World War II Database

Full Title: The Führer's Headquarters: Hitler's Command bunkers 1939-45

Although Adolf Hitler had little in the ways of military training, he had always taken more than a casual interest in the campaigns. During the Polish campaign, he closely followed the front lines in his personal train. Against France, he again moved close to the action by moving his staff to the Felsennest headquarters on the German-French border. This pattern repeated itself through the end of the war. In The Führer's Headquarters, author Neil Short attempted to provide more information on these locations where many decisions were made and many important meetings took place.

Having only about 60 pages to detail ten sites and one personal train, the author had little real estate to go into too much detail, but Short did a fine job in describing Hitler's movement from headquarters to headquarters during various campaigns and the continual building of new forward headquarters. As expected in Osprey titles of this format, a wealth of photographs, paintings, and maps were included, of which I found the map on page 5 to be most helpful, dotting the locations of the various headquarters on a map of Europe. As I was in the middle of William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich at the same time, this book also acted as a good complement. Given the short size of the book, however, I felt that the author could have dropped some of the cursory glances at history and instead use that space to go a bit more into the architecture, construction, layout, and security arrangements of some of the sites. Another complaint from me would be that some of the photographs seemed to be placed out of order, not illustrating the text on the same page.

I imagined that there would be titles on this topic that were more in depth, but I found Neil Short's The Führer's Headquarters to be useful nevertheless.