In 1945 Nazi Germany achieved total defeat. In sharp contrast with what had occurred in 1918 in 1945 Germany fought, literally, to the bitter end. The Germans held out, although by early 1945 just about everyone knew that catastrophic defeat was the inevitable outcome. They did not give up even when Russian soldiers arrived in the garden of the Reich Chancellery in Berlin. Not even the Japanese resisted like that.

How can we explain this remarkable, horrible end to the Third Reich? This is the question that Ian Kershaw seeks to answer here. While he does not overlook the continuing murderous assault of the Nazis on their ‘racial enemies’, Kershaw does not frame his book within the currently fashionable ‘racial paradigm’. Instead he focuses on ‘the mentalities of rulers and ruled’, as Germany was driven towards catastrophe.

The starting point for the narrative – and Kershaw has chosen to organise this book as a narrative – is the failed bomb plot of July 1944. That failure eliminated the possibility that the German armed forces could stage a successful coup and stop the subsequent headlong procession towards total defeat – a ten-month march that led to half of all the deaths of German soldiers during the Second World War.

By the second half of 1944 ‘there already was no central government, in any conventional sense of the term’. This spelled the effective destruction of any alternative to fighting to the bitter end for a country in the hands of ‘diehards without a future’. At the same time, as it spiralled towards complete collapse, the Nazi regime sought increasingly to control German society. A militarised, controlled, regulated and terrorised population was effectively powerless to do much more than keep heads down, hope that the war would end soon and pray that the British and Americans would arrive before the Russians.

All that was left to the Nazi leadership was a determination to win time, in the fanciful hope (at least until January 1945) that catastrophic defeat somehow might be avoided. Continued fighting was justified not only by the unrealistic hopes that the Allied coalition would disintegrate or that ‘wonder weapons’ might save the Nazi day, but also by the memory of the First World War: a war which became a stalemate until the Germans finally cracked. This time, so the tune went, it would not be the Germans who would crack.

Kershaw says that his book is not a military history. Nevertheless he offers an admirably clear, coherent discussion of the military situation and insightful portraits of the leading figures in the German armed forces, in what was, in its last months, ‘an entirely militarised society’. In doing so he observes that among the generals in particular ‘Nazi values intermingled, often subliminally, with old-fashioned patriotism’; they may not have wanted to fight for Nazism but they remained willing to fight for their country. The importance of nationalism in binding Germans to the suicidal Nazi regime is hard to overestimate.

So, too, are the consequences of isolation and lack of information. While with hindsight we may have a fairly clear picture of the hopeless position of the Nazi regime during its last months in a country where communications were breaking down that was not necessarily the case for individuals at the time. Isolation also drove Nazi terror during the final months, as ‘all semblance of centralised control over judicial action was visibly disintegrating, and authorised lawlessness and criminality … were becoming rampant’.

The End is sober, judicious, clearly written and superbly well researched – a definitive history of the last months of the Third Reich. Kershaw avoids easy answers and is dismissive of the idea that Hitler’s popularity or the supposed integrative force of the Nazi ‘people’s community’ provides much of an explanation for Germany’s fight to the bitter end. Instead, he carefully describes how the fragmented structures of Nazi rule beneath the charismatic Führer, a leader determined to lead his country into the abyss, proved decisive.

Nazi Germany’s total defeat was due finally to the elimination of any other way out: ‘Whether in the army or among the civilian population, there was simply no alternative but to struggle on under the terroristic grip of the regime.’ The end of Nazi Germany was the most brutal and bloody realisation imaginable of the mantra that ‘there is no alternative’.

Richard Bessel is the author of Germany 1945: From War to Peace (Simon & Schuster, 2009)