Last Victory in Russia: The SS-Panzerkorps and Manstein's Kharkov Counteroffensive - February-March 1943

by George M. Nipe

Release Date: 01 January, 2000

Edition: Hardcover

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Only for a dedicated fan of the Waffen SS.

The book is well researched but extremely tedious. There is a mass of minor detail, fine if you are interested in the minutiae of the day to day fighting on the Eastern front during the winter of 1942 / 43 but if you want a good history book then look elsewhere.
The story is told only from the German side, the Soviets are only mentioned in passing. Every SS officer of any consequence gets a photo and a resume of his career achievements. Fine in itself, but we don't get to hear any of the nasty bits about the same gentlemen. We are told the details of their First war careers, their inter war adventures with the Freikorps and their passage into the Nazi party and ultimately the SS. The author lays particular stress on the vast number of decorations won by the SS soldiers in both World wars.
The war crimes committed by these same officers are not mentioned at all. Also, many of these SS men served in the concentration camps both before and after their service at the front. Only the creator of the Totenkopf (also the founder of the concentration camp system with it's attendant brutality), Theodor Eicke is mentioned as having served in the camps, (for more details see C.W. Sydnor's Soldiers of destruction). Sydnor details the story of the Totenkopf from beginning to end. This division in particular had a reputation for cruelty and barbarity which grew directly from the ethos of the concentration camps and from their common founder, Eicke.
It could be argued that this book is only concerned with the events at the Front during a particular period and that the rest is outside of the scope.
Given the level of detail and the amount of research involved in compiling this book I feel that the author must have had access to all of the details on the war criminals serving with these units and deliberately chose to ignore it.
I must therefore conclude that his intention is to glorify the SS rather than to write history.

Gripping

'Last Victory in Russia' is a well written detail-oriented look at the last great achievement of the German Armed Forces in World War Two ' the defense and retaking of the Eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkov. *A battle so vicious it produced more casualties than all American losses during the entire Vietnam war *. Knowing how badly he was outnumbered, outgunned and outsupplied, General Manstein assembled 4 of the most battle-worthy and prestigious combat divisions the German Wermacht could field for his operation ' the SS divisions Leibstandarte, Das Reich, and Totenkopf, and the elite Army division Grossdeutschland. In February of 1943 General Manstein unleashed the fury of his SS divisions on the 4 massive Russian armies defending the recently captured city of Kharkov. Employing the same rapid-fire, encirclement tactics used to such stunning success in the early stages of the Barbarossa campaign in 1941, Manstein and Hausser's SS divisions slashed, stomped and sliced their way through the ocean of Russian defensive works and retook Kharkov. Once the 'pincer movement' of the mechanized battle groups on the outskirts of the battle zone were complete, Hauser's SS divisions slowly ground the stunned Russian armies against the waiting Grossdeutschland and Leibstandarte divisions, which acted as an anvil. So complete was the defeat, and carried out with such ferocity, the Soviet high command re-thought the way it conducted both offensive and defensive maneuvers for the entire remainder of the war. The author of 'Last Victory in Russia', George Nipe, does a brilliant job of detailing the monumental task that faced Manstein and Hausser when it came to organizing the German offensive aimed at retaking Kharkov. With a flare for recreating the moment, Nipe reveals the logistical nightmare that Kharkov was for the Germans, and just how determined the German High Command was to retake the city. Nipe's work is at once analytical and detail-oriented, but not so much so that the average history buff will drown in statistics. Nipe brings forth the 'human element' in his work ' something many other books in the WWII genre seem to lack. For the battle of Kharkov is really about men, hundreds of thousands of men. The definitive work on this important battle, and absolutely essential reading for anyone interested in military history. The book takes a while to be delivered and is printed in limited numbers, but it's worth the wait if Amazon can track down a copy for you!