Eastern Germans

Dawn on Sunday, June 22, 1941 saw the opening onslaughts of Operation Barbarossa as German forces stormed forward into the Soviet Union. Few of them were to survive the five long years of bitter struggle. A posting to the Eastern Front during the Second World War was rightly regarded with dread by the German soldiers. They saw epic battles such as Stalingrad and Kursk, and yet it was a daily war of attrition which ultimately proved fatal for Hitler's ambition and the German military machine.

Before the first light of dawn on the morning of June twenty-second, 1941 Oskar Scheja stood on the western shore of the Bug River, looking to the east. The Russian army was camped on the other side. When the signal came to begin Operation Barbarossa he and his comrades from the German Wehrmacht stormed over the River and began an assault that took millions of Germans deep into Russian territory. For some the journey was brief. For others, like Oskar, it would last for years, and the struggle did not end when the fighting was over. This is the story of one German soldier’s experience in ...

Markus Bauer tells the moving story of his great-uncle, Leonhard März, who experienced the madness of the Eastern Front as an anti-tank gunner – and never returned from the Tarnopol encirclement in 1944. “If things continue as they are now, there won’t be anything left of our regiment within a month. Every day ten to twenty of the boys are wounded or killed.” “We drove the Russians out of the city. They had suffered terrible losses. They lie around in heaps.” Drafted into the Wehrmacht in early 1941 and trained on an anti-tank gun, the young soldier is thrown into the hell of ...

Considered one of the finest tanks of WWII, the Panzerkampfwagen VI Tiger tank killed 11.52 tanks for every one Tiger destroyed in battle. Tigers suffered a large number of non-combat losses, however, as the chaos of wartime and the Tiger’s mechanical reliability reduced the number of deployable tanks, then along with frequent breakdowns the Tiger managed only 5.25 enemy tanks killed for every lost Tiger. The Second World War began with the lightning German Blitzkrieg as their Wehrmacht raced across Europe, spearheaded by the most dreaded weapon of the 20th century. No German tank better ...

In no less than seven concentration and extermination camps, the Polish-Jew Noach (Natan) Żelechower was imprisoned during World War II. His first wife and their daughter were transported from the Warsaw Ghetto to Treblinka and perished there during the Great Deportation of the Warsaw Jews in the summer of 1942, and he was left alone to face the threat of Nazi persecution and death. With great resilience, fortitude, and the hope to be reunited with his wife and daughter, Noach was able to withstand and survive the hardships of the camp world, forced labor, and death marches. Throughout the...

Bloomsbury presents Generalship on the Eastern Front, 1941–45: A Study in Command by Robert Forczyk, read by Elliot Chapman A comprehensive evaluation of generalship on the most important front in World War II. The war on the Eastern Front from 1941 to 1945 was the largest sustained air-ground...

Gunter K. Koschorrek was a machine-gunner on the Russian front in WWII. He wrote his illicit diary on any scraps of paper he could lay his hands on. As keeping a diary was strictly forbidden, he sewed the pages into the lining of his thick winter coat and deposited them with his mother on infrequent trips home on leave. The diary went missing, and it was when he was reunited with his daughter in America some 40 years later that it came to light and became Blood Red Snow. 

Wounded five times and awarded numerous decorations for valor, Gottlob Herbert Bidermann saw action in the Crimea and siege of Sebastopol, participated in the vicious battles in the forests south of Leningrad, and ended the war in the Courland Pocket. In his memoir, he shares his impressions of countless Russian POWs seen at the outset of his service, of peasants struggling to survive the hostilities while caught between two ruthless antagonists, and of corpses littering the landscape.

The author could be described as a veteran in every sense of the word, even though he was only age 21 when the war ended. Armin Scheiderbauer served as an infantry officer with the 252nd Infantry Division, German army, and saw four years of bitter combat on the Eastern Front, being wounded six times. This is an outstanding personal memoir, written with great thoughtfulness and honesty.

At seventeen, he was thrown into the deadliest front of World War II. In 1942, a young German soldier was sent to the Eastern Front—into the icy Caucasus Mountains. Surrounded by cold, fear, and despair, he faced horrors that no teenager should ever endure. Wounded three times, every day could have been his last. More than eighty years later, his memories come to light—a raw and unfiltered testimony of survival, fear, and resilience—also available as an unabridged audiobook on Audible and Spotify. Inside this powerful World War II memoir, you will discover: • Survival against all ...

This book presents the remarkable personal journals of German soldier Hans Roth. Writing as events transpired, he recorded the mystery and tension as the Germans deployed on the Soviet frontier in June 1941. In these journals, battles are described in "you are there" detail, as Roth wrote privately, as if to keep himself sane, knowing that his honest accounts of the horrors in the East could never pass through Wehrmacht censors. 

Narrated by Derek Perkins From a renowned historian who writes with "maximum vividness" (The New Yorker) comes the most authoritative, readable single-volume military history of the brutal struggle for the Holy Land. Nine hundred years ago, a vast Christian army, summoned to holy war by the Pope...

Experience hard-hitting military science fiction from Germany! Immerse yourself in a gripping story that tells of an alternate war. Author Hermann Weinhauer, known for his nerve-wracking frontline reports, presents “Imperium Germanicum,” an alternate history of the highest order. His series skillfully blends the genres of political thriller and war novel as Weinhauer answers what is arguably the most intriguing of all questions: What if …? February 1943: The Italian and German troops fighting in North Africa are urgently needed in Europe. The Kaiser has long since decided to abandon ...

This book explores the Nazi occupation of Poland 1939-1945--and how ordinary people survived, resisted and endured during those horrible years. Here, with information smuggled out of Poland by the underground resistance, the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs documented the Nazi regime’s systematic plan to erase an entire nation: to destroy its culture, enslave its people, and extinguish resistance through terror. Inside this rare report are: Translations of Nazi laws designed to annihilate Polish identity Eyewitness accounts of deportations, executions, and village massacres Chilling ...

WINNER OF THE DAYTON LITERARY PEACE PRIZE A letter from a German soldier to his grandson recounts the terrors of war on the Eastern Front, and a postwar ordinary life in search of atonement, in this “raw, visceral, and propulsive” novel (New York Times Book Review). A New York Times Book...

He was sixteen when war took him out of the classroom. At seventeen, he was fighting for his life on the Eastern Front. In 1943, Heinz Langejürgen was still a schoolboy in northern Germany. Within months, he was serving as a naval anti-aircraft auxiliary on the Baltic coast, living an improbable double existence between military duty and lessons that were supposedly meant to continue his education. A year later, that world had disappeared. Now a seventeen-year-old soldier in the Hermann Göring Division, Heinz was sent east as Germany’s military situation collapsed. In the winter of 1944...

By 1943, after the catastrophic German defeat at Stalingrad, the Wehmacht's panzer armies gradually lost the initiative on the Eastern Front. The tide of the war had turned. Their combined arms technique, which had swept Soviet forces before it during 1941 and 1942, had lost its edge. Thereafter the war on the Eastern Front was dominated by tank-led offensives and, as Robert Forczyk shows, the Red Army's mechanized forces gained the upper hand, delivering a sequence of powerful blows that shattered one German defensive line after another.

STALINGRAD Hell on the Volga: The Battle That Broke Hitler’s Army On 23 August 1942, the sky over Stalingrad fell in fire. Hitler’s armies had already thundered across the steppe in search of oil, glory, and a victory grand enough to break the Soviet Union for good. Ahead of them stood one long industrial city on the Volga — a city of factories, ferries, rail yards, workers’ districts, and a name that carried enormous symbolic weight. To Berlin, Stalingrad was a prize. To Moscow, it was a commandment. To the men, women, and children trapped inside it, it was about to become hell. In...

One tank commander. One notorious institution. One legend built in war—and rebuilt in memory. Michael Wittmann became Nazi Germany’s most famous Tiger commander. His attack at Villers-Bocage on 13 June 1944 entered military folklore; his death during Operation Totalize less than two months later remains one of the Normandy campaign’s most argued-over battlefield mysteries. But how much of the familiar story is documented? How much came from wartime propaganda, post-war memoir and repetition? In this revised and expanded biography, Gary Mitchell follows Wittmann from rural Bavaria into...

Erhard Steiniger joined his Wehrmacht unit on October 12, 1940, as a radio operator, a role which required his constant presence with troops at the Front, right in the midst of combat. On June 22, 1941, he accompanied his division to Lithuania where he experienced the catastrophic first day of Operation Barbarossa. He later witnessed intense clashes during the conquest of the Baltic islands and the battles leading up to Leningrad on the Volkhov and Lake Ladoga.