Stalingrad

Product Information

Additionally, the popular acceptance for the nationalistic demagoguery and propaganda used by political leaders today, though often of a milder caliber than that used by Stalin and Hitler, suggests a disregard for the lessons of history, maybe even an unwillingness to study history in the first place.

After 18 months of advance, 2000 miles deep into the Russian hinterland, the German Army experiences the elation of success, rolling in Panzer columns unopposed across the vast Russian steppe (prairie) between the rivers Don and Volga. A story of civilian bravery, obsession, carnage and the nature of war itself, Stalingrad remembers the vital role of the soviet war effort.In October 1942, a Panzer officer wrote ‘Stalingrad is no longer a town… Animals flee this hell; the hardest stones cannot bear it for long; only men endure’. The brutal Russian winter - which played a huge part in the final encirclement and devastation of the German Sixth Army - is another thing that really takes hold in this book. The author tells the story of this terrible battle through the accounts of those soldiers who endured this inferno and survived as well as using letters and diaries of those who didn't! Bravery - Russian soldier having one Molotov cocktail shot from hand and enveloping him in fire, only to carry the second and himself onto a Panzer tank.

A group of survivors from the 297th Infantry Division was confronted by a Russian officer, who pointed at the ruins around and yelled at them: "That's how Berlin is going to look.While the German atrocities in Russia are briefly recounted at the book's start, the Russian atrocities - against their own troops, no less! Ambushes out of basements, wall remnants, hidden bunkers, and factory ruins produce heavy casualties among our troops.

In the context of World War II, "Ukrainian nationalists" usually means participants and supporters of Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) or Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). The book ends with the defeat and surrender of the Germans in February 1943 and the beginning of the Soviet advance on Germany.What I found staggering, besides those lost through battle, starvation, illness and suicide, were the high number of executions for cowardice - shooting one's self in a limb as to not fight for example; particularly on the Soviet side.

He would have nothing to do with ideas concerning the retreat or surrender of the encircled 6th Army in Stalingrad. Hitler had no notion whatsoever of supplying a large army that was thousands of miles from its base in Central Europe. Michael Burleigh, Independent on Sunday “It is not often that tales of battleground strategy and tactics reach the very top of bestselling lists of non-fiction. After braving German fire, they convince a Nazi sentry to bring them into a bunker (after they are blindfolded with their own parkas).Others, however, kept glancing ahead to the blazing buildings on the western shore, their steel-helmeted heads instinctively withdrawn into the shoulders. San Diego Union-Tribune “Stalingrad is a splendid piece of work, on the human as well as the historical level” St. It deserves to be understood by every literate westerner, because what happened on the Eastern Front had a decisive impact on the post-war world. He claimed that Beevor used NKVD reports as the source and that they were "not aware of such facts being revised at the Nuremberg tribunal", also accusing Beevor of falling for a "provocation".