With Our Backs to Berlin: The German Army in Retreat 1945

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Leafing through the material I have accumulated from over twenty years of studying the Second World War Berlin battlefield scene, much of it ‘feedback’ from the German editions of my books, The Battle of Berlin 1945 and Zhukov at the Oder, I came across so many interesting, hitherto unpublished pieces that I decided to bring some of them together here as a collection of short stories.

These heroic, often poignant accounts of the desperate, last-ditch defence of the Fatherland should not be taken in any way as an apology for the German cause. It is precisely because one so seldom hears their side of the story, that they deserve a wider readership. They are mainly told by former members of the Wehrmacht and even the dreaded Waffen-SS, some of them still surviving. Perhaps surprisingly, the stories are characterised by the same individual human warmth and soldiers’ humour as you might normally expect from the ‘good guys’ – the GIs, British and Commonwealth infantry and armoured brigades, who had to contend with a surprising degree of resistance before ending the war in Europe. The lesson, I suppose, is that we are all pretty much alike, under the uniform.

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