Waugh on God, and Kershaw on Hitler.

 

 Alexander Waugh. God (2002) Waugh has assembled all the passages from the Talmud, the Bible, and the Qu’ran in which God speaks for himself, plus a wide range of scriptural and other comments about God. This amounts to a portrait, both incomplete and inconsistent, which is no surprise. By definition, God is beyond human understanding, so any attempt to assemble a coherent description of the Deity is bound to fail.
    Nevertheless, worth reading, if only for the salutary reminder that what one may think the sacred texts and religious authorities said about God isn’t like that at all. ****

  Ian Kershaw. The End: The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler’s Germany 1944-1945 (2011). A thorough and thoroughly depressing account of the end of the 3rd Reich. Once again, I’m astonished at the denial of reality by men (and some women) who could or would not understand that their fantasies of Aryan glory were at best mere superstition. There were of course many people who disobeyed Hitler’s order to fight to the death and capitulated rather than suffer the destruction of their towns and villages. But as the Reich went under, many Nazis went on a last murderous and nihilistic spree of revenge and annihilation. On the Eastern Front, much of the fighting continued in a desperate attempt to stave of the vengeance of Russian troops and gain time for evacuation of troops and civilians. Many SS units fought rather than accept what they expected to be a harsh and unforgiving imprisonment.
     Apart from the unnecessary suffering inflicted on soldiers and civilians by Hitler’s refusal to capitulate, three other themes impressed me. First, the fantasy that Nazi heroic resistance to Bolshevism would be recognised and celebrated by future generations. Second, the Reich leadership’s stubborn belief that resistance would buy time during which the Alliance would disintegrate as the Western powers realised that they had a common enemy in Stalin’s Russia. The Alliance did disintegrate, but not until Stalin imposed his rule on Eastern Europe some months after the end of the war. Third, the belief by Doenitz and his rump government that they had some leverage for negotiating peace terms. Overarching the whole is the thesis that Hitler’s intransigence caused the self-destruction of the Reich.
     Kershaw’s account of the end of Hitler’s Reich seems much shorter than its 400 pages (plus 164 pages of notes, bibliography, and index). He manages to present this complex multi-stranded story clearly. For me, it was a page-turner. ****