The Russian front was the decisive theater of World War II with the great mass of the German army and Luftwaffe locked in battle with the Red Army in the largest land campaign in history. On a 1,200-mile front from the Arctic Circle to the Caspian Sea, in baking summer heat and winter temperatures of -40?C, millions of men and women fought the most vital battle of the war. Had the Germans won in the East, a Nazi victory in World War II would have been almost inevitable.

This book examines the German campaign on the Eastern Front, from their first significant defeat at the gates of Moscow in 1941 to the defeat at Stalingrad and the Russian capture of Berlin marking the end of the war in Europe, exploring how Hitler's flawed dream of conquest in the East brought about the end of the Thousand Year Reich - in little over a thousand days.


Introduction  • Hitler and the Wehrmacht  • The Red Army  • To the Gates of Moscow  • Attack and Counter-attack  • Verdun on the Volga: Stalingrad  • The Correlation of Forces  • The Last Blitzkrieg  • The Writing on the Wall  • Prussian Roulette  • Goodbye to Berlin  • Notes  • Index  • Select Bibliography