IMAGES OF BARBAROSSA

Images of Barbarossa includes photographs of Operation Typhoon, the attempt by three Panzer armies to capture Moscow. However, Soviet doggedness and one of the coldest Russian winters in living memory combined to stop the Germans at the gates of the Soviet capital, and in the process dashed any hopes of bringing the war on the Eastern Front to an end in 1942. Then, the Soviets unleashed a counter-attack along the front, under which the German armies buckled but managed to hold - just. Drawing on many previously unpublished images sourced from Russian archives, Christopher Ailsby recreates the experience of war on the Eastern Front in 1941: the choking dust and endless steppes of the Ukraine, the glutinous autumn and winter mud that made movement by wheeled and tracked vehicles all but impossible, and the numbing Russian Winter, which froze petrol and killed thousands of ill-equipped German soldiers. Away from the battlefield, Images of Barbarossa features the alrocities of the German SS and paramilitary units that followed the armies into the Soviet Union to implement the murderous racial policies of Nazism. Many of the images are haunting, and convey the horror and destructiveness of war on the Eastern Front.