Prevail until the Bitter End

In Prevail until the Bitter End, Alexandra Lohse explores the gossip and innuendo, the dissonant reactions and perceptions of Germans to the violent dissolution of the Third Reich. Mobilized for total war, soldiers and citizens alike experienced an unprecedented convergence of military, economic, social, and political crises. But even in retreat, the militarized national community unleashed ferocious energies, staving off defeat for over two years and continuing a systematic murder campaign against European Jews and others. Was its faith in the Führer never shaken by the prospect of ultimate defeat?

Lohse uncovers how Germans experienced life and death, investigates how mounting emergency conditions affected their understanding of the nature and purpose of the conflagration, and shows how these factors influenced the people's relationship with the Nazi regime. She draws on Nazi morale and censorship reports, features citizens' private letters and diaries, and incorporates a large body of Allied intelligence, including several thousand transcripts of surreptitiously recorded conversations among German prisoners of war in Western Allied captivity.

Lohse's historical reconstruction helps us understand how ordinary Germans interpreted their experiences as both the victims and perpetrators of extreme violence. We are immersively drawn into their desolate landscape: walking through bombed-out streets, scrounging for food, burning furniture, listening furtively to Allied broadcasts, unsure where the truth lies. Prevail until the Bitter End is about the stories that Germans told themselves to make sense of this world in crisis.

Alexandra Lohse is an applied research scholar at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

[Lohse] interweaving of rich and varied primary source material with a solid command of secondary literature produces a troubling but beautifully written and psychologically convincing portrait of German society facing or refusing to face military defeat.

Alexandra Lohse provides a salutary analysis of how German soldiers and civilians dealt with bad news in the second half of World War II.

Adam R. Seipp, Texas A&M University, author of Strangers in the Wild Place:

Alexandra Lohse's wide-ranging and elegantly written book provides a fascinating window into the processes through which Germans came to understand the Third Reich's impending defeat, and to imagine a world after war.

Bianka Adams, Senior Historian, Office of History of the US Army Corps of Engineers, author of From Crusade to Hazard :

Through the creative piecing together of Nazi and Allied evidence, Alexandra Lohse adroitly reveals what Germans understood about the state of the war in its final years, the Nazi regime, and the crimes it committed in their name.

Peter Fritzsche, University of Illinois, author of Hitler's First Hundred Days:

An eloquent exploration of love and betrayal in the time of total war, Prevail until the Bitter End tells a sobering, frightening story about allegiance and desire at the extremes of a thoroughly fascist world.