The Fall of Hitler’s Third Reich

The year 1943 saw the tide of war turn decisively against the Third Reich. Germany’s reverses began with the Anglo-American invasion of North Africa in November 1942, culminating in the expulsion of Axis forces from Tunisia, and continued with the annihilation of the Sixth Army at Stalingrad. In the north, the siege of Leningrad was lifted, while at sea the combination of Allied air and naval power was slowly but surely winning the battle of the Atlantic. In July 1943, the Allies struck in Sicily, an invasion that coincided with the decisive armoured battle of Kursk, on the Russian front. With Sicily quickly secured, Allied forces moved on to establish a foothold on Italy, but there were to be no quick and easy victories here. The Italian campaign soon turned into a remorseless slogging match, and remained so until the end of the war.

In 1944, while the Red Army began the relentless advance that would take it all the way to Berlin, the Allies launched their long-awaited invasion of western Europe, the initial landing in Normandy being followed by a second D-Day in southern France. Despite their increasingly desperate plight, the Germans continued to fight doggedly, frustrating the Allied attempt to force a passage of the Rhine at Arnhem in September 1944 and launching a major counter-attack through the Ardennes in December. However, by March 1945 the western Allies were across the Rhine, and in the east the Russians were on the river Oder. In April, the siege of Berlin began. By the end of the month Hitler had committed suicide, and on 8 May Germany signed an unconditional surrender. The ‘Thousand-Year Reich’ had lasted just 12 years.

The Fall of Hitler’s Third Reich takes the reader from the peak of Nazi power in Europe, following the campaigns that led to the utter destruction of the German war machine. The course of the war’s final years is charted in a series of 50 stunning full colour maps supported by 60,000 words of text as well as colour and black and white illustrations. This work will be a worthy addition to the bookshelves of the serious military historian and the general reader alike.