In February 1945 the German front at Stettin made one final offensive. What make this extraordinary is the fact that the last desperate push was mounted by non-German volunteers serving in the Waffen-SS. The main body of the division was composed of Scandinavian volunteers, Belgians and Dutchmen. This text presents a history of the Dutch volunteers of the Waffen-SS from 1941 to 1945.
This book traces Russian campaigns from the counterattack at Stalingrad to the fall of Berlin and the capture of Prague. It explores in detail Stalin's wartime relations with Roosevelt and Churchill and examines the evolution of his policies toward Poland and the Balkans.
With scarcely an interlude, the German-Soviet conflict in World War II lasted for 3 years, 10 months, and 16 days. The conflict seesawed across eastern and central Europe between the Elbe and the Volga, the Alps, and the Caucasus. The total number of troops continuously engaged averaged between 8 and 9 million, and the losses were appalling. Wehrmacht losses numbered between 3 and 3.5 million. Deaths on the Soviet side reached more than 12 million, about 47 percent of the grand total of soldiers of all nations killed in World War II. The war and the occupation cost theSoviet Union some 7 million civilians and Germany about 1.5 million. The losses, civilian and military, of Finland, the Baltic States, and eastern and southeastern European countries added millions more.The great struggle completely unhinged the traditional European balance of power. The war consolidated the Soviet regime in Russia, and enabled it to impose the Communist system on its neighbours, Finland excepted, and on the Soviet occupation zone in Germany. The victory made the Soviet Union the second-ranking world power.This book follows the conflict from Stalingrad to Berlin. Topics include strategy and tactics, partisan and psychological warfare, coalition warfare, and manpower and production problems faced by both countries, but by the Germans in particular.With a new introduction by Emmy AwardTM winning historian Bob Carruthers and numerous rare illustrations this powerful book makes for a welcome addition to any Second World War library.
The Eastern Front gives an authoritative account of the epic clash between two infamous dictators, Hitler and Stalin, as they vied for supremacy during World War II. Exploring in detail the German and Soviet armies in 1941, it covers all the most infamous campaigns and offensive operations. A selection of action photos plus outstanding illustrations and art showcase the main battles, vehicles, uniforms, maps, and equipment.
Contains 72 illustrations and 42 maps of the Russian Campaign. After the disasters of the Stalingrad Campaign in the Russian winters of 1942-3, the German Wehrmacht was on the defensive under increasing Soviet pressure; this volume sets out to show how did the Russians manage to push the formerly all-conquering German soldiers back from Russian soil to the ruins of Berlin. Save for the introduction of nuclear weapons, the Soviet victory over Germany was the most fateful development of World War II. Both wrought changes and raised problems that have constantly preoccupied the world in the more than twenty years since the war ended. The purpose of this volume is to investigate one aspect of the Soviet victory-how the war was won on the battlefield. The author sought, in following the march of the Soviet and German armies from Stalingrad to Berlin, to depict the war as it was and to describe the manner in which the Soviet Union emerged as the predominant military power in Europe.
This book describes the everyday life of a Soviet citizen besieged in the city of Leningrad and his subsequent service in the Red Army during the war and post-war occupation of Czechoslovakia and Hungary.
In January 1944 the Red Army at last succeeded in putting to an end one of the most dramatic sieges in the history of warfare, that of Leningrad. The Soviet spearheads quickly expelled the Wehrmacht from the vicinity of the city, but once they reached the prewar border with Estonia, they were stopped dead in their tracks by a very determined Axis resistance. There, at river Narva, Germans, Estonians, and Waffen SS volunteers and conscripts from all over Europe stood firm for several months against numerous Soviet violent attacks. By doing so, they were able to cripple the ambitious military and political plans of Joseph Stalin, and to effectively postpone the Soviet re-conquest of the Baltic States for more than half a year. Penned by a leading Bulgarian researcher, the book provides an expert analysis of this lesser-known battle. A considerable number of German and Soviet wartime documents were accessed, and this allowed the author to tell the story from perspective of both sides. It also contains many never-before-published photographs.
Based on an unparalleled access to Russian archival sources and going far beyond the military aspects of other historical works, Glantz's book is a testament to the nearly two million Russians who lost their lives during the battle for Leningrad. 90 illustrations. 16 maps.
The siege of Leningrad constituted one of the most dramatic episodes of World War II, one that individuals and the state began to commemorate almost immediately. Official representations of 'heroic Leningrad' omitted and distorted a great deal. Nonetheless, survivors struggling to cope with painful memories often internalized, even if they did not completely accept, the state's myths, and they often found their own uses for the state's monuments. Tracing the overlap and interplay of individual memories and fifty years of Soviet mythmaking, this book contributes to understandings of both the power of Soviet identities and the delegitimizing potential of the Soviet Union's chief legitimizing myths. Because besieged Leningrad blurred the boundaries between the largely male battlefront and the predominantly female home front, it offers a unique vantage point for a study of the gendered dimensions of the war experience, urban space, individual memory, and public commemoration.
The 900-day siege of the Soviet city of Leningrad by the combined forces of the Germans and the Finns is one of the most remarkable, and terrible, events of the Second World War, yet until recently it has not received the attention it deserves it has been overshadowed by other massive confrontations on the Eastern Front, at Stalingrad and Kursk. And rarely has the compelling story of the siege been told through graphic wartime photographs like those that author Nik Cornish has collected for this book. Many of these images have not been published before, and they give an unflinching insight into the reality of the conditions of the siege as it was experienced by the soldiers on each side and by the civilians trapped in the city who were threatened by starvation, disease, shelling and assault. The entire course of the siege is covered, from the encirclement of September 1941, through the successive attempts by the Wehrmacht to break in and the dogged, sometimes desperate defense put up by the Red Army, to the withdrawal of the Germans and the lifting of the siege in January 1944. Nik Cornishs portrait of the ruthless struggle of Hitlers armies to capture the second city of the Soviet Union and the determination and suffering of the defenders will be fascinating reading for everyone who is interested in the war on the Eastern Front.
