Endgame, 1945

Critical Praise

"David Stafford... weaves an often majestic tapestry of testimony from the anguish of those who survived Belsen, those who liberated Berlin and those whose fate we hear far less of… Time and again, you sit up and take notice in ways that more conventional history lets slip… The success of Stafford's method, using ordinary men with ordinary voices … is to make such testimony still moving and urgent six decades on… You know what war was like, is like and will be like again. You see the mistakes and evasions. You look into the depths and shudder..."
-Peter Preston, The Observer

"Stafford skilfully provides a connecting framework for a narrative of almost Tolstoyan proportions [and is] to be congratulated on his even-handed treatment of a subject which, in the depths of its almost incredible inhumanity, brutality, violence and scale, beggars the imagination and which only a writer of the first calibre, strongest nerve and monumental intellectual stamina could tackle."
-Noble Frankland, (former Director of the Imperial War Museum)

"Stafford has assembled a remarkable gallery of human stories- heroic, tragic, squalid, moving- for his book…. [which is] a vivid reminder of the misery that persisted across Europe long after the shooting stopped in 1945."
-Max Hasting, Daily Mail, Critic's Choice

"a fascinating book [in which he relates] the experiences of "ordinary" people on both sides, brilliantly interleaved with the fate of the monsters who had precipitated this cataclysm….The purpose of this book is to put a human face on the bewildering scale of death and devastation. David Stafford does it most compellingly."
-Allan Mallinson, The Times

"Stafford proves himself the master of a dazzling and complex narrative, providing us with sufficient detail about the various main characters, drawn from their letters and diaries, to fix their humanity against a panoramic background of abysmal inhumanity..."
… -Christopher Silvester, Daily Express