LIKE A CLIFF IN THE OCEAN

Unit history of the 3.SS Panzer Division "Totenkopf", written by Karl Ullrich, a Knight's Cross with Oak Leaves recipient and later commander of the 5.SS-Panzer-Division "Wiking". This comprehensive one-volume history follows the division through its formation in 1939 to its last bitter days of difficult fighting against the advancing masses of the Red Army in the East. With the exception of the French Campaign in 1940, the division fought entirely on the Eastern Front and earned a reputation as one of the most capable divisions of the entire Eastern Army, especially on the defence. The division became famous during its stalwart defence of the Demjansk Pocket in 1941-1942. In early 1943, it participated in some of the most famous battles and campaigns of the war: the Battle for Kharkov and Operation Citadel. It then spent most of late 1943 and all of 1944 in the conduct of a mobile defence along the Eastern Front, where it became a mechanised "fire brigade" at the hot spots of the fighting. It finished the war in yet another hot spot: the fighting to relieve the beleaguered city of Budapest and the desperate struggles to keep the Soviets out of Austria. After surrendering to the Americans, the division was then handed over to the Russians, where its members faced years of captivity. Karl Ullrich, long-time divisional engineer and commander of the combat-engineer battalion, presents an almost day-by-day account of the division that is based on extensive use of unit documents - war diaries, operational maps and operations orders. He couples the overview of the fighting with a significant number of first-hand accounts, both contemporaneous and written just for this volume. While there are other English-language histories of the division, this is the first one to be presented from the viewpoint of the veterans themselves. A quality Fedorowicz publication.