Breakout At Stalingrad

'One of the greatest novels of the Second World War' The Times 'A remarkable find' Antony Beevor 'A masterpiece' Mail on Sunday Stalingrad, November 1942. Lieutenant Breuer dreams of returning home for Christmas. But he and his fellow German soldiers will spend winter in a frozen hell – as snow, ice and relentless Soviet assaults reduce the once-mighty Sixth Army to a diseased and starving rabble. Breakout at Stalingrad is a stark and terrifying portrait of the horrors of war, and a profoundly humane depiction of comradeship in adversity. The book itself has an extraordinary story behind it. Its author fought at Stalingrad and was imprisoned by the Soviets. In captivity, he wrote a novel based on his experiences, which the Soviets confiscated before releasing him. Gerlach resorted to hypnosis to remember his narrative, and in 1957 it was published as The Forsaken Army. Fifty-five years later Carsten Gansel, an academic, came across the original manuscript of Gerlach's novel in a Moscow archive. This first translation into English of Breakout at Stalingrad includes the story of Gansel's sensational discovery.

This memoir from an aide to, and fellow POW of, General Friedrich Paulus documents a unique perspective on the horror of Stalingrad. Colonel Wilhelm Adam, senior ADC to General Paulus, commander of the German 6th Army at Stalingrad, wrote this compelling and controversial memoir describing the German defeat, his time as a prisoner of war with Paulus, and his conversion to communism. Now, for the first time, his German text has been translated into English. His account gives an intimate insight into events at the 6th Army headquarters during the advance to Stalingrad and the protracted and devastating battle for possession of the city. In vivid detail, he recalls the sharp personality clashes among the senior commanders and their intense disputes about tactics and strategy, but he also records the ordeal of the German troops trapped in the encirclement and his own role in the fighting. The extraordinary story he tells, fluently translated by Tony Le Tissier, offers a genuinely fresh perspective on the battle, and it reveals much about the prevailing attitudes and tense personal relationships of the commanders at Stalingrad and at Hitler’s headquarters. “Through his daily involvement with them, Wilhelm Adam is able to perfectly describe the characters involved, the tensions and despair amongst them and the pressure Paulus and his staff found themselves under as the Soviet pincers closed around the men of the abandoned 6th Army. The reader is presented with the hopeless situation faced by Paulus and his staff who, aware of the looming disaster from a very early stage are constantly denied the option of a withdrawal by Hitler and left to their catastrophic fate.”—Grossdeutschland Aufklarungsgruppe

The Battle of Stalingrad was not only the psychological turning point of World War II: it also changed the face of modern warfare. From Antony Beevor, the internationally bestselling author of D-Day and The Battle of Arnhem. In August 1942, Hitler's huge Sixth Army reached the city that bore Stalin's name. In the five-month siege that followed, the Russians fought to hold Stalingrad at any cost; then, in an astonishing reversal, encircled and trapped their Nazi enemy. This battle for the ruins of a city cost more than a million lives. Stalingrad conveys the experience of soldiers on both sides, fighting in inhuman conditions, and of civilians trapped on an urban battlefield. Antony Beevor has itnerviewed survivors and discovered completely new material in a wide range of German and Soviet archives, including prisoner interrogations and reports of desertions and executions. As a story of cruelty, courage, and human suffering, Stalingrad is unprecedented and unforgettable. Historians and reviewers worldwide have hailed Antony Beevor's magisterial Stalingrad as the definitive account of World War II's most harrowing battle.

Revised edition of a rare account of a German armored division in combat at the epic Battle of Stalingrad. • Day-by-day story of the 24th Panzer Division's savage fighting in the streets of Stalingrad in 1942 • Eyewitness accounts from participants reveal the brutality of this battle • Photos from official archives, private collections, and veterans--most of them never seen before • Used copies of the out-of-print earlier edition sell for more than $900 • A treasure trove for historians, buffs, modelers, and wargamers

By November, 1942, the empire of Adolf Hitler had reached its zenith. It stretched from North Africa to the Arctic, from the English Channel to Stalingrad deep inside the Russian interior. The German Army seemed invincible, but then in a matter of only five days, from 19th to 23rd November, 1942, the seemingly impossible happened. During a massive Russian counter-offensive involving over a million men, 1,560 tanks, 16,261 field-guns and mortars and 1,327 aircraft, not only were two Rumanian armies wiped off the Axis order of battle, but more decisively the "crack" German 6th Army, under the command of General Friedrich Paulus, was encircled at Stalingrad. Despite being cut off from the ramainder of the Eastern Front in a huge cauldron (Der Kessel), the 269,000 troops of the 6th army continued to resist against impossible odds for 72 blood-soaked days. Devoid of adequate winter clothing, enduring temperatures of minus 35 degrees centigrade on a bare, blizzard-swept steppe, with nothing to eat but scraps of bread and watery soup, the doomed army suffered an infinity of agonies including frostbite, dysentery and typhus. While they slowly froze and starved to death they were constantly pounded by Russian artillery and bomber sorties. When the 6th Army finally surrendered on 2nd February, 1943, only 91,000 of the original force remained alive to be herded into Siberian prison camps. Surrendering to the Russians, however, proved to be only an alternative way of dying, for only 5,000 survived the captivity to see Germany again. The author has drawn on German and Russian sources to write this commemoration of the battle which broke the back of the Germany Army and turned the tide of the war in the Allies' favour. This book aims to give a balanced account of Stalingrad from both the German and the Russian perspectives.

A primary source account of the WWII Battle of Korsun-Cherkassy written by a Nazi commander who survived the Soviet victory. In 1943, the tide began to turn against Germany on the Eastern Front. Their summer offensive, Operation Citadel, was a failure. The Red Army’s Dnieper-Carpathian Offensive was pushing back on Germany’s Army Group South in a war of attrition. By October, Kiev was liberated, and the Soviets had reached the Dnieper River in Ukraine. After sudden attacks by the 1st and 2nd Ukrainian Fronts, the Russians achieved a major encirclement of six German divisions, a total of 60,000 soldiers, in a pocket near the Dnieper River. A dramatic weeks-long battle ensued. After a failed attempt led by Erich von Manstein to break into the pocket from the outside, the trapped German forces focused their efforts on escape. Abandoning equipment and wounded soldiers, the survivors rejoined the surrounding panzer divisions. Beginning with the German retreat to the Dnieper in 1943, Generalleutnant von Vormann chronicles the battle and describes the psychological effects of the brutal combat. As one of the few primary source materials that exists on the subject, this volume is of significant historical interest.