Book Description
In February 1943, German forces surrendered to the Red Army at Stalingrad and the tide of war turned. By May 1945 Soviet soldiers had stormed Berlin and brought down Hitler's regime.
Total Warfollows the fortunes of these fighters as they liberated Russia and the Ukraine from the Nazi invader and fought their way into the heart of the Reich. It reveals the horrors they experienced - the Holocaust, genocide and the mass murder of Soviet POWs - and shows the Red Army, brutalized by war, taking its terrible revenge on the German civilian population. For the first time Russian veterans are candid about the terrible atrocities their own army committed. But they also describe their struggle to raise themselves from the abyss of hatred. Their war against the Nazis - which in large part brought the Second World War in Europe to an end - is a tarnished but deeply moving story of sacrifice and redemption.
Total Warfollows the fortunes of these fighters as they liberated Russia and the Ukraine from the Nazi invader and fought their way into the heart of the Reich. It reveals the horrors they experienced - the Holocaust, genocide and the mass murder of Soviet POWs - and shows the Red Army, brutalized by war, taking its terrible revenge on the German civilian population. For the first time Russian veterans are candid about the terrible atrocities their own army committed. But they also describe their struggle to raise themselves from the abyss of hatred. Their war against the Nazis - which in large part brought the Second World War in Europe to an end - is a tarnished but deeply moving story of sacrifice and redemption.
Editorial Reviews
Review
Praise for Michael Jones -- --- A milestone in the treatment of the battle ... highly effective and utterly captivating ... This is the finest history of its type published to date -- David Glanz 'A tribute to the resilience of the human spirit' -- Herald 'Jones deserves full credit for the remarkable personal testimonies he has amassed' -- Max Hastings, Sunday Times --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
About the Author
Michael Jones was awarded a history PhD by Bristol University, and subsequently taught at Glasgow University and Winchester College. He is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a member of the British Commission for Military History, and works now as a writer, media consultant and presenter. He has written books on the battles of Bosworth, Agincourt, Stalingrad and Leningrad, and most recentlyThe Retreat: Hitler's First Defeat. For the last few years has conducted battlefield tours of the Eastern Front.
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| Most Helpful Customer Reviews 9 of 10 people found the following review helpful: 5.0 out of 5 stars Total war. Total horror., By Wayne Robinson (Las Vegas, USA) - See all my reviews Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?) This review is from: Total War: From Stalingrad to Berlin (Kindle Edition) About a week ago, the German magazine 'der Spiegel' published a long article in advance of the 70th anniversary of the German attack on the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, so I read Michael Jones' previous book 'Retreat. Hitler's First Defeat', which dealt with the initial invasion and repulsion of the German invaders from the gates of Moscow.If you haven't read it, you need to read this book first. It's a definite 5 star book. I don't need to review it as there are already enough reviews. I was initially tempted to give this book 4 stars; very good, but really needed to be longer as 350 pages to cover almost two and a half years of war I thought was inadequate. It really needed to be 700 or even 1,000 pages long. I was wrong. When the author began the account of the battle for Stalingrad, I immediately read Antony Beevor masterly account in 'Stalingrad', before returning to 'Total War'. Michael Jones came into his own only when he discusses the liberation of the Ukraine, and the German 'typhus camps'. I read this account with almost disbelief. The Germans herded Ukranian civilians into wire enclosures without shelter and deliberately infected them with typhus in the hope that the Red Army troops would also be infected as they took over the camps. Actually, I can well believe it. Something similar happened in Italy, as discussed in Richard Evan's book 'the Third Reich at War'. Two medical specialists in malaria, Martini and Rodenwaldt, directed the Wehrmacht to reflood the reclaimed Pontine marshes and to reintroduce sea water to allow anopheles labranchiae, a malarial vector, to breed there. And then destroyed or removed the pumps and tidal gates. And it a further act of bastardry, confiscated all the stocks of quinine in the area. So cases of malaria in the area increased from 1,200 in 1943 to 55,000 in 1944 (inofficially, the true figure is thought to be double this). All this to punish an unreliable former ally, not an enemy which had been demonized for years. The highlight of the book, if anything so terrible can be described as a highlight, was the account of the Soviet liberation of Auschwitz on January 27, 1945. To quote the account 'This profoundly important liberation is still marred by oft-repeated assumptions that are misleading or downright wrong. The Red Army did not walk into a camp already abandoned by the Germans. They had to fight for it. Soviet soldiers were not so brutalized by the war that they were unable to emotionally engage with what they found there. They were deeply moved, shocked and disturbed by what they witnessed - even today, many still have nightmares about it'. After finishing reading the book, deeply shaken, I read the author's preface, where he stated that he didn't intend the book to be a conventional military narrative, focussing instead on the Red Army's psychological experience during this terrible war as tribute. He states the focal point of his book is the liberation of Auschwitz. I can only agree. The next book I'm reading is the author's 'Leningrad', which promises to be of the same standard. 6 of 7 people found the following review helpful: 5.0 out of 5 stars Total War on the Eastern Front, By This review is from: Total War (Hardcover) It's quite rare these days that a book on the Eastern Front will surprise me once, almost never more often than that. Having read on this war for over a decade I thought I knew the majority of what went on and what one could expect to find on a book entitled 'Total War'. With this work, however, Jones has built on what he's done previously and in many ways this might be his best work to date, easily rivaling his first foray into the Eastern Front with 'Stalingrad'. As with his previous volumes, Jones tells the story of the Eastern Front through the voices of the soldiers, commanders, and civilians who participated in it, willingly or unwillingly from both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Woven through the accounts he presents is the regular question of how Red Army soldiers and the civilian population of the Soviet Union kept up enough morale to endure the chaos and defeats of 1941, the demoralizing situation around the siege of Leningrad, and the battle for Stalingrad in 1942. Thus, 'Total War' begins with the initial situation around 1941 and moves through battles for Leningrad and Stalingrad, onto the eventual Soviet defeat of the German sixth Army and continues through their victories at Kursk, Bagration, etc., all the way to Berlin. The question here is less about military prowess, tactical, operational, or strategic decisions (although various details of individual operations are discussed and contextualized) but revolves around what the Red Army and civilian population endured, witnessed, and remembered up until their entrance into East Prussia and Germany proper. Jones sets the stage for the infamous events of the Red Army's 'liberation' (a contested term to say the least) of Eastern Europe and Germany. The initial chapters dealing with 1941 and Stalingrad are readily covered in Jones's other books on the Eastern Front so they presented little new in the greater scheme of the Eastern Front. It is only when we get to 1944 and the German scorched earth policy as they retreated before the Red Army that events and information I had never heard of before first began to appear. As the Germans withdrew from Belorussia they ran up against large swamp areas, on these territories they began to herd the local population, encased them in barbed wire, and trucked in typhus patients. They dumped them all in one of these 'camps', let them lay on muddy ground and allowed hundreds of cases of typhus to break out so that they might be passed on to the liberating troops of the Red Army. According to the commander of the 65th Army, whose soldiers were at times unable to control themselves as they ran to liberate these locals, an entire corps had to be quarantined because typhus ran rampantly through Red Army units as they tried their best to liberate these hastily established camps. Luckily the spread of the disease was readily contained and presented limited problems for the Red Army advance. The Red Army's crossing over into Germany proper brings much debate and controversy. What Jones attempts to do, and in truth does very well, is contextualize what Red Army soldiers perpetrated on German territory. In showcasing what Red Army soldiers witnessed on their way to Germany, the enormous amount of death and destruction they came through during the liberation of Ukraine and Belorussia, the liberation of camps like Majdanek and Auschwitz (both of which are discussed by Jones in this book), as well as the regular propaganda campaign waged by the Soviet Union in order to keep up Red Army morale and encourage them to 'kill' the occupiers of their territory and the murderers of their families and friends, there is reason to suspect that such bent up anger and hatred would have an outlet once the German border was crossed. And this is exactly what happened. But Jones also gives voice to those soldiers who attempted to curb the violence, looting, raping, and murder that was going on. He continually implies that this was a minority within the Red Army that contributed to the 'total war' mentality of the time and shows orders coming from the high command and army command that attempted to curb any type of violence and looting against the local population, changing the propaganda of the time from 'destroy the fascist beast in his lair' to a voice claiming the Red Army is an army of liberation. There are some heartwrenching stories presented of Red Army soldiers taking out their hatred on the German population, all too often women, but in each case Jones attempts to contextualize the atmosphere these events occurred in and the reaction of Red Army soldiers to these events, which after the initial euphoria of revenge passed quickly into condemnation, contempt and a questioning of their methods. Many soldiers even attempted to protect the local population, forgetting or at least putting aside the propaganda they had been exposed to for years. A minor weakness in these chapters is the fact that Jones mentions little of the fact that the Red Army at this point was operating with allies, like two Polish armies, who at times had more reason to hate Germans than Soviet troops, who can account or separate for crimes they perpetrated? Additionally, Jones takes the time to show how the Germans themselves exaggerated Red Army atrocities on their soil. Goebbels created something called 'atrocity propaganda' that exaggerated everything 'in order to strengthen the deterrent effect and the German people's will to hold out' (224). More so, at times the Germans themselves were given orders to destroy a village or town while the population was expelled, only to then have German film crews and journalists bussed in to "survey the ruins and to record the imagined ravages of Soviet soldiers...The swans in the town park were shot, and it was then announced that the 'Asiatic hordes' had killed and eaten them' (225). As I reached the end of the book I found myself speechless. The epilogue Jones includes is a mere five pages, and the last page simply found me questioning myself and my knowledge of the Great Patriotic War/Second World War as well as the costs that the Soviet population had to bear. I don't want to give anything away but Jones shows once more that we continue to merely scratch the surface of the Eastern Front and there is still so much left to learn and understand in this encounter between Germany and the Soviet Union. A few minor mistakes are evident, Soviet units should be listed as 'rifle' but in various instances they are described as 'infantry brigade' or 'infantry corps' rather than rifle or if this was a naval unit it should have been 'naval infantry' rather than just 'infantry'. There is also a mention of a fortieth 'tank army', but only six existed and they were named first through sixth. Additionally, the Soviet commander Chernyakhovsky is misspelled as 'Chernyakovsky'. Lastly, I have to say that the notation system in this book leaves much to be desired. While Jones lists his sources there are no endnotes/foodnotes in the traditional sense and at times it makes for a very hard time when attempting to locate the source of a specific comment/description/event. Putting aside these minor errors, there is no question that Jones has created a highly important addition to Eastern Front literature. He is one of the few authors who attempts to contextualize Red Army action on German territory by putting the motivation of the Soviet soldier in a context that showcases that while some might have taken vengeance to an extreme, many others managed to control themselves and at times showed their altruistic side by protecting the local population and providing them with basic necessities. Jones continually emphasizes that it was a minority of the Red army that committed crimes on enemy soil, while the majority managed to preserve their reputation and the title of 'liberators'. 5.0 out of 5 stars Our real price for the Victory, Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?) This review is from: Total War: From Stalingrad to Berlin (Kindle Edition) I was eleven years old when the Great Patriotic War ended. I was trying to forget it. I could not foresee that my memory would start stinging me again. As time passed, the burning feeling intensified. One of the main reasons for that was the Soviet literature's determination to cross out any slightest mention of the Holocaust as well as participation of people of Jewish origin in the War. This is why in the USSR General Dovator became a Bielorussian, Major Kunikov became a Russian, and heroes whose names were obviously Jewish the Russian press simply obliterated from the history of the war. This in particular explains why, when I emigrated from the USSR back in the 1970's , I started refreshing my school English not by reading English classics in originals, but by reading Western authors' accounts of and insights into the events of the War. I used to read them sometimes smiling and at other times frowning. Now, having lived in the West for over thirty years, I have found an author whose narrations are adequate to the events we lived through. From all standpoints. This is Michael Jones. Every his new book shakes me as a distress. No smiles, no frowns. Tears. I myself might have been an episode of Jones' book. Once, in October of 1941, I became a single target for a German plane in kilometers of empty fields around me. I still wonder how I survived on that occasion under the strafing plane a few meters straight over my head. The pilot missed me when it was impossible to miss. There is something to contemplate about this situation. However, with all my personal impressions and suffering due to the War, I would not be able to tell about it with such remarkable brevity and expressiveness as Michael Jones did. No one of us, insiders, could have written such a book. We, Russian Jews, would be inevitably stuck in painful details. A German could, but in that case, the narration might not be considered credible. An outsider was needed, and Michael Jones came out and did the job for the both sides. He reached the core of our wartime feeling. His descriptions are realistic. Everyone knows horrible account of Treblinka by Vassilii Grossman. To me it was presenting a very limit of hell. Jones managed to put the hellish limit even higher with his account of Auschwitz. The book is full of sympathy for all those who suffered on both sides. It turns out that after time passes, all the atrocities that people commit upon each other during any war are seen in quite a different light inducing severe remorse. The book also leads the reader to a conclusion that the nations sentenced to be exterminated have no other choice except to go on waging a Total War with a determined rage of people doomed. This aspect turns the book into a warning for the mankind. I believe that for this very reason the book must be translated into all the cultured languages on Earth. If the mankind has not learned from the lessons of the past, it deserves what is coming to it in the future. However, this is not Michael Jones' fault. Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review | |
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