After Stalingrad: Seven Years as a Soviet Prisoner of War

Adelbert Holl

Mar 2016 · Pen and Sword

About this ebook

This WWII memoir of a Nazi infantryman captured at Stalingrad offers a rare firsthand account of life inside Soviet POW camps.

The Battle of Stalingrad has been studied and recalled in exhaustive detail ever since the Red Army trapped the German 6th Army in the ruined city in 1942. But most of these accounts finish at the end of the battle, with columns of tens of thousands of German soldiers disappearing into Soviet captivity. Their fate is rarely described. But in After Stalingrad, German infantryman Adelbert Holl vividly recounts his seven-year ordeal as a prisoner in the Soviet camps.

As Holl moves from camp to camp across the Soviet Union, he provides an unsparing view of the prison system and its population of ex-soldiers. The Soviets treated German prisoners as slave laborers, working them exhaustively, in often appalling conditions. He describes the daily life in the camps: the crowding, the dirt, the cold, the ever-present threat of disease, the forced marches, and the indifference or outright cruelty of the guards.

Ratings and reviews

This an excellent book of dedicated perseverance of a soldier & soldiers who remained loyal to their homeland & combat comrads. Under the harshest conditions these men mentally kept themselves sane while others succumbed to a selfish state of survival & allowed treason in expectation of better tratment. This book explains the brutality of being POW in Russia but it also defines the German soldier that stands for a cause that defines him as soldier.

factual

About the author

During many years working in several senior official positions in Berlin - including spells as provost marshal and British governor of Spandau prison - Tony Le Tissier has accumulated a vast knowledge of the campaign the led up to the fall of Berlin. He has researched every aspect of the 1945 battle for the city in unprecedented detail and has published a series of outstanding books on the subject - The Battle of Berlin 1945, Farewell to Spandau, Berlin Then and Now, Zhukov at the Oder, Slaughter at Halbe, The Third Reich Then and Now, With Our Backs to Berlin, Death Was Our Companion, Berlin Battlefield Guide: Third Reich and Cold War and The Siege of Kstrin 1945: Gateway to Berlin.