Eight Days in May

In a bunker deep below BerlinΓÇÖs Old Reich Chancellery,Adolf Hitler and his new brideEva Brauntook their own lives just after 3:00 p.m. on April 301945ΓÇöHitler by gunshot to the templeBraun by ingesting cyanide. But the F├╝hrerΓÇÖs suicide did not instantly end either Nazism or the Second World War in Europe. Far from it: the eight days that followed were among the most traumatic in modern historywitnessing not only the final paroxysms of bloodshed and the frantic surrender of the Wehrmachtbut the total disintegration of the once-mighty Third Reich. In Eight Days in Maythe award-winning historian and Hitler biographer Volker Ullrich draws on an astonishing variety of sourcesincluding diaries and letters of ordinary Germansto narrate a societyΓÇÖs descent into Hobbesian chaos. In the town of Demmin in the northresidents succumbed to madness and committed mass suicide. In BerlinSoviet soldiers raped German civilians on a near-unprecedented scale. In Nazi-occupied PragueCzech insurgents led an uprising in the hope that General George S. Patton would come to their aid but were brutally put down by German units in the city. Throughout the remains of Third Reichhuge numbers of people were on the movecreating a surrealistic tableau: death marches of concentration-camp inmates crossed paths with retreating Wehrmacht soldiers and groups of refugees; columns of POWs encountered those of liberated slave laborers and bombed-out people returning home. A tautpropulsive narrativeEight Days in May takes us inside the phantomlike regime of HitlerΓÇÖs chosen successorAdmiral Karl D├╢nitzrevealing how the desperate attempt to impose order utterly failedas frontline soldiers deserted and Nazi Party fanatics called on German civilians to martyr themselves in a last stand against encroaching Allied forces. In truthhoweverthe post-Hitler government represented continuity more than change: its leaders categorically refused to take responsibility for their crimes against humanityan attitude typical not just of the Nazi elite but also of large segments of the German populace. The consequences would be severe. Eight Days in May is not only an indispensable account of the Nazi endgamebut a historic work that brilliantly examines the costs of mass delusion.