Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

As one who has been reading and wondering about German history for the better part of forty years, I picked up Grey Wolf on first sighting. I was hoping for an intriguing new viewpoint on the the end of the Third Reich and the ultimate fate of its Führer. Sadly, I found the book lacking in many ways. The first problem I had was the method of citation. Endnotes are annoying enough as it is, but the way Messrs. Dunstan and Williams chose to format theirs is maddening in the extreme. There are no superscript numbers indicating citations; one is forced to look up the note by the relevant line of text. Also, many of the lines I wanted to look up were missing from the notes; on the first page of the Preface is written that the "famous `Hitler Skull' fragment held in Moscow for decades has finally been DNA tested," yet there is no citation given for that rather crucial tidbit. Even some passages given such citation are lacking; for example on page 157, in support of the contention that the "last officially photographed appearance" of Hitler was actually that of his double, Gustav Weber, we are treated to the endnote stating that this was concluded by "[f]acial analysis by Alf Linney, professor of medical physics, University College London, commissioned by the authors...,' followed by a brief biography of Professor Linney, who, we are then told, "has proven scientifically that the man depicted ... in frames from ... [the] footage ... is not Adolf Hitler." But we are not given any idea as to what such scientific proof entails, or how such a conclusion was made. The first third of the book is a brief history of the Second World War, information with which it may be safely assumed that anyone reading this book would be familiar. The stories of the espionage of the period might not be as well known, and their inclusion is forgivable, but the detailed retelling of the rocket attacks on Britain and Allied positions seemed rather superfluous. Instead of this, I would have thought the authors', as well as the readers', time better spent in a more detailed description of how these conclusions were reached; for example, the DNA testing on the "Hitler Skull," a description of the afore-mentioned scientific proof of it being Weber, not Hitler in the film, and a bit more evidence and explanation of the existence of Hitler's daughters, which seem so casually mentioned in the book, to name but three examples. Perhaps many of the questions about the authors' conclusions may have been assuaged with a more thorough explanation of their methods. (It seemed a bit negligent to me that the authors did not follow up on the idea that the Hitlers had two daughters. I would have thought them the ultimate source, the crowning achievement of the book, and the final, irrefutable proof of their "case presented.") To be perfectly honest, I viewed the authors' research methods with more than a bit of skepticism after page 102, where it is stated that in the US election of 1944, "Roosevelt had no choice but to ditch [his vice president] Wallace and nominate the senator from Arkansas, Harry S. Truman." If Messrs. Dunstan and Williams or their publisher can't be bothered to do a Google search to confirm that Mr Truman was, in fact, a senator from his home state of Missouri, or, perhaps worse, that they just took at their word the first person they asked, it doesn't speak well of the `fact-checking' in the remainder of the book. Sorry, Messrs. Dunstan and Williams, but from this teacher of history's perspective, until you present a less speculative, more empirically-backed case, I will continue to doubt the validity of your conclusions. Two stars for the effort.