Stalingrad

"Stalingrad in the Second World War has become a byword for misplaced military endeavour -- as well as courage, endurance, heroism and betrayal. Joachim Wieder was a staff officer in VIII Army Corps who survived the last terrible onslaught of the Russians into the Stalingrad pocket at the end of 1942. He wrote his memoir of the battle, and the events leading up to it, twenty years later. It was no routine account. Beyond recording his own experience, he searched for the motives that drove the Germans on in the face of hopeless odds, asked why orders were issued that could only lead to certain defeat, examined the lies from High Command, the whole morass of unjustified human sacrifice. It was an intense evaluation of the war, the first German book on Stalingrad to be published in the Soviet Union, and was revised in 1993 in the light of later information on the battle"--P. [4] of cover.