To the Bitter End: The Final Battles of Army Groups A, North Ukraine, Centre, Eastern Front, 1944-45

click here for more details, find new or used items	Rolf Hinze Our price £20.97 (£29.48) New from £14.98 Used from £16.99 Pages: 232 (Hardcover) ISBN: 1874622361 Pub: Helion & Company Pub date: 2005-10-25 Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 145112

Reader Reviews:

Narrow history, interesting political stance (6/8 people found this helpful)

This book is very specifically focused on the battles of the German army against the Soviet Union in the latter stages of the war, and in Southern Poland, Czechoslovakia and Saxony. Within this arena, the narrative of the various campaigns is reasonably well-told, with excellent detail on the principal Axis units involved.

The weaknesses though, are many. The maps are critical to understanding the flow of the campaigns. In this book, they are limited, whilst the text retains some of the stilted language so often found in translations from German. Also, if the author mentions the paucity of German resources at this late stage in the war, he mentions it a thousand times. Perhaps this is just me being churlish given it was such a critical factor. There is little commentary on German command decisions, although again the room for maneouvre was, quite literally, severely limited. Indeed the sense of utter hopelessness is conveyed well.

Where the auther takes a very interesting slant for British readers is in his discussion of the guilt of the protagonists in terms of war crimes. He(rightly) deplores the behaviour of the Red Army against German civilians and POWs. He berates the British for the bombing of Dresden (with perhaps some justification here too). He accuses Polish and Czech partisans of attacking poorly-armed retreating German soldiers, which I am sure they did. His reference to any war crimes by German troops is conspicuous by its absence. Even Germany's attack on the USSR is excused by reference to recent disclosures about Stalin's intent to attack Germany. The Holocaust is mentioned once and is hastily swept away as the remote act of a few wayward radicals. German atrocities in the USSR and Poland are not mentioned at all (why are the Polish and Czech partisans so keen on hastening German retreat?).

If the author had not set out his stall on the issue of war crimes so aggressively, this might not be such an omission. Given its importance to him, it is fascinating to see the lack of reflectiveness on these issues and the absence of any admission that Red Army actions might have been provoked by the loss of 20 million of their people. Instead, the German army's desperate defence of its civilian population is prompted by unprovoked Soviet atrocity, with no hint of reaping a whilrlwind sown by themselves.

All in all, a usefully detailed narrative, but which left this reader, at least, wondering still about the true motivations of the Feldgrau in the last desperate days of the Wehrmacht.

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