La retirada

In the winter of 1941, having failed in its attempt to conquer Moscow, the German army began its first withdrawal unable to carry out the orders of Hitler, who wanted his men to resist at all costs. What Jones tells us here is not so much the military history of these events as "the withdrawal of human values that turned what was already a brutal war into mass slaughter": a story of more than two million prisoners of war. Soviets left to die in concentration camps, of wounded who were buried alive, of German soldiers fleeing in terror, of towns burned in their wake, of hunger, horror and death. Jones has used the diaries of Wehrmacht fighters and the memories of Russian veterans to construct a direct and vivid account of this terrible winter that determined the fate of the war.