This massacre became the longest battle of the Great Patriotic War, which lasted for a year and a half, from September 1941 to March 1943. Both sides declared this bloody battle their victory - the Nazis even established a special award, the so-called “Demyansk Shield”. It was near Demyansk that a large German group was first surrounded and the first elite of the SS division “Totenkopf” was killed, but the Red Army also lost hundreds of thousands of soldiers and up to a thousand tanks here. Why was the “Demyansk bridgehead” never liquidated, and why did the brilliantly started operation of our troops turn into a months-long positional meat grinder? Whose fault was it that a victory was missed that could have changed the course of the war? How did the Germans manage to survive in complete encirclement, establishing supplies to the “Demyansk fortress” by air, then unblocking the “cauldron”, breaking through and holding a 40-kilometer “corridor”, and a year later, in an organized manner, withdrawing their group from under attack? And is it true that this “Pyrrhic victory” of the Wehrmacht ultimately turned into the Stalingrad disaster, that it was precisely because of the huge losses of military transport aviation near Demyansk that the Luftwaffe was unable to build a reliable “air bridge” for the encircled army of Paulus?.. First detailed The study of the Battle of Demyansk provides comprehensive answers to all these questions.