1941 Year Through the Eyes of Germans. Birch Crosses Instead of Iron

The book of a famous British military historian, created based on numerous interviews with surviving Wehrmacht veterans, participants in the invasion of the USSR, vividly shows that Operation «Barbarossa» was not a victorious march, as it is depicted in Western literature. The history of blitzkrieg and its collapse is shown through the eyes of ordinary soldiers and officers who experienced firsthand what war with Russia is like, and watched in horror as their campaign for victorious wreaths turned into a march for birch crosses (before the Battle of Moscow, the Germans had already lost 30 divisions, or about half a million people). The author thoroughly analyzes the common myth of the Wehrmacht's non-involvement in the genocide of the Soviet people, candidly discussing the crimes of the German army against prisoners of war and the civilian population, atrocities that the Germans themselves still attribute solely to the SS.