SS - Christopher Ailsby

A detailed account of the Waffen-SS on the Eastern Front 1941-45, its battles, its organisation, tactics, weapons and equipment. - Examines the Waffen-SS ideology and the military consequences of viewing the Russians as sub-humans. - Operation Barbarossa, June 1941 and the successes achieved through mastery of mechanized warfare and their unique esprit-de-corps. - The terrible winter of 1942 and the Russian counter-attack, contained by the Totenkopf Division, in the Demyansk Pocket. - Birth of Waffen-SS panzer and panzergrenadier divisions. - First-hand accounts and photographs tell the story of the recapture of Kharkov and the carnage at Kursk. - New tactics, such as the 'mobile pocket' followed the need for new defensive tactics after July 1943. - The 1944 campaign in northern Russia. The attempts of the Waffen-SS to halt the Russians at Narva, and its fighting withdrawal across Poland the eastern Prussia. - The collapse of the German front in southern Russia and the attempts of the Waffen-SS to hold the line. Includes accounts of the fighting in the Cherkassy and Kamanets-Poldolsk Pockets, and the annihilation of whole Waffen-SS divisions as 1944 came to a close.;- The final offensives of the Waffen-SS in 1945 in Hungary and Germany including the fall of Berlin.