KEY POINTS:
ENDGAME 1945
by David Stafford
Published by Little, Brown
This is the way the war ends: not with euphoria, but in chaos, confusion and continuing cruelty. They think it's all over? They're wrong. And here David Stafford, who specialises in great events seen through individual eyes, weaves an often majestic tapestry of testimony from the anguish of those who survived Belsen, those who liberated Berlin and those whose ordeal we hear far less of, because the Cap Arcona and others never got the headlines they deserved.
It's an inevitably uneven book; that is the nature of the human experience upon which it relies. One witness, the 26-year-old German daughter of a plotter who failed to kill Hitler, is whisked from her aristocratic life into Buchenwald. Her husband is gone, her two little children are lost. It will be a year of suffering before they are reunited. The story of Fey von Hassell is poignant enough for Hollywood.
Geoffrey Cox and his New Zealanders march vividly through Italy. Time and again, you sit up and take notice in ways that more conventional history lets slip. Nazis brutal, Allies gentle? It wasn't quite that simple. As they liberated the concentration camps, even hard hats such as George Patton were physically sick.
Could you trust a German to surrender? SS and paratroopers had to be dispatched 'on sight'. No Geneva Convention niceties here.
But should we wonder at this or many more horrors ? Live through a day of hapless carnage as RAF Typhoon bombers sink ships - the Thielbek and converted liner Cap Arcona - full of prisoners of war.
As these incidents, and many more like them, form a pattern, you begin to find echoes for today. Take Iraq. When the German armies in Holland surrendered, they were not immediately disarmed or incarcerated. Instead, they were left intact to keep order. Any compliant force for law and order was better than none, we reckoned.
Could you just walk out and leave populations to their fate? That's what happened in the Sudetenland, three million ethnic Germans expelled, to add to the 12 million suddenly driven from their former homelands by Poland and Stalin in the biggest ethnic cleansing 20th-century Europe endured. Tragedy lingered. The legacy of hate was more hate.
The collaborators, in France, Holland or Italy, were seized on by mobs. Peace meant retribution as well as rejoicing.
The success of Stafford's method, using ordinary men (and wives) with ordinary voices, is to make such testimony still moving and urgent. The concentration camps ought to be as unforgettable now as they were to the troops who first found them. The stench of "rotting flesh, faeces and urine" that hung over Belsen should never entirely fade. The evil that men do lives on and on.
Once you see that through human eyes, easy pieties and slogans fade away. You know what war was like, is like and will be like again. You look into the depths and shudder. Endgame 1945 isn't a footnote to history. It's the last chapter in a book from which to learn before another volume opens.
- Observer
