The Second World War claimed millions of victims; four million of these were Soviet POWs who died in German captivity. Their suffering was terrible, and Göring is said to have commented how in the camps for Russian prisoners of war, ‘after having eaten everything possible, including the soles of their boots, they have begun to eat each other’.1 One of these four million was Stalin’s son, Yakov Dzhugashvili. Fighting as a thirty-three–year-old artillery lieutenant in the Red Army, Yakov was taken prisoner near Smolensk in 1941. The Germans later dropped leaflets over Moscow boasting of how they had captured the son of the Soviet leader. In 1943, the Germans offered to exchange him for Field Marshal von Paulus, captured at Stalingrad earlier in the year, but Stalin refused the deal. He and his son had never been close. Stalin had bullied the boy so badly that, in the late 1920s, Yakov had attempted suicide but had instead wounded himself in the head.
The circumstances surrounding Yakov’s death in German custody remained clouded at the end of the war but it now seems that he died in April 1943, in Sachsenhausen concentration camp. This was shortly after his father had refused the prisoner exchange. Reports suggest that he deliberately approached the forbidden zone by the camp fence and was shot by one of the guards. In September 2003, the US State Department handed over documents detailing the circumstances of his death, which had been discovered in Berlin in 1945, to Galina Dzhugashvili, Yakov’s daughter. Many more millions died as the Second World War slowly turned against Hitler and eventually ended in the total destruction of the Third Reich. It was a destruction rooted in that war against the USSR.
On 21 June, 1941, the day before launching the attack on the USSR, Hitler wrote a revealing letter to Mussolini, the Italian dictator.
‘Since I struggled through to this decision, I again feel spiritually free. The partnership with the Soviet Union, in spite of the complete sincerity of the efforts to bring about a final conciliation, was nevertheless often very irksome to me, for in some way or other it seemed to me to be a break with my whole origin, my concepts and my former obligations. I am happy now to be relieved of these mental agonies.’2
For the Führer, the strain of working with his ideological enemy had been difficult. But with the attack on the USSR, he had returned to his ideological roots. Even at this point he was incapable of personal honesty. Despite being the one who had launched the attack, he still clearly believed that he could describe himself as having shown ‘complete sincerity’ in trying to build a lasting relationship with the Soviets. It is a revealing insight into the breathtaking way that Hitler reinvented any ‘reality’ in order to satisfy his own outlook.
What was beyond dispute was the success that attended the opening weeks of the campaign on the Eastern Front. The three million soldiers of Germany and its allies made astonishing progress. Stalin had ignored intelligence from both his own security agencies and the Allies because he believed the Germans would not start a war in the East while Britain remained unconquered in the West. As a result, the Soviets were taken by surprise; 50 per cent of the Soviet air force was destroyed on the ground and within three weeks the Germans had advanced 300 miles (500 kilometres) on the northern front, 370 miles (600 kilometres) in the centre and 210 miles (350 kilometres) on the southern front. One senior German officer noted in his diary that it was ‘probably no overstatement to say that the Russian campaign has been won in the space of two weeks’.3
However, while the Germans deployed a massive 153 divisions, the Soviets had 150 divisions of their own facing this attack. And the German Luftwaffe could only deploy 68 per cent of its strength due to commitments elsewhere. Furthermore, although the forces of the Third Reich were massive, the Red Army had some 2.8 million soldiers in the western districts of the USSR and another million in the southern republics of the USSR and in the Far East. Additionally, those in the Far East were battle tested after having beaten the Japanese in fierce border clashes, including the largest tank battle in history to date, at Khalkhin-Gol, on the Mongolian border, in August 1939. These troops could be deployed westward if the threat from Japan receded, as it did. The statistics were more disturbing yet – from a German perspective. The total population of Germany was 80.6 million. The population under Soviet rule was in the region of 196.7 million. Even allowing for the fact that this included 20.2 million people in territories annexed since 1939, the disparity between the two sides was striking. The USSR would be able to replace dead soldiers faster than the Germans could in a drawn-out war. Hitler’s gamble on a short, decisive victory involved playing with very poor odds. And, whilst Russian losses were huge in 1941, so were those of the Germans who, by late September of that year, had sustained 534,000 casualties and were beginning to appreciate something of the enormity of the task they had taken on.
Hitler’s decision to concentrate on the push for Leningrad in the north and into the Ukraine in the south, meant Moscow was not occupied before winter set in. The German troops were not equipped for a Russian winter. It was in this condition that their advance ground to a halt before Moscow. Then, on 5 December, the Soviets launched a massive counterattack.
The Battle for Moscow involved some seven million men and women fighting across a battlefield the size of France. By its end, the victorious Red Army had lost over 900,000 men. The enormity of this casualty figure for one battle is revealed in the fact that it is greater than the combined casualties of the British and Americans for the whole of the Second World War and far higher than the British losses in the entire First World War. It gives an insight into the colossal struggle on the Eastern Front. By the end of the Battle of Moscow, the Third Reich had a bitter taste of exactly what its racist geopolitics had committed it to. In the snows of the winter of 1941–2 lay the beginnings of the catastrophic defeat of the ‘Thousand-Year Reich’. To those advocating retreat, Hitler asked: ‘Do you want to go back 50 km; do you think it is less cold there?’4
Clearly, a major part of the blame for the disaster lay with Hitler.5 By November, confident of victory, the attention of the Führer had shifted towards the oil fields of the Caucasus and he was content to leave Moscow to be strangled by an encirclement. And, while it was Hitler’s determination that had prevented the crisis before Moscow turning into retreat and rout, it was his overconfidence that had launched Germany into that crisis in the first place. But the blame lay wider than this. Errors by senior generals played their part too.6
On 11 December 1941, Hitler declared war on the USA. When Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor on 7 December, Hitler had delightedly commented: ‘We can’t lose the war …’ And, on 9 December, Goebbels had noted in his diary the vain hope that ‘The United States will scarcely now be in a position to transport worthwhile material to England, let alone the Soviet Union.’7 Even given the increasing amount of aid the US was giving to Britain (along with attacking U-boats encountered in the North Atlantic) it was an astonishing move by Hitler. Now Germany was at war with the three other superpowers at the same time. It reveals a great deal about Hitler’s outlook on life as it was a classic example of his policy of ‘flucht nach vorn’ (in essence meaning, ‘when in a tight spot, attack’). As always, the political gambler’s instinct was to go for broke. In the past it had wrong-footed opponents and amazed allies; now it was escalating crisis into disaster.
The depth of Hitler’s denial of his own responsibilities and his self-delusion can be gauged from a speech he made, on 11 December, to the Reichstag (in one of its rare meetings). Roosevelt, he claimed, ‘bears the main guilt for this war’ and, ‘From November 1938 onwards, he began systematically to sabotage any chances of a policy leading to European peace.’ So the Second World War was all Roosevelt’s fault. Clearly, the German invasion of Poland, the attacks on the western nations and, finally, on the USSR were just the defensive measures of the peace-loving Third Reich, as it faced the heartless threat of the USA and its allies amongst ‘members of the same nation [the Jews] whom we fought in Germany as a parasitic human phenomenon’. Roosevelt and the Jews – they were the ones who had caused it all. It would be almost laughable, were it not for the layers of slaughtered civilians in the mass graves at Babi Yar and countless other sites of SS mass shootings, the bombed cities of Europe, the devastated USSR and the extermination camps being developed in occupied Poland. And, in case anyone had forgotten Britain’s part in apparently causing the war, von Ribbentrop in his address to the American Chargé d’Affaires reminded him of the ‘outbreak of the European war, provoked by the British declaration of war against Germany’.8 Clearly, the small matter of the German invasion of Poland had quite slipped the mind of the Nazi Foreign Minister.
With the USA now in the war, the German need to bring the war on the Eastern Front to a satisfactory conclusion was more pressing than ever. In 1942, the aim became to capture the industrial region of the Donets Basin, or Donbas, in eastern Ukraine, and then secure the oil-production areas of the Caucasus. At the same time it was hoped that the siege of Leningrad would be successfully concluded and the Baltic fall completely under German and Finnish control. Despite a failure to destroy Soviet forces along the river Don, Hitler ordered the start of the next phase of planned operations. Furthermore, his overconfidence led him to order the simultaneous advance on Stalingrad and into the Caucasus. As a result, neither attack had sufficient strength to accomplish its objectives. As Soviet resistance stiffened at Stalingrad, the German 6th Army was ordered to take the city.9
From August 1942 until February 1943, the battle raged street by street. The sacrifice of lives on both sides was enormous and the courage of the Soviet defenders immense. When the Red Army signaller Titayev was sent to re-establish telephone contact between two key positions, his body was later found with the broken wire clenched between his teeth – he had used his own skull as a semiconductor.10
As the battle sucked in more German troops, the defence of the flanks was left in the hands of inadequately trained and equipped Romanians. In November, the Soviets struck; a pincer attack shattered the Romanians and trapped the 6th Army in the city. Despite Göring’s assurances, the Luftwaffe was incapable of supplying them. A catastrophe was building. On Christmas Day 1942, German radio carried greetings from ‘the army on the Volga’ to civilians back home. But the transmission was mocked up in a Berlin radio studio, as the troops at Stalingrad were in no position to send Christmas greetings. The fighting in the city was intense and, in the final weeks of the Stalingrad disaster, the German army in the city shot more deserters per day than the British shot in the entire First World War. The 6th Army’s commander, General von Paulus, was made a Field Marshal, on the basis that no German Field Marshal had ever surrendered. Von Paulus surrendered the day after his promotion. He is reported to have remarked: ‘I have no intention of shooting myself for this Bohemian corporal.’ Twenty-four German generals went with him into the prison camps.
In Soviet captivity, von Paulus eventually became a critic of the Nazi regime, made radio appeals to Germany to surrender and, after the war, was eventually released in 1953. This was two years before the German soldiers captured with him at Stalingrad. He settled in Dresden, in communist East Germany, and died in 1957. His body was taken to Baden and buried with his wife, who had died in 1947. Of the 90,000 Germans soldiers captured with him, only about 7,000 survived, to be repatriated by the Soviets in 1955. Another 150,000 German soldiers had been casualties in the city before its surrender; Germany could not survive losses of this magnitude. The Soviets sustained about 1.1 million casualties in the Stalingrad campaign, of which about 480,000 were killed.11
The disaster of winter–spring 1942–3 in the USSR was mirrored on other fronts. In North Africa, British and Commonwealth troops inflicted a major defeat on the Germans and Italians at El Alamein in October 1942. Soon the German Afrika Korps were in full retreat, a crisis made worse by an Anglo-American landing in Algeria and Morocco in November (Operation Torch). Vichy French forces in Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco capitulated shortly afterwards. In response, Hitler ordered more German troops to North Africa and the occupation of Vichy France. In May 1943, the last German and Italian troops in North Africa surrendered. A total of 238,000 prisoners were taken by the Allies.
In the Battle of the Atlantic, Germany also faced major problems. It was a clear example of the ‘over-stretch’ that Hitler had created. In 1939, Admiral Dönitz, chief of U-boat operations, had indicated that 300 U-boats would be necessary to defeat Britain. By 1941, only 22 were operational. Despite a surge in U-boat successes in the first half of 1942 (due to the slowness of the Americans to learn the lessons of British convoy tactics), by 1943, the tide had turned. Hitler eventually ordered the construction of new U-boats at a time when the Battle of the Atlantic was actually lost. The last significant blow against an Allied convoy occurred in March 1943. As U-boat losses mounted, they were ordered away from the graveyard of the North Atlantic.12
As the wartime situation worsened for the Third Reich, the weaknesses in Germany’s relationships with its allies became more apparent. The Japanese ignored requests from Germany during 1942 and 1943 for an offensive against the USSR. The Japanese had enough on their hands facing the growing Allied threat to their newly won Asian empire. They would not face the USSR on the battlefield until August 1945 when the USSR declared war on them.
Regarding Italy, matters were even worse. The loss of North Africa, the realization of the scale of the German defeat at Stalingrad and the ill-concealed contempt of the Germans for their Italian allies undermined their alliance with the Third Reich. When the Allies invaded Sicily in July 1943, the Italian disillusionment with the war boiled over into crisis. A meeting of the Italian Grand Fascist Council voted to transfer command of the Italian armed forces from Mussolini to the King of Italy. The next day, Mussolini was arrested and, by September, the Italians had negotiated a separate armistice with the Allies. The Germans reacted swiftly. They occupied the northern half of Italy and established a strong defensive line south of Rome. Italian soldiers across Europe were disarmed and 615,000 ended up as slave labourers in Germany. It was this tragic German retaliation against the Italians on the Greek islands that features in the novel and film Captain Corelli’s Mandolin.13 For the Allies, Italy – under German occupation – was no longer the ‘soft underbelly of Europe’, as Winston Churchill described it in 1942, but was instead ‘the tough old gut’ (as the British and American soldiers termed it, borrowing a phrase from the US general Mark Clark). However, the Italian campaign drained German military resources that might otherwise have propped up the Eastern Front for longer.
If 1943 saw the Third Reich shoring up its position in Italy, it also saw mounting catastrophes on the Eastern Front. ‘Operation Citadel’ was a German plan to destroy the offensive capacity of the Red Army and regain the initiative. It would be centred on Kursk and would entail a colossal clash of armoured forces. However, postponements of the attack date cost the Germans the element of surprise and the eventual battle failed to bring about a German breakthrough. The Red Army had developed to the extent that ‘a staged German offensive was defeated in less than two weeks!’14 It was followed by a series of massive Soviet advances – albeit bitterly contested by the German army, which was tenacious in defence. By November 1943, the Soviets had recaptured Kiev; in January 1944, the German siege of Leningrad was ended; by June 1944, the Red Army had recaptured the Crimea, liberated almost the whole of the Ukraine and had crossed the Romanian border. Then, between June and August, the Soviet offensive – ‘Operation Bagration’ – destroyed the German Army Group Centre; this victory cleared German forces from Belorussia and eastern Poland, and killed 381,000 Germans, wounded a further 384,000 and captured 158,000. The way was now open for further Soviet advances into East Prussia and the Baltic states. Over the winter of 1943–4, the Third Reich had concentrated over 60 per cent of its military manpower and over 50 per cent of its armoured forces on the Eastern Front, and this had been insufficient to halt the Soviet advances. The casualty figures of Germany and its allies reached almost one million over that winter. The Eastern Front was grinding the Third Reich into the ground.15 While the British and Commonwealth forces were engaging 12 German and Italian divisions at El Alamein, the Russians were fighting 186 divisions on the Eastern Front. The scale of the fighting – and German losses – there meant that, from this point onwards, Hitler could only react to the actions of others; the supreme gambler had lost the ability to decide the course of events. He had gambled and failed.
Then, on 6 June 1944, the much awaited Allied liberation of Western Europe began.16 With D-Day, Hitler was now facing a ground war in the east, west and south. This was accompanied by increasing ferocity in the aerial bombardment of German cities. Germany failed to repulse the D-Day invasion for a number of reasons. First, there was a strategic error in assuming that the main Allied invasion would target the Pas de Calais. For a month after the landings, the Germans held considerable forces there in anticipation of a second invasion. Second, a compromise between senior German officers meant that tank formations were held back from the coast, despite Field Marshal Rommel’s strong belief that proximity to possible landing beaches in Normandy was crucial if a beachhead was to be denied any invading Allied forces. Third, on 6 June, hours were wasted waiting for Hitler to wake up (he always slept late) before German armoured units could be ordered forward to confront the Allies on the beaches.
Additionally, the German troops on the vaunted Atlantic Wall were not the cream of the German army. In fact, the second-rate German units stationed in Normandy also included units of Poles, Osttruppen (German military units comprised of Russian volunteers), Volksdeutsche (ethnic Germans living outside the Reich) and Russian Hilfswillige, or Hiwi, paramilitary units (Soviet deserters, prisoners and volunteers). Some of these volunteers became very loyal indeed; ‘Panzer Meyer’ commander of the 12th SS Panzer Division had a devoted Cossack orderly.17 But they were no substitute for the battle-hardened troops needed to repulse the Allied invasion.
A major factor in German defeat was the supremacy in the air enjoyed by the Allies. This allowed them to cover their own advances and disrupt German troop movements. Wry German military humour during the battle for Normandy in June 1944 commented on the absence – or ineffectiveness – of the Luftwaffe (and also the inaccuracy of US airstrikes): ‘If British planes appear, we duck. If American planes come over, everyone ducks. And if the Luftwaffe appears, nobody ducks.’18 In fact, it was short-falling American bombs that were responsible for killing Lieutenant-General Lesley McNair, one of the highest-ranking US officers to die in the war (two other US Lieutenant-Generals were also killed in the conflict).
As always, the German army was highly effective when fighting from defensive positions. The battle for Normandy soon turned into a bitterly contested struggle for every high-banked hedgerow, sunken lane and copse of the Norman bocage (mixed woodland and pasture). For a while, casualty rates were starting to reach First World War proportions. The fanaticism of SS resistance meant that few SS soldiers appeared in the Allied POW cages as, in a little documented aspect of the war, Allied servicemen frequently gave no quarter to the SS. But in July, the Allies broke out towards Avranches in ‘Operation Cobra’ and, even though the trap sprung around the Germans at Falaise was not closed as fast as necessary (allowing significant numbers to escape), German losses in both casualties and equipment were still enormous. Eisenhower would later describe how it was ‘possible to walk for hundreds of yards, stepping on nothing but dead and decaying flesh’.19 However, these German losses were still some ten times smaller than those being inflicted by the Russians at the same time in Operation Bagration.
Despite the losses on the Eastern Front, Hitler was certain that the key to victory was in the West. This was a combination of his refusal to admit to the scale of the defeats of the winter of 1943–4, a realization that loss of the Ruhr industrial heartland to the Allies would be a disaster and a delusion that a victory in the West was still possible and this would, in turn, make victory possible on the Eastern Front. As a result, German forces were still tenaciously opposing the advances of the Western Allies in May 1945, as the Red Army was rampaging through eastern Germany.
Attacks by German V1 flying bombs and then V2 rockets on London in 1944 came too late in the war to affect its result. And the Nazi racial obsession that theoretical physics was ‘Jewish’ (alongside the Allied destruction of the ‘heavy water’ production plant in Norway in 1943) ensured that Germany was far behind the Western Allies in the research leading to atomic weapons. As a result, no German wonder-weapon could change the course of events, whatever Hitler promised to the contrary.
Paris was liberated on 25 August 1944; US forces had landed in the south of France ten days earlier. But the war was not to be over by Christmas. The airborne landings at Arnhem in September failed in the face of strong German resistance and the Rhine remained a barrier to the Allies until March 1945. Then, in the winter snow of 1944–5, the last German offensive in the West pushed a bulge in the Allied lines (hence its name – the ‘Battle of the Bulge’) but could not be sustained. Although surprised at first, US army resistance soon slowed the German advance. At Bastogne, in December, the US commander of the 101st Airborne troops defending the town, General Anthony Clement McAuliffe, met the German surrender ultimatum with the one-word reply, ‘Nuts!’ The squandering of German reserves of men, tanks and fuel in this doomed offensive was down to Hitler’s decision. As the historian Max Hastings has commented: ‘Only Hitler’s personal folly maintained the Ardennes battle.’20
Increasingly erratic and flawed in his military decisions since Stalingrad, he unrealistically hoped that a surprise German victory in the West would cause the alliance of the USA and Britain to disintegrate and bring the Western Allies to the negotiating table. And, as his Third Reich imploded, the Führer reverted more and more to type: wild gambles, refusals to give ground, preposterous versions of reality and a refusal to hear any criticisms of his actions. Field Marshal Paul von Kleist judged Hitler’s mentality, by this stage in the war, as being ‘more of a problem for a psychiatrist than for a general’.21 The very personality features and strategies that had once propelled him towards power were now accelerating Germany into the abyss of cataclysmic defeat. There was a savage irony in this.
The failure of the German Ardennes offensive meant that when, in January 1945, the Soviets launched a new offensive there were no more German reserves to deploy against them. The same was true when the Western Allies resumed their advance in February 1945. In the East, disasters mounted though, even at this late stage, German resistance was tenacious. In February, the German navy succeeded in evacuating four military divisions and 1.5 million civilians from Baltic ports before they fell to the Red Army. It was a feat assisted by the striking inactivity of surface ships of the Soviet’s Baltic Fleet.22 Even so, the evacuation witnessed the worst maritime disaster in history when a Soviet submarine sank the liner Wilhelm Gustloff, with the loss of 9,000 civilians. It was German civilians who now suffered the full fury of the Red Army. Black humour in Berlin that winter remarked: ‘Enjoy the war while you can, the peace will be terrible.’23 But the reality was no laughing matter. As Soviet troops crossed the borders of the Reich they murdered and raped in appalling revenge for the Nazi atrocities in the USSR. The German home front disintegrated in unimaginable horrors. (See Chapter 19.)
Finally, in the ruins of Berlin, old men and teenagers fought in the poorly armed ranks of the Volkssturm (Home Guard) against Soviet tanks. On 29 April, Hitler married his long-term mistress Eva Braun. In the chaotic last hours of the Third Reich, the only official who could be found to conduct the wedding was Walter Wagner, deputy surveyor of local rubbish collections in a district of Berlin. With the Red Army just a few streets from the Führer Bunker, Hitler dictated his last will and testament. In it he nominated Admiral Karl Dönitz as the new President of Germany and Goebbels as the new Reich Chancellor. At about 3.30 p.m. on Monday 30 April 1945, Hitler (and Eva Hitler) committed suicide in his underground bunker below the Reich Chancellery. Above him, Berlin was in ruins. Hitler’s vision of life had finally ended in a destructive defeat reminiscent of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung (the mythical war of the Norse gods that, in ancient Germanic legend, was thought to bring about the end of the world). Shortly afterwards – on 1 May – Goebbels and his wife Magda also killed themselves; they had earlier poisoned their six children. This left Admiral Dönitz as sole leader of what was left of Germany.
On 2 May, German army units in Berlin surrendered.24 Over the ruined Reichstag building flew the red and gold hammer and sickle flag of the USSR. It had been improvised from a red tablecloth by a Red Army cameraman, the Ukrainian Jew Yevgenny Khaldei. The famous photograph of its raising on the building had later to be airbrushed to remove the – all too obviously looted – multiple wristwatches visible on the wrist of one of the young Red Army soldiers. The destruction and humiliation of the Third Reich could hardly have been more strikingly staged.25 At 2.41 a.m. on Monday 7 May, the Chief of Staff of the German Armed Forces High Command, General Alfred Jodl, on behalf of the new German government of Admiral Dönitz, surrendered unconditionally to the Western Allies at Rheims, France. Since no representative of the USSR was at this event, the surrender was repeated two days later in Berlin (backdated to 8 May). The last fighting of the war is usually considered to have ended at about 4 p.m. on Tuesday 15 May when a mixed force of Croatian, Slovenian and Montenegrin allies of the Germans finally surrendered to Yugoslav partisans at Poljana, in Yugoslavia (now in modern Slovenia).
Richard Overy has provided a persuasive analysis of why the Allies won. Amongst his answers a number stand out. Germany was not sufficiently equipped for war in 1939,26 a situation made worse when it invaded the USSR. Most of its army was unmechanized and heavily dependent on horses; in 1942 alone some 400,000 were sent to the Eastern Front.27 Furthermore, over 90 per cent of the world’s oil resources were controlled by the Allies.28 Germany was also over-focused on developing new technologies when those it already had required updating.29 The Western Allies destroyed the Luftwaffe through bombing aircraft factories and the oil industry; alongside deployment of long-range fighters, this meant that, between autumn 1943 and spring 1944, the Luftwaffe was starved of replacement planes and fuel and was shot out of the sky.30 Crucially, Germany could not compete with the massive Allied commitment, organization and mobilization of resources, both human and technical.
As a result, by May 1945, the Third Reich was utterly ruined. It was to have lasted one thousand years; in the event it had lasted less than thirteen. In that time it had caused the deaths of about 40 million people, had committed genocide against the Jews and had enslaved millions. The Nazi New Order had caused misery beyond imagining but was finally over.
Finally ended was a world in which a German doctor at Auschwitz (in civilian life, Professor of Medicine at the University of Münster) could write the following in his diary: ‘6–7 September, 1942. Sunday, an excellent lunch: tomato soup, half a chicken with potatoes and red cabbage, petits fours, a marvellous vanilla ice cream. Left at eight in the evening for a special action [the mass killing of Jewish prisoners] …’31
1. Manvell, Roger, Fraenkel, Heinrich, Goering, Simon & Schuster, 1962, p. 262.
2. Noakes, J. and Pridham, G., Nazism 1919–1945, vol. III, Foreign Policy, War and Racial Extermination, University of Exeter Press, 1988, p. 817.
3. General Halder, recorded in ibid., p. 818.
4. Ibid., p. 829.
5. See Jones, Michael, The Retreat: Hitler’s First Defeat, John Murray, 2009.
6. For an exploration of the conflict in the wider context of the war, see Mawdsley, Evan, World War II, Cambridge University Press, 2009, chapter 6, ‘The Red Army versus the Wehrmacht, 1941–1944’, pp. 164–87; also, Braithwaite, Rodric, Moscow 1941, Profile Books, 2006, for an exploration of the impact of the struggle on the city of Moscow and its population; and also, Nagorski, Andrew, The Greatest Battle: Stalin, Hitler, and the Desperate Struggle for Moscow That Changed the Course of World War II, Simon & Schuster, 2007, for another examination of this titanic struggle.
7. Henig, Ruth, The Origins of the Second World War, 1933–41, Methuen and Co. Ltd, 2nd edn, 2005, p. 63.
8. Noakes, J. and Pridham, G., op. cit., p. 831–2.
9. For a detailed examination of the battle, see Beevor, Antony, Stalingrad, Viking, 1998.
10. Roberts, Andrew, The Storm of War, Allen Lane, 2009, p. 333.
11. See Erickson, John, Barbarossa: The Axis and the Allies, Edinburgh University Press, 1995, Table 12.4; Overy, Richard, Russia’s War: A History of the Soviet Effort 1941–1945, Penguin, 1998; Beevor, Antony, Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege: 1942–1943, Penguin, 1999.
12. An in-depth study of the U-boat war can be found in Westwood, David, The U-boat War: The German Submarine Service and the Battle of the Atlantic, 1935–45, Conway Maritime Press, 2005.
13. Bernières, Louis De, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Vintage, 1993.
14. Dunn, Walter S, Kursk: Hitler’s gamble, 1943, Praeger Publishers, 1997, p. 185.
15. A detailed examination of the war from the Russian perspective can be found in Merridale, Catherine, Ivan’s War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939–1945, Picador, 2007.
16. Examined in detail in Beevor, Antony, D-Day, Viking, 2009.
17. Ibid., p. 340.
18. Ibid., p. 291.
19. Roberts, Andrew, op. cit., p. 487.
20. Hastings, Max, Armageddon: The Battle for Germany, 1944–45, Macmillan, 2004, p. 263.
21. Roberts, Andrew, op. cit., p. 531.
22. Grier, Howard D, Hitler, Dönitz, and the Baltic Sea: The Third Reich’s Last Hope, 1944–1945, Naval Institute Press, 2007, pp. 102–3.
23. Carruthers, Bob and Trew, Simon, Servants of Evil: New First-hand Accounts of the Second World War from Survivors of Hitler’s Armed Forces, Zenith Press, 2005, p. 208.
24. The battle for Berlin is examined in detail in: Beevor, Antony, Berlin: the Downfall, Viking, 2002. See also, Evans, Richard, The Third Reich at War, Penguin, 2009, pp. 707–26, for an overview of the last weeks of the war.
25. For details of this example of airbrushing – and many others – see King, David, The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin’s Russia, Metropolitan Books, 1997.
26. Overy, Richard, Why the Allies Won, revised edition, Pimlico, 2006, p. 245.
27. Ibid., pp. 264–5 and p. 265.
28. Ibid., p. 279.
29. Ibid., pp. 297–9.
30. Overy, Richard, ibid., pp. 150–2.
31. Noakes, J. and Pridham, G., op. cit., p. 1,204.