The war between Nazi Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union that raged
between 1941 and 1945 was the ultimate confrontation between the two
great totalitarian ideologies of the twentieth century. Unprecedented
in the scale of the destruction that it wrought and the deep
historical scars that it left behind, it was a gargantuan conflict in
every sense of the term: in the vast territories over which it ranged,
its intensity and duration, the huge numbers of people involved -- and
last but by no means least, the millions of victims that it claimed.
The invasion of the Soviet Union was the conflict that Hitler had
always ultimately planned for: a pitiless war of conquest and
destruction in which the Fuehrer dreamed of creating his 'Thousand
Year Reich', destroying his ideological opponents, and enslaving or
'eliminating' whole peoples in the process. It was right from the
start a struggle for survival, conducted with great bitterness and
savagery by opponents who knew that defeat meant the destruction of
everything they stood for. The outcome of this bitter struggle was
quite as momentous as the struggle which had preceded it. By 1945 a
huge swathe of Europe between Berlin and Moscow had been reduced to a
devastated wasteland in which whole societies had been erased from the
face of the earth. Over 26 million Soviets and between four and five
million Germans lay dead. The victory of the Red Army transformed the
Soviet Union into one of the world's two superpowers. It also saw the
complete destruction of Hitler's megalomaniac vision for the East, the
division of the German Reich, and the Soviet domination of Eastern
Europe for a generation. In Operation Barbarossa, German military
historian Christian Hartmann draws upon the latest research, enriched
by a wealth of eye-witness testimony from both the Soviet and the
German sides, to paint a masterly overview of these momentous four
years and their human consequences - one that is both gripping, and at
times deeply moving.
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Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9780191636547
Publisert
2020
Utgiver
Vendor
OUP Oxford
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter