Description

The authors have delved into archival research, diaries, and memoirs, and conducted numerous interviews to recreate through brilliantly detailed vignettes the story of Berlin and its resilient inhabitants: the soldiers and ordinary citizens pounded by Allied bombing but maintaining their gallows humor; the endless procession of refugees; the 5,000 Jews who foiled the Nazi's rabid attempt to "purify" the capital; people like Dietrich Bonhoeffer who gave their lives in heroic anti-Nazi resistance while film stars and the well-connected lived in precarious luxury; the Third Reich's leaders jockeying for power in Hitler's underground bunker even as a ragged army of children, invalids, and old men confronted Soviet tanks in the rubble above; and of course, Hitler himself, trapped beneath a city he hated, waiting for the miracle promised him in horoscope readings. Not since Is Paris Burning? has a book so vividly evoked the daily struggle for survival and dignity in the nightmarish center of total war.