The author compares biographies of Hitler and Stalin, looking for the similarities, and analyzing the psychology of the war as a collision of characters. The author compares strategic decisions, the good ones, the bad ones and obvious blunders made by both sides, and how they led to the final tall in terms of the war results and massive human losses of both nations.
He analyzes the records left by the historians and memoirs of the participants on both sides to build big picture of what had happened. But he also offers anecdotal stories of Russian and German regular folks like me and you who found themselves in the mutual slaughter. There are stories of young communists trained to be spies, and of a general who committed suicide to avoid capture, the excerpts from the letters German soldiers sent home to their Hausfraus, and a story of the group of captured German soldiers lined up by the side of the road in their summer uniform in the midst of Cruel Russian winter, falling on the ground one by one and literally freezing to death.
The author takes on ugly sides of war (as if there was a nice side), omitted in the Soviets history textbooks. He tells the story of Moscowites fleeing the Capital in panic and looting, the stories of the Soviet troops set behind the front line of their compatriots and shooting those trying to retreat.
Great book, highly recommended. Buy The Greatest Battle: Stalin, Hitler, and the Desperate Struggle for Moscow That Changed the Course of World War II
from Amazon.
