Hitler's Defeat on the Eastern Front, 1943-1945

Drawing on a collection of rare contemporary German photographs covering the last two years of the war accompanied by in-depth captions, this latest book in the popular Images of War series provides an insight to the long and most bitter Eastern Front campaign. It reveals in detail how the battle of Kursk was the beginning of the end and led to the Red Army recapturing huge areas of the Soviet Union. In the face of the long awaited Soviet summer offensive of 1944, German forces were forced to withdraw under constant ground and aerial bombardments. Those German forces that survived the artillery barrages, the onslaught of the tank armadas and mass infantry assaults, streamed back westwards and fought vicious defensive battles through the Baltic States, Byelorussia and Poland. As the final months of the War were played out on the Eastern Front, the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS, with diminishing resources, withdrew across a devastated Reich to fight their final battle around Berlin.