In April 1945, German troops withdrawing from the Seelow Heights were encircled by the Soviet Army near the small town of Halbe, south-east of Berlin. Rather than surrender, their orders were to attempt to break out, westward, and join up with the German 12th Army. A brutal battle ensued, with an estimated 30,000 German and 20,000 Russian soldiers killed, along with thousands of civilians.This collection of first-hand accounts tells the story of the battle and its aftermath from th...

In April 1945, German troops withdrawing from the Seelow Heights were encircled by the Soviet Army near the small town of Halbe, south-east of Berlin. Rather than surrender, their orders were to attempt to break out, westward, and join up with the German twelfth Army. A brutal battle ensued, with an estimated 30,000 German and 20,000 Russian soldiers killed, along with thousands of civilians.This collection of first-hand accounts tells the story of the battle and its aftermath from...

Operation 'Berlin', the Soviet offensive launched on 16 April 1945 by Marshals Zhukov and Koniev, isolated the German 9th Army and tens of thousands of refugees in the Spreewald 'pocket', south-east of Berlin. Stalin ordered its encirclement and destruction, and his subordinates, eager to win the race to the Reichstag, pushed General Busse's 9th Army into a tiny area east of the village of Halbe.To escape the Spreewald pocket, the remnants of 9th Army had to pass t...

From an expert on the Eastern Front of World War II, this book chronicles the cataclysmic experience of the region that includes modern-day Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia.The Baltic States suffered more than almost any other territory during World War II, caught on the front-line of some of the war's most vicious battles and squeezed between the vast military might of the German Wehrmacht and the Soviet Red Army.Combining new archival research and numerous f...

An engrossing history of the last year of the Second World War, charting the battles fought between the Soviet Red Army and the Nazis across German soil.The terrible months between the arrival of the Red Army on German soil and the final collapse of Hitler's regime were like no other in the Second World War. The Soviet Army's intent to take revenge for the horror that the Nazis had wreaked on their people produced a conflict of implacable brutality in which million...

In May 1945, as the triumphant Red Army crushed the last pockets of German resistance in central Berlin, French soldiers fought back. They were the last surviving members of SS Charlemagne, the Waffen SS division made up of French volunteers. They were among the final defenders of the city and of Hitlers bunker. Their extraordinary story gives a compelling insight into the dreadful climax of the Battle for Berlin and into the conflicts of loyalty faced by the French in the Second World War...