The final days of World War II are related in a study that furnishes details of Hitler's final days in the bunker and the torment on the streets of Germany's cities and towns as the Third Reich collapsed under the weight of American, British, French, and Russian forces. There is nothing in recent history that comes close to the cataclysmic events of the spring of 1945. Never before has the defeat of a nation been accompanied by such monumental loss of life, such utter destruction. Author Joachim Fest shows that the devastation was the result of Hitler's determination to take the entire country down with him; he would make sure that his enemies would find only a wasteland, where once there was a thriving civilization. Fest describes in riveting detail the final weeks of the war, from the desperate battles that raged night and day in the ruins of Berlin, fought by boys and old men, to the growing paranoia that marked Hitler's mental state--his utter disregard for the well being of both soldiers and civilians-- to his suicide and the efforts of his loyal aides to destroy his body before the advancing Russian armies reached Berlin. Inside Hitler's Bunker combines meticulous research with spellbinding storytelling and sheds light on events that, for those who survived them, were nothing less than the end of the world.