General Heinz Guderian (1888–1954) was the true author of blitzkrieg as propounded in his book Achtung Panzer (1937).

These paradoxes became very apparent during the Warsaw Rising of 1944. The Polish Home Army had assumed that it was fighting ‘the Germans’, and the appalling massacres of civilians that took place are generally denounced as ‘German atrocities’. Yet the picture looks rather different if examined in detail. The Wehrmacht was loath to release units

Nowhere was this Nazi attitude towards the Eastern Front more evident than in the Warsaw Rising of August 1944. An Allied capital containing nearly a million people had risen against

It terms of size, if one counts all available formations, it numbered several hundred thousands, and was hence the third largest army on the continent before the Normandy landings.

An important geographical distinction also operated. When Poland was attacked, in 1939, the Führer made a point of ordering his generals to act with ‘the harshest cruelty’. In effect he was inviting the Wehrmacht to ignore the conventions of civilized warfare when fighting in the East. He repeated the injunction in 1941 before the attacks on

British soldiers were threatened with court martial for opining (quite truthfully) that the Katyn massacres were a Soviet atrocity.

Front were so enormous that peremptory

Many years later, a debate was sparked in post-war Germany over the ‘barbarization’ of soldiers on the Eastern Front.22 It was widely believed that the Wehrmacht, unlike the SS, had generally upheld the standards of good soldiering, and that ordinary German soldiers had not been guilty of serious atrocities. This myth was easily shown to be false.

It appears to be possible, therefore, that the Red Army’s self-inflicted losses exceeded the total number of battle deaths of the British and US armies combined (see pp. 106–7).26