Drawing on rare and previously unpublished photographs accompanied by
in-depth captions, the book provides an absorbing analysis of this
traumatic period of the Second World War. It reveals in detail how the
battle of Kursk was the beginning of the end and how this massive
operation led to the Red Army recapturing huge areas of the Soviet Union
and bleeding white the German armies it struck. Despite the adverse
situation in which both the German Army and its Waffen-SS counterparts
were placed, soldiers continued to fight to the bitter end and attempted
to build new defense-lines. But as the Red Army launched its long awaited
summer offensive on June 1944, German forces were forced to withdraw under
the constant hammer blows of ground and aerial bombardments. Those German
forces that survived the artillery barrages, the onslaught of the tank
armadas, and mass infantry assaults, streamed back from the battlefield
and fought vicious battles through the Baltic States, Byelorussia, and
built up new defense along the Vistula in Poland. As the final months of
the War were played out on the Eastern Front, the Army and Waffen-SS,
with diminishing resources, withdrew across a devastated Reich and fought
out their last battle with party militia forces around a devastated Berlin.

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