The Third Reich at War (170 page)

22. House-to-house fighting in Stalingrad at the end of 1942; but where have the houses gone?

23. The face of defeat: a German soldier is taken prisoner at Stalingrad in January 1943.

24. The long march into captivity: German soldiers pass before the ruined city of Stalingrad, January 1943.

25. Germany in flames: Allied air-raids on Hamburg in July and August 1943 destroyed a large part of the city and killed 40,000 of its inhabitants. When this photo was taken, on 2 December 1943, all that remained of much of the city was dust and rubble.

26. Strategic bombing caused widespread disruption of communications: a photo of Hamburg’s main railway station not long after the raids.

27. General Gotthard Heinrici (
right
) and Field-Marshal Günther von Kluge (left) plan the next retreat.

28. Red Army soldiers advancing on Warsaw in August 1944 pursue German troops running away from their shattered tank.

29. V-I pilotless bombs sometimes carried propaganda leaflets such as this: the message on the reverse told Londoners that they were being ‘continually blasted day and night by those mysterious flying meteors’. ‘What good are all your planes, warships and tanks against that new German weapon?’ it asked.

30. The gates of hell: workers going through the entrance to the underground factory where the V-2 rockets were made in the later stages of the war.

31. Hitler with officers of the 9th Army on a brief visit to Wriezen, behind the Oder front, 3 March 1945. With him, standing in the front row, from left: Wilhelm Berlin, Robert Ritter von Greim, Franz Reuss, Job Oderbrecht and Theodor Busse.

32. The German ‘Dad’s Army’: not all members of the ‘People’s Storm’ were as smartly dressed and well equipped as in this photograph taken in Hamburg on 29 October 1944, though many of them were probably as short-sighted.

33. The young were drafted in to the ‘People’s Storm’ as well: Joseph Goebbels meets a teenage soldier at Lauban, Lower Silesia, in March 1945.

34. Hermann Goring breakfasting in his Nuremberg cell on 26 November 1945. He committed suicide rather than face the hangman.