A stunning war novel, unconditionally recognized as a classic of the genre. The terrible truth about one of the most brutal battles of the Great Patriotic War. The bloody horror of the Eastern Front through the eyes of the Germans. Beginning of 1942. The remnants of the retreating Wehrmacht units are surrounded in the city of Kholm by superior forces of the Red Army. For 105 days, the German garrison fought off the desperate attacks of Soviet infantry and tanks, bleeding, losing more than a third of its personnel in the Kholm “cauldron” (virtually all the rest were wounded), but having fulfilled Hitler’s “stop order”: “to provide fanatically stubborn resistance to the enemy ” and “hold the front until the last soldier...” This poignant novel is “trench truth” in German, a brutal and honest story about the horrors of war, about life and death on the front line, about self-sacrifice and devotion to duty - about those who fought bravely and died for Ungerechte Tat (wrong cause).