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The Conquerors: Roosevelt, Truman and the Destruction of Hitler's Germany
By Michael Beschloss
Simon & Schuster, 293 pages
Letter Grade: C

As time marches ever forward, new perspectives and documents offer historians tantalizing opportunities to set the record straight about any past event or era. But digging deeper into history doesn't always reveal anything new, beyond details.

In The Conquerors, award-winning historian Michael Beschloss tackles the end of World War II and the machinations that led to the division of Germany after the war. The work is exhaustive in its research, but the reader might be left asking, "So what?"

The problem is, the history Beschloss traces isn't revelatory. There is so much already written on the various personalities that molded the postwar world, from Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman to Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin and the decisions they made.

This volume doesn't add new perspective. What we're left with is a decade worth of intensive research, absorbed and spit out in a small pieces within a somewhat sludgy narrative.

Beschloss begins the book with a bang - literally - describing an assassination attempt on Hitler with the breathless narrative of a detective novel.

But he bogs down in minutiae as he follows the various personalities that worked behind the scenes, especially in the Roosevelt administration, to set policy toward the end of the war.

Secretary of State Cordell Hull, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau and others are given voice through their day-by-day interactions, discussions, backstabbings and grandstandings via myriad records, documents, notes, journals, diaries, letters and reminiscences.

The effort to capture the moment is Herculean, but ultimately clunky, with quoted snippets dropped in helter-skelter among other snippets and forced into context with each other.

Too much of the text departs from the crisp prose of the opening, exchanged for passages such as, "Farming was the 'one thing' his father 'knew nothing' about," quoting from Morgenthau's diaries. Elsewhere, Beschloss at least feels comfortable enough to quote entire sentences. But the cut-and-paste rhythm of the book robs the voices of the men he researched of their authority and actually places them outside of their historic context.

A lot of important history is covered, of course, including the U.S.' refusal to make stopping genocide one of the country's war aims, and the radicalization of Morgenthau, who pushed FDR to acknowledge the German slaughter of Jews and then advocated a harsh postwar plan that would have crippled Germany and was wisely ignored.

The inexorable march to the end of the war and the conquerors' wrangling to make sure the country would not once again wage a worldwide conflict is important reading.

As the author explains in his final chapter: "At the dawn of the twenty-first century, it is now clear that Franklin Roosevelt had more influence than any other non-German on what Hitler's nation has now become. The democratic, decentralized Germany is largely the country that Roosevelt imagined and worked for. Of the many things that Roosevelt and his generation of Americans made possible during World War II, today's Germany is one of the most important."

It's too bad that Beschloss' book bogs down between his exciting opening and the persuasive closing.

This review ran in the Rocky Mountain News on Nov 1, 2002