BEHIND THE STEEL WALL

The American edition of Sweden's best selling account of recent events inside Germany -- a sort of Swedish ""Last Train from Berlin"", written by a Swedish correspondent. It is a long book, tightly written, packed with facts, many of them illuminating as they record the passage of events as viewed behind the wall of German censorship -- the effect on the people, on the officials, on the Party, of good news (from their angle) and bad, of victories, defeats, bombings, the landing of United Nations' forces in North Africa, the fall of Mussolini -- and recurrently, the failure of Soviet Russia to collapse before the German forces. One could wish for more of the pace and sense of selectivity that we are accustomed to in our own reporters, but the book is vitally important as a considered, up-to-the-minute (September '43) interpretation, and the analyses of factors within Germany in the final chapters is especially vital to our better understanding of the elements involved in the possibility of German internal collapse. I found the last third more interesting reading than the painstakingly meticulous marshalling of the panorama of events, though many will disagree with his monarchistic tendencies.