean the Russians too. In a 2010 German film about the rapes in Berlin, based on the diary of a victim, that victim muses on the fact that all the Russians who have raped her had lost their own loved ones to rape and death. She accepts that if she were in the opposite position, as a victim of German troops, she would be dead. She realises that the Russians can manage to rape - out of deep anger -, but cannot bring themselves to murder women to the same scale as her own compatriots - in cold blood!

This book - like the same author's Das Reich - seems almost pro-German in tone and content.In that one he seemed more concerned to admire the German man's fighting spirit than to condemn the results of this, and this despite the fact that Das Reich was an SS battalion unit with a terrible reputation.For example, on p 128, he actually refuses to engage in the question as to why these German troops massacred almost the entire village of Oradour sur Glane - killing hundreds of unarmed men women and children - instead choosing to highlight what he calls their 'excellent day to day relations with the [French] civilians' and seeming instead to blame the media for whipping up a big fuss over nothing.In this book too his sympathy for the enemy seems quite extraordinary, and the the whole thing left me feeling quite ill.