Ocho días de mayo

April 30, 1945. In a bunker deep within the Third Reich Chancellery, Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun commit suicide. But Nazi Germany survives, the war is not over. Everything seems to stop, and yet everything moves at a frenetic pace. Volker Ullrich recounts this time out of time day by day and takes the reader into a world that is collapsing, full of drama, violence, hope and fear. The following eight days, among the most turbulent in history, saw the final battles of World War II and the collapse of the Wehrmacht, but also the last death marches, an epidemic of suicides and mass rapes, of the fanatical attempts of a last resistance, of the desperate escape from the Nazi bigwigs, of the liberation of the concentration camps... In this vibrant and moving narrative, the prestigious historian and journalist Volker Ullrich takes us to the ghostly regime of the Admiral Karl Dönitz, Hitler's successor, fleeing towards Flensburg as the Allied forces inexorably advance. Berlin capitulates, the scientist and rocket designer Wernher von Braun is arrested, Marlene Dietrich searches for her sister in Bergen-Belsen. Based on an astonishing array of new primary sources and crafted from historical miniatures that form a vast mosaic, the tale of these eight days in May is more captivating than many suspense novels.