Falk, Svenja Die letzten Tage der Diktatur

Spione, Drahtzieher und das Ende der Nazi-Herrschaft. Eine packende Chronik vom Untergang des Dritten Reiches

The gripping finale of the "Third Reich"dramatic weeks suspended between dictatorship and liberation. The "Third Reich" has fallenyet history does not stand still. In Flensburg, the paths of agents, survivors, and members of the old elites intersect. Amidst crumbling power and tentative new beginnings, negotiations take place, deceptions are spun, silences are keptand the foundations for astonishing careers are laid. This is the compelling story of an interregnum, a transitional period in which the contours of the modern world are already discernible. Following the unconditional surrender, the final National Socialist Reich government convenes in Flensburg. Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz stages himself as the legitimate interim authority. The Allies tolerate this charadefor the time being. Thus, for a few brief weeks, a transitional era emerges, brimming with surprising new beginnings: Here, Albert Speer begins constructing the myth of himself as the apolitical expert. The pilot Beate Uhse lays the groundwork for what would become the world's largest erotica empire. British intelligence officer Ian Fleming gathers impressions, characters, and motifsmaterial for the figure who would later become James Bond. The young Siegfried Unseld, too, is part of this scenehe would go on to become one of the Federal Republic's most influential publishers. In the north, the paths of perpetrators, concentration camp survivors, and fellow travelers converge. It is a time poised between continuity, reckoning, and renewalunfolding within astonishing constellations. In her gripping narrative, Svenja Falk chronicles this little-known transitional perioddrawing upon sources analyzed for the very first timeand reveals how, even in those early days, the broad contours of the postwar era were already beginning to take shape.