In this auction you get a once in a lifetime chance to get


A signed and dated first edition copy

of Sir Ian Kershaw's new book 'The End'

The signature is Ian Kershaw 25 August 2011.

The Book is brand new.
The reserve on this fabulous book is £50.

This is what the cover looks like:



The auction will run for a week.


So please make your bids before

Tuesday, 13th of September, 1800 hrs.

( Just to make sure, this is UK time. )


All proceeds to Holidays4Heroes, please help those who have given so much.

Thank you for your support !

Special thanks to Sir Ian Kershaw, who donated and signed the book and Auld-Yin, who organised it all.



By bidding or taking part in the auctions in any way, you approve tacitly the Auction Rules.


Here’s the description of the book:
The last months of the Second World War were a nightmarish time to be alive. Unimaginable levels of violence destroyed entire cities. Millions died or were dispossessed. By all kinds of criteria it was the end: the end of the Third Reich and its terrible empire, but also, increasinglyk it seemd to be the end of European civilisation itself.
In his gripping, revelatory new book Ian Kershaw describes these final months, from the failed attempt toa ssassinate Hitler in July 1944 to the German surrender in May 1945. The major question that Kershaw attempts to answer is: what made Germany keep in fighting? In almost every big war there has come a point where defeat has loomed for one side and its rulers have cut a deal with the victors, if only in an attempt to save their own skins. In Hitler’s Germany, nothing of this kind happened: in the end the regime had to be stamped out town by town with a level of brutality almoste without precedent.
As the Alllies closed in on every front extraordinary efforts were made by Hitler and his key ‘paladins’ to keep fighting way beyond the point where any rational plan for victory had vanished. A system based on terror, which had for years ravaged the countries conquiered by the Nazis, was now visited on the Germans themselves. Dissent was extirpated and the entire nation mobilised, driven on by the belief that defeat would restul in the end of Germany itself.
Both a highly original piece of research and a gripping narrative, ‘The End’ makes vivid an era which still scars Europe deeply. It raises the most profound questions aobut the nature of the Second Wold War, about the Third Reich and about how ordinary people behave in extreme circumstances.

And some reviews:
‘Magisterial .. anyone who wishes to understand the Third Reich must read Kershaw, for no one has done more to lay bare Hitler’s morbid psyche’ Niall Ferguson, Sunday Telegraph

‘I cannot imagine a better biography of this great tyrant emerging for a long while’ Jeremy Paxman, Financial Times

‘The Hitler biography for the twenty-first century’ Richrd J Evans, Sunday Telegraph.

£50 to get things going.

Thank you, Jarrod.

I'll try to complete the review before the auction ends!

Thank you, Boldnotold.

There is another review online to be found HERE.

Originally Posted by Boldnotold

I'll try to complete the review before the auction ends!

You'd better

Just to add to the provenance, the book is dated 25/8/11 as that is the day the book was launched at the Edinburgh Book Festival, so you will get a book signed by the author on the day of the book's launch. Don't get much fresher than that!

Thanks for adding this, Auld-Yin and thank you for procuring yet another fantastic book for the auctions.

A first 'booky'

I haven't finished it yet, but I can assure bidders that this is a brilliant book, and will have an excellent review in the Arrse Book Club.

100£ To raise it to a reasonable level