Eight Days in May (The Book)

 

There seems to be no end in sight to our fascination with World Wr II - certainly not to my fascination with it. Hence, I spent some of this holiday weekend with Eight Days in May: the Final Collapse of the Third Reich, by Volker Ullrich, tr. Jefferson Chase. As its title suggests, this is a day-by-day account of the eight days (May 1-8, 1945) between Hitler's suicide on April 30 and V-E Day and the reenactment in Berlin on May 9 of Germany's already accomplished surrender in order to satisfy Stalin's vanity (definitely a harbinger of conflicts to come).

That alone would make an interesting book. But this eight-day journey includes retrospective and prospective accounts, contributing a more complete context than would be possible in a strict eight-day chronology. Still, between Hitler's cowardly exit and the jubilation of V-E Day, a surprising amount happened. Unlike the dramatic cessation of conflict on the Western Front at the end of World War I, the end of the Second World War was spread out over time, with complete chaos (dramatically portrayed by the author) in significant parts of the Reich while at the same time and somewhat confusingly the German occupation persisted intact until the final moment in Scandinavia and parts of the Netherlands and Czechoslovakia. Meanwhile, the rump Reich government, led from Flensburg by Hitler's "successor," Admiral Karl Dönitz, continued to pretend to operate even after it had performed its one essential function of unconditional surrender.

Ullrich characterizes this unique week as a kind of historical pause "the gap between no longer and not yet," and amazingly appropriate formulation.

 

From a distance now of more than 76 years, it is a challenge for those of us who obviously have no memory of those dramatic events to appreciate all that happened - from the fanatical last stands of the defeated, to the final deaths and lucky survivals of the many civilian victims, to the complex maneuvers of the victors. Ullrich supplies those recollections for us with copious detail.

At some point, the fascination with World War II will wane. But that will be a loss for the world. As Thomas Merton once wrote: 'What a tragedy to forget Hitler and Stalin and their total corruption of the moral sense" [May 7, 1961, Journals, volume 4, p. 116].