One of the better introductory books on this topic is Ian Kershaw's The End: The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 1944-1945, which is about how the war kept grinding on despite clear signals that Germany had lost. Richard Bessel's Germany 1945: From War to Peace is primarily a synthesis of secondary sources on the last months of the war and the first months of peace, but is a compact and well-written book on this subject. In the Wake of War: The Reconstruction of German Cities after World War II is an older book, but an important one, on the long process of reconstruction in Germany. Both In the House of the Hangman by Jeffrey Olick and German Intellectuals and the Challenge of Democratic Renewal: Culture and Politics after 1945 by Sean A. Forner are excellent intellectual histories of how Germans mentally came to terms with Nazism and democracy. Finally, the anonymously-written A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City: A Diary conveys something of the civilian experience of defeat from the ground level.