The outcome of the Second World War was decided on the Eastern Front. Denied a swift victory over Stalin’s Red Army, Hitler’s Wehrmacht found itself in a bloody, protracted struggle from late 1941 that it was ill-prepared to fight. Although many pictorial books have been published on Germany’s hapless invasion of the Soviet Union, they are typically a collection of soldiers’ snapshots or ‘official’ photographs taken by Propagandakompanien (PK) reporters. This book is different. It contains an extraordinary personal record of the war captured by a professional photographer, Walter Grimm, who served in the German Army in a communications unit. David Mitchelhill-Green brings Grimm’s previously unpublished photographs together with a carefully researched introduction. The 300 evocative black and white images provide an absorbing insight into the daily life and privations of the ordinary German soldier amid the maelstrom of history’s largest conflict. The Ukrainian people, many of whom initially welcomed the Germans as liberators, freeing them from the yoke of Bolshevik oppression, are also chronicled in this fascinating study of the fighting in Ukraine.
IMAGES OF WAR: FIGHTING IN UKRAINE A Photographer at War
RRP: £14.99
Winter Sale: £3.19
A useful addition to the ever-growing Images of War series, this title covers the Eastern Front in WW2, depicting the war, in good clear photographs, from the viewpoint of a motorised telephone line and pole-laying unit, that were taken by a professional photographer, conscripted into the German army in 1940 and posted to Ukraine 1941-1943. Of particular interest to the military vehicle specialist will be the huge range of vehicles in use by this unit, from French lorries and half tracks to German vehicles of every kind, including tractors and Russian lorries.
In stock