The Bitter End

As Hitler’s empire crumbled, the Eastern Front became a crucible of destruction—this is the definitive account of its final, brutal months. The world had never seen anything like the Eastern Front in World War II. In the so-called bloodlands between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union—from the Baltic in the north to the Balkans, the Crimea, and the Caucasus in the south—the two sides clashed in a series of titanic campaigns that involved millions of soldiers and entangled many more civilians. During the war’s last year, the Eastern Front descended into cataclysm as the Red Army forced the Germans into retreat and collapse. The Bitter End chronicles this chaotic final stage of World War II, distilling a sprawling conflict into a concise and highly readable narrative. In concert with the American and British invasion of Normandy in the West, the Soviets launched the war’s endgame with Operation Bagration in June 1944 and crushed the German center. It was Barbarossa in reverse as the Red Army killed or captured German forces by the hundreds of thousands. From there, Soviet offensives spread all along the Eastern Front—Finland, the Baltics, the Balkans, Romania—and inflicted defeat after defeat on Germany and its Axis allies. In early 1945, Soviet forces took Warsaw and drove the Germans westward out of Poland, along the way liberating concentration camps including Auschwitz. Shattered German forces attempted to regroup for a desperate showdown in Berlin, but the weight of the Red Army was too great, and after two weeks of street fighting, the Reich capital fell. A week later Germany surrendered. From Bagration to Berlin, from the Vistula to the Oder, from the Kremlin to Hitler’s bunker, The Bitter End reconstructs the final battles on the Eastern Front in a narrative covering war-defining operations but never losing sight of the human cost paid by soldiers in the tanks and foxholes and by innocent civilians in the villages, towns, and cities of Eastern Europe.