Pritt Buttar’s look at the Soviet assault on Prussia focuses on the brutality and vengeance of the Red Army’s merciless campaign.Through previously unseen testimony and sagacious analysis by the author, the chilling events of 1944-45 Prussia are brought to life. Buttar assumes the perspectives of both those at command level and of the soldiers on the front-line.
We learn how men of different ranks reacted to the horror.
Each chapter is prefixed by a poignant quote, ranging from part of a Goebbels speech to an extract from Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. ‘All of us knew,’ Solzhenitsyn tells us, ‘that if the girls were German, they could be raped and then shot.’
The narrative is punctuated by frequent and often similarly harrowing first-hand accounts.
With Battleground Prussia, one is given an all-too-real encapsulation of that period of bleak German
Osprey, £15.00