“Festung” (“fortress”) is how the Wehrmacht command called the cities surrounded by the Red Army, which Hitler ordered to defend to the last soldier. The capital of Silesia, the city of Breslau was little like a fortress, but this did not stop the Nazi leadership from proclaiming it an “impregnable citadel” in February 1945. For eighty days, the besieged garrison and Volkssturm fighters offered desperate resistance to the Red Army, holding down the actions of 13 Soviet divisions. Hitler even appointed Breslau Gauleiter Karl Hanke as the last Reichsführer of the SS. The rebellious city, which found itself deep in the Soviet rear, capitulated only on May 6, 1945, after the Fuhrer’s suicide and the fall of Berlin. Echoing Goebbels’ propaganda, which praised the “miracle of Breslau,” Western authors still compare its defense with the feat of Stalingrad. In Soviet times, they tried to forget about this episode. A new book by a popular historian, author of the best-selling books “Hitler’s Penal Battalions” and “The Demyansk Cauldron” breaks this conspiracy of silence - relying on sources previously inaccessible to the Russian-speaking reader, Andrei Vasilchenko restores the history of the battle for the last fortress of the Reich, one one of the longest and bloodiest battles of World War II.