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World War II The Eastern Front in Photographs
Carlton Books Limited
PROFESSOR JOHN & LJUBICAERICKSON
UK ISBN 1 84222 242 2
US ISBN 1 84222 260 0
258 pages {PDF}
Hitler versus Stalin: The Second World War on the Eastern Front In Photographs Illustrates every aspect of the Eastern Front campaigns, from the early Blitzkrieg successes of the Nazis through the turning point of Stalingrad to the climactic fall of Berlin.
It presents a panoramic view of this war using previously unpublished photographs from Russian collections, augmented by Images from Germanarchives.
lt Is not a book of posed propaganda triages but the viscera of life, death, survival, battle, the home front, friend and foe. Written by the world's leading authority on the subject, the late Professor John Erickson, and his wife, LJublca,Hltler versus Stalin: The Second World War on the Eastern Front in Photographs Is a moving, authoritative and unforgettable account of the conflict that sealed the fate of Nazi Germany and shaped the world's postwar history.
FOREWORD
On Sunday morning 22 June 1941, Adolf Hitler launched the greatest land campaign in world history:
Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union.
This was total war without match, stupefying in its dimension, horrendous in its cruelty, harrowing in its degradation.
Hitler committed his armies to a war of subjugation, to an ideological crusade against "Jewish-Bolshevism" and to racial war against Slav "subhumans".
In the course of "The Great Patriotic War 1941-1945", the Soviet Union mobilized 29,574,900 men.
Wartime turnover in manpower amounted to 21,700,000.
During 1,418 days of barbarized warfare, bereft of any legal or moral constraints, the Red Army's battlefield losses were more than half those 21 million, 11,440,100 men put permanently out of action.
Almost one million men were variously convicted:
376,300 charged with desertion and 422,700 sentenced to service in penal battalions, or strafbats, assigned to the most dangerous sectors.
Civilians were not spared.
German rule in occupied territory took the lives of some 16,350,000 citizens, shot, starved, neglected, or
murdered in concentration camps.
More than two million were deported for slave labour in the Reich.
Soviet soldiers and civilians shared a combined death toll of 27-28 million souls.
Each minute of this war cost 9-10 lives, each hour 587, each day 14,000.
Savage partisan warfare and ferocious German retribution compounded the horrors.
Huge hunks of fronts disintegrated.
Entire armies vanished, some to reappear later, others with fatal damage.
Between 1941 and 1943, the Wehrmacht destroyed almost a third of 570 Soviet rifle divisions.
The Red Army finally destroyed, disabled or captured 607 Axis divisions, at great cost to itself in men and machines: 96,500 tanks, 106,400 aircraft and 317,000 guns.
Anglo-American armies fighting in North Africa, Italy and Western Europe destroyed 176 enemy divisions.
What Boris Pasternak called the "naked power of evil" had been unleashed.
The cost to perpetrator and victim of first suppressing and then exorcising it was visited on the wartime generation and also on their descendants, mindful of inconsolable grief and ineluctable sorrows.
World War II The Eastern Front in Photographs
Hitler versus Stalin
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