At the end of July - beginning of August 1941, in the area of the Ukrainian city of Uman, the 6th and 12th armies of the Southern Front were surrounded and almost completely destroyed. The Uman “cauldron” became one of the largest defeats of the Red Army. In the “cauldron” 6 Soviet corps and 17 divisions “burned out”, irretrievable losses amounted to 18.5 thousand people, and more than 100 thousand Red Army soldiers were captured. Many of them would then die in a clay quarry, a prisoner of war camp known as the “Uman Pit.” In addition to two army commanders - Lieutenant General Muzychenko and Major General Ponedelin (who was executed after the war by the verdict of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court), four corps commanders and eleven division commanders were captured. The Battle of Uman still remains one of the most poorly studied pages of the Great Patriotic War. This book is a unique chronicle of a bloody battle, based on materials from not only Soviet, but also German archives. A wide range of Wehrmacht documents allowed the author to look at the tragic history of the encirclement of the 6th and 12th armies through the eyes of the enemy, showing that the Germans perceived the Red Army soldiers as a formidable and dangerous enemy. The archives shed light both on the fatal circumstances that led to the death of two Soviet armies, and on the feat of thousands of unnamed soldiers and commanders who, with their courage, delayed the advance of German formations to the east and thus thwarted Hitler's blitzkrieg.