Fighter ace Col. Johannes Steinhoff commanded an elite group of pilots trained to fly the first jet aircraft employed in combat, the famous Messerschmitt Me-262, at a time when Reich Marshal Hermann Gsring, by then out of favor with Hitler for his failure to stop the Allied bombing raids, denounced his own pilots as cowards. After Gsring refused to deploy the Me-262 as a fighter, the role for which it was designed, and instead ordered its use as a bomber, Steinhoff and other senior air leaders devised a plot to depose Gsring from his command of the Luftwaffe in the futile hope of staving off final defeat in the air. The pilots' long-standing disgust with their Reich Marshal's military incompetence and technical dilettantism led to their dangerous intrigue in the fall of 1944. There was an added element of risk as their desperate gamble came in the wake of the July 20 plot against Hitler, the onrushing Allied onslaught, and the general disintegration of the German military and its war effort. Steinhoff crashed while trying to take off in a heavily laden Me-262. The explosion left him badly burned and still in the hospital when the war ended. German soldier the account that became The Final Hours. His memories are vivid, painful, and gripping. Free from the years of recrimination and reflection so common in similar works, his tale recounts the pressure of fighting for a lost cause and the intrigue fostered by an unstable command. His account reveals every facet of a remarkable fighter pilot's struggle for survival and provides an excellent case study of the plodding bureaucracy and scheming obscurantism so characteristic of the Third Reich. I first discovered Johannes Steinhoff as a graduate student, preparing a field in World War II. His name kept appearing as one of the gifted warriors who carried the Third Reich on their shoulders for six years. Never did men fight better in a worse cause than did the Germans from 1939 to 1945, and Steinhoff was a paladin. As a fighter pilot he served on every major front and scored 176 aerial victories. He was among the first to fly jets in combat, serving with the famous Squadron of Experts in the war's final days. He had been decorated with the Knight's Cross with Swords and Oak Leaves. bravery they recognized were no less real for that. There was also a certain karmic irony in someone often called the handsomest man in the Luftwaffe having his face burned off in a crash just at the end of the war, eventually emerging from years of restorative surgery with a gargoyle mask that was mostly scar tissue. It required little imagination to interpret Johannes Steinhoff as a symbol of Germany itself: disfigured by its past, permanently marked for everyone to see. I regularly suggested the trope to my classes, and considered myself a clever young professor indeed. It required no more research than reading German newspapers to discover that Johannes Steinhoff was more than a symbol of a vanished regime and a lost war. When the newly-established Federal Republic of Germany began considering recreating its armed forces as part of its reintegration into an emerging Western Alliance, Steinhoff was among the first veterans consulted. challenge openly what he considered the disastrously mistaken operational decisions of Hitler and his lieutenant, Luftwaffe commander Hermann Goring. Initially reluctant, like many of his counterparts, to consider putting on a uniform once more, Steinhoff finally decided that he might after all be able to contribute directly to creating a new Germany. It would not be a Germany of power and conquest like its Imperial and National Socialist predecessors. Nor would it be the Holy Germany, a beacon to the nations, of which resisters like Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg had dreamed. This Germany would be a state and a people among others, committed to a common European and Atlantic enterprise. Resisting the ideological and military challenges of the Soviet Union was merely a first step towards the eventual construction of a community of free peoples, linked by mutual interests and mutual respect. He saw German-American relations as the cornerstone of that enterprise. whose officers and men served a democracy in the context of the NATO Alliance. He eventually rose to be its Inspector-General, then as Chairman of the Military Commission of NATO, retiring as a four-star general. Neither he nor his pilots ever fired a shot in anger. In his later years, Steinhoff described that as the aspect of his career of which he was most proud. I learned that during our collaboration on a book titled Voices from the Third Reich. In 1985, President Ronald Reagan made international headlines by standing alongside German Chancellor Helmut Kohl to commemorate German war dead at Bitburg, in a cemetery including some graves of SS men. General Steinhoff, by then retired, attended the ceremony, and was shaken by the negative reactions it evoked in Europe and the United States. Johannes had told his own wartime story, in The Straits of Messina and this volume, The Final Hours. But he believed there was a larger story to tell: the story of the German people, especially the generation that had fought World War II in the front lines. understand the complex web of circumstances and principles that brought Adolf Hitler to power and held Germany in his thrall until nothing remained. To tell the story, Johannes decided he needed an American collaborator. By then I was teaching at Colorado College. Johannes's son-in-law was also on the faculty, in a different department, and the General and I had met casually a couple of times. When his daughter suggested What about Dennis? he was willing to consider it. We met, talked, and came to a quick agreement. For me it was the start of an adventure. We'll be working in each others' pockets for a long time, Johannes told me. I want someone who can discuss more than today's newspaper. It didn't take me long to discover that the general

In an account of unusual power, Luftwaffe ace Johannes Steinhoff recounts the final days of the German air force on Sicily in June and July 1943. Facing crushing odds-including a commander, Hermann Goering, who contemptuously treated his pilots as cowards-Steinhoff and his fellow Messerschmitt 109 pilots took to the skies day after day to meet waves of dreaded Flying Fortresses and swarms of Allied fighters, all bent on driving the Germans from the island. A captivating narrative and a piercing analysis based on the author's personal World War diary, this book is a classic of aerial combat. A concluding chapter assesses the war's lessons for air forces

A major historical document, this book contains interviews with more than 150 Germans who witnessed, participated in, or resisted the rise of Adolph Hitler. The testimony comes from well-known figures like Manfred Rommel and Helmut Kohl former soldiers and ordinary civilians and victims of the criminal policies of the Nazi regime. Haunting and extraordinary tales of horror, courage, grim determination, and moral confusion fill these pages. Voices from the Third Reich takes the material of epic history and presents it in the form of the individual human experiences of men, women, and children subjected to the pressures of total war in a fascist state.