The Fall of Hitler's Fortress City: The Battle for Konigsberg, 1945

By Isabel Denny

Book Overview

Heroism and tragedy in the East, in the face of the Red Army's onslaught . . . In 1945, in the face of the advancing Red Army, two and a half million people were forced out of Germany's most easterly... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1510712402
• ISBN13: 9781510712409
• Release Date: February 2017
• Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
• Length: 264 Pages
• Weight: 1.04 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.1" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Well Written

This is a well written book and was very helpful to me in understanding the confused series of events which led up to the Battle of Konigsberg in 1945. I would agree with some of the previous reviewers that the author does not go into a lot of detail about the battle itself and I was suprised that General Otto Lasch's memoir of the battle (SO FIEL KONIGSBERG) wasn't used. Of course Lasch's book isn't available in English and is hard to find in German. In other words, the author might not have been able to find a copy. The author is at her strongest when she puts this catastrophic battle into the context of East Prussian history. Too many drum and bugle corps historians skip that leaving you wondering what all the fuss was about. She also handles the spectacular atrocities associated with the Red Army's sweep through East Prussia in a balanced, professional way. A lot of professional historians have deplored what is coming to be called "the pornography of violence" and Ms. Denny doesn't allow her narrative to be bogged down in accounts of naked, gang-raped women nailed to barn doors in the form of the Cross (which supposedly happened at Nemmersdorf and elsewhere). The author writes well and does a good job of reconstructing the grand sweep of the Red Army's advance into the Third Reich. If she'd developed her account of the actual battle itself more thoroughly, I'd have given her five stars instead of four. This book is definitely worth having even if it isn't the last word on the Battle of Konigsberg itself.