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Berlin was the city at the very center of World War Two. It was the launching pad for Hitler’s empire, the embodiment of his vision of a "world metropolis." Berlin was also the place where Hitler's Reich would ultimately fall. Berlin suffered more air raids than any other German city and endured the full force of a Soviet siege.
In Berlin at War, historian Roger Moorhouse uses diaries, memoirs, and interviews to provide a searing first-hand account of life and death in the Nazi capital - the privations, the hopes and fears, and the nonconformist tradition that saw some Berliners provide underground succour to the city's remaining Jews. Combining comprehensive research with gripping narrative, Berlin at War is the incredible story of the city - and people - that saw the whole of World War Two.
"A well-researched, fluently-written and utterly absorbing account of what life (and, so very often) death was like for ordinary Germans in the capital of Hitler's Reich during the Second World War. The Berliners’ capacity for suffering, for sacrifice, for self-delusion, but also astonishingly for love—and even on occasion humour—is superbly evoked by Moorhouse's cornucopia of new information." - Andrew Roberts, author of Masters and Commanders: How Four Titans Won the War in the West, 1941-1945
"Starred Review. A superb addition to the social history of Nazi Germany…. An august contribution to the city-during-a-war genre, worthy to sit alongside such classics as Margaret Leech’s Reveille in Washington (1941) and Ernest Furguson’s Ashes of Glory (1996)." - Kirkus
"Berlin at War is a well-researched and beautifully composed account, vividly recreating those years of Nazi arrogance, oppression, and corruption, which ended in such terrible destruction and civilian suffering." - Antony Beevor, author of Stalingrad and The Fall of Berlin 1945
"British historian Moorhouse puts a human face on the capital city of a Reich at war." - Publishers Weekly
"Roger Moorhouse has marshalled an impressive range of primary sources including newspaper reports, official documents, memoirs, diaries and interviews with the dwindling band of survivors to create a gripping panorama of Berlin at war....Moorhouse’s meticulous and painstaking research is matched by his narrative verve, wide-ranging sympathy and eye for telling detail." - Independent (UK)
"Evocative social history....[Moorhouse] punctures a variety of myths. The Berlin he depicts is not the portrait of fanatical Nazis and hunted Jews that we are used to, although both groups are represented. Instead it is a city defined by apathy, filled with people who are content to pretend they cannot smell the unpleasant background odour until it becomes too overpowering to ignore." - Daily Telegraph (UK)
"Roger Moorhouse’s measured, sympathetic book offers a fascinating corrective....It doesn’t try to absolve the Germans altogether, but what he does do is help us understand them. A good many loathed Hitler and all he stood for; some risked torture and death to save Jews; the majority toed the line, not so much because they were ardent Nazis as because they were Germans who instinctively cleaved to the rule of law and just didn’t like to rock the boat." - Mail on Sunday (UK)
"Roger Moorhouse has deep knowledge of wartime Germany…[and] a nice eye for social detail…. Anyone who reads Moorhouse to the bitter end will agree that Berlin suffered titanic punishment for the titanic crimes of Germany." - Max Hastings, Sunday Times (UK)
"Intelligent and absorbing....This is very much a people’s history where the backbone of the narrative has not been supplied by the wider military progress of the war but by the response of many ordinary Berliners. Moorhouse has dug deeply and diligently and, in so doing, he has provided a truly innovative history." - Scottish Herald
This information about Berlin at War was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Roger Moorhouse is a regular contributor to BBC History Magazine. He is the author of Killing Hitler: The Plots, the Assassins, and the Dictator Who Cheated Death, and coauthor with Norman Davies of Microcosm: Portrait of a Central European City. He lives in Buckinghamshire, England.
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