LAST DAYS OF THE THIRD REICH - THE COLLAPSE OF NAZI GERMANY, MAY 1945 by Lucas, James

William Morrow and Company, New York, 1986. Hardcover w/dj,. First American Edition. 6 x 9 , 255 pages. Illustrated w/ black and white photographs, maps. appendices, bibliog., index----------------------------When the fighting ended in Europe in May 1945, the world focused its attention on Japan and the forthcoming invasion of the Land of the Rising Sun. There was still another war to end.In Europe, however, death still hovered over the land.Many details of this book have never before been published. Buttressed by more than 100 maps and photographs, it is the first account of the fall of the Third Reich and what happened to its soldiers as the nations that had been forcibly made a part of Hitler's satanic empire exacted their retribution. Here are the stories of quite ordinary people over whom there swept a destructive war and who have not forgotten those events although they occurred more than forty years ago. These are not merely the stories of what happened to the Germans—who had made the mistake of starting a war and then losing it—but also the first-person recollections of people of other nations.On the Eastern Front, the fighting had taken on a dreadful, bitter aspect early on: Three years of intensive, epic conflict in which each side had seemingly tried to outdo the other in atrocity and terror had not prepared the ground for peace and reconciliation. In Germany, propaganda predictions of the horrors and brutalities of the Red Army were to prove all too true. The brutality of the Nazis would be fully paralleled by that of the conqueror.