Jonathan Petropoulos: Himmler's Last Days, Gebunden

Klappentext

The gripping story of the fall of Heinrich Himmler--the man who sought to perfect genocide---as he becomes the most hunted war criminal in history during the convulsive final days of the Third Reich

Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, Gestapo, and Waffen-SS, rose to all but supreme power as architect of the concentration camps and commander of the murderous deportations, the mass sterilizations, and the gas chambers. In Himmler's Last Days , acclaimed historians Wendy Lower and Jonathan Petropoulos deliver an acutely revealing story of the psychic and physical unraveling of the ultimate mastermind of the Nazi terror apparatus.

• Himmler leaves the Führerbunker just days before Hitler's April 1945 suicide, now aspiring to be his successor, and flees a Berlin under siege.
• The book tracks Himmler's desperate movements, never before reconstructed, in cinematic detail, to a series of outposts and hiding spots in the north of Germany.
• Even as the camps are liberated---and the depth of Nazi genocidal evil is revealed through the testimony of living skeletons---Himmler schemes delusionally and in ill faith to parlay concentration camp prisoner releases into a deal with General Eisenhower for a partial German surrender.
• The capture by the British of a disguised Himmler, his interrogation, his suicide by hidden cyanide capsule, and his consignment to an unmarked grave are vividly illuminated through eyewitness accounts and photographs.
• A definitive telling that casts light on the universal fate of genocidaires--and puts to rest far-right conspiracy theories regarding Himmler's supposed murder by the Allies.

Finally, through his own desperate acts and words, Himmler is revealed as clearly as we have ever seen him. A stunning and reverberating account.