"With Felix Bohr's magisterial Before the Downfall , we can finally understand how Hitler brought the world to the gates of hell. Adolf Hitler killed from a distance, from the fantasy world he had erected in his hide-outs and retreats. To comprehend how Hitler orchestrated his war of extermination and genocide, we need to look at that world. Bohr's book for the first time comprehensively recreates and analyses the darkest of all of Hitler's worlds: that of the Wolf Lair, Hitler's military HQ deep in the woods of East Prussia. Ever since Hugh Trevor-Roper's chilling account of Hitler's final days in the bunker, the world has been waiting for a corresponding account of Hitler's more than 800 days in the Wolf Lair. That book is finally here." Thomas Weber, University of Aberdeen "Drawing on diaries, memoirs and other eyewitness accounts, Before the Downfall reconstructs everyday life in the Führer's infamous East Prussian headquarters. Far from humanizing, much less romanticizing, Hitler and his entourage, Bohr shows how ideological extremism, bureaucratic chaos and mass murder were propagated within and normalized by adherence to the daily routines of the Wolf's Lair.

" Eric Kurlander, Stetson University "Between June 1941 and November 1944, the "Wolf's Lair" was not just the location from which the battles on the Eastern Front were directed but was, for weeks and months at a time, Hitler's residence and therefore the beating heart of the Nazi Empire. It was in this mosquito-infested redoubt, rather than in Berlin or Berchtesgaden, that many of the regime's most fateful decisions were taken, both military and political, including the final launch of the Holocaust. In Felix Bohr's extraordinary book Before the Downfall , he describes in fascinating and ultimately chilling detail how the Wolf's Lair was built, how it functioned, the bizarre cast of flatterers and place-seekers who flocked there alongside the essential military staff, and most of all how Adolf Hitler, who spent so much time there, dominated the place. We are granted intimate witness to his illnesses, to his private habits, to his changing moods - brutal, terrifying dictator one moment, courtly Austrian gentleman the next - and last, but not least, the way that the Wolf's Lair's unique environment itself influenced Hitler's decisions and behaviour at crucial times." Frederick Taylor, author of 1939: A People's History of the Coming of the Second World War.