Eight Days in May
How Germany's War Ended
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Eight Days in May
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Narrated by:
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John McLain
About this listen
Brought to you by Penguin.
1st May 1945. The world did not know it yet, but the final week of the Third Reich's existence had begun. Hitler was dead, but the war had still not ended. Everything had both ground to a halt and yet remained agonizingly uncertain.
Volker Ullrich's remarkable book takes the listener into a world torn between hope and terror, violence and peace. Ullrich describes how each day unfolds, with Germany now under a new Führer, Admiral Dönitz, based improbably in the small Baltic town of Flensburg. With Hitler dead, Berlin in ruins and the war undoubtedly lost, the process by which the fighting would end remained horrifyingly unclear. Many major Nazis were still on the loose, wild rumours continued to circulate about a last stand in the Alps and the Western allies falling out with the Soviet Union.
All over Europe, millions of soldiers, prisoners, slave labourers and countless exhausted, grief-stricken and often homeless families watched and waited for the war's end. Eight Days in May is the story of people, in Erich Kästner's striking phrase, stuck in 'the gap between no longer and not yet'.
©2021 Volker Ullrich (P)2021 Penguin AudioCritic Reviews
"The last days of the Third Reich have often been told, but seldom with the verve, perception and elegance of Volker Ulrich's rich narrative...an instructive lesson in how societies cope with the devastating reality of a surrender that they grimly await." (Richard Overy, author of The Bombing War)
"A fast-paced, brilliant recounting of the turbulent last days of the Third Reich, with all the energy and chaos of a Jackson Pollock canvas." (Helmut Walser Smith, author of Germany: A Nation in Its Time)
What listeners say about Eight Days in May
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall2 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story2 out of 5 stars
- Anonymous User
- 22-08-2024
Nothing New Here
I was expecting a condensed picture of the inner workings of the both the German and Allied high command in this crucial period. But, there is no new scholarship or even point to the book. The book is a general history of the final six months of the war, with too much familiar context. Towards the end there is a clearly a need to reach the word limit as the reader is subject to Wikipedia style biographies of Marlene Dietrich and Anne Frank. Ullrich is too accomplished a historian to have adjudged this worthy of release.
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