A gripping account of the final chapter of the Third Reich—told not from the capital or the bunker, but through the small German town of Flensburg—a microcosm of a collapsing regime, based on sources never examined before.

In Flensburg, the paths of agents, survivors, and old elites intersect for a brief period in 1945. Amid crumbling power and tentative new beginnings, deals are made, deception prevails, silence is observed—and the foundations for astonishing careers are laid. In a captivating narrative style for readers of Florian Illies, Svenja Falk brings this little-known transitional period to life, drawing on sources analyzed for the first time—and shows how, even in these days, the broad lines of the postwar era were already emerging.