Two bestsellers in one volume! The best German novels about the Second World War, long recognized as classics of the genre. The bloody “trench truth” of the Wehrmacht. The hell of the Eastern Front through the eyes of German penal prisoners and encircled death row prisoners. They go through all the circles of front-line hell together with Penal Battalion 999, which the Nazis themselves dubbed the “ascension team”, because, unlike the penal units of the Red Army, here it is impossible to “atone with blood” and there is only one way out of the damned Strafbataillon 999 - to a mass grave. They are bleeding in the Kholm “cauldron”, fulfilling Hitler’s merciless “stop order”: “to provide fanatically stubborn resistance to the enemy” and “to hold the front until the last soldier.” They realize with horror that all Goebbels’s incantations about their “racial superiority” over the “Ivans” are propaganda nonsense, that Russians fight and die for their Motherland, and Germans for ungerecht Tat (wrong cause). Contents: Heinz Konzalik. 999th Penal Battalion Reiss Schneider. Suicide bombers of the eastern front

The bloody “trench truth” of the Wehrmacht. The underworld of the Eastern Front through the eyes of German penal prisoners and encircled death row prisoners. They go through all the circles of front-line hell together with Penal Battalion 999, which the Nazis themselves dubbed the “ascension team”, because, unlike the penal units of the Red Army, here it is impossible to “atone with blood” and There is only one way out of the damned Strafbatallion 999 - to a mass grave.

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 carried out 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 cruel 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).