The war between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union that opened with the German invasion of July 1941 was the ultimate confrontation between the two great totalitarian ideologies of the twentieth century. It was also without precedent in human history in the sheer scale of the destruction it wrought: over 26 million Soviet dead, and between four and five million dead on the German side. By 1945 a huge swathe of Europe between Berlin and Moscow
had been reduced to a vast devastated wasteland in which whole societies had been erased from the face of the earth. In Operation Barbarossa, German military historian Christian
Hartmann draws upon the latest research, enriched by a wealth of eye-witness testimony from both the Soviet and the German sides, to paint a masterly overview of these momentous four years and their human consequences - one that is both gripping and at times deeply moving.