Labelling the Second World War battles between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia on the Eastern Front as The War of the Century is asking for trouble. What about the First World War, not to mention the other theatres of the 1939-45 conflict? Laurence Rees argues that the brutality of the fighting was unprecedented and that the outcome, with the annihilation of the German troops, was pivotal to the Allies eventual victory. On both counts, he is absolutely right. The severe cold, hunger, shelling and hand-to-hand street-fighting decimated both sides and the casualties ran into millions. And, yes, Germany never did recover both physically and mentally. The supposedly unbeatable had been beaten. But does this make it a war of the century? To decontextualise the Eastern Front is to miss the bigger picture. This was not just a war between two competing ideologies--Communism and Nazism. The Russians, whatever their politics, were Britain's and America's allies; they may have had a separate private agenda in the war--which country didn't? (America only stepped off the fence in 1941 after Pearl Harbor) but they were on the right side and part of an overall allied effort. Moreover, Rees's position lets the Germans off the hook somewhat. It allows them to make the revisionist claim that they were fighting Communism--something that became a holy cause in the West in the post-war years. They weren't. They were Nazis fighting the Allies. End of story. Rees also goes on to make the somewhat bizarre claim that the German defeat unleashed the Holocaust against the Jews. This will come as a massive surprise to the millions of Jews who had been persecuted in the 10 years prior to 1943. It is true that the death camps went into overdrive after defeat in Russia, but this would almost certainly have happened if the Germans had won. The result on the Eastern Front was immaterial. However, there is also much to recommend in War of the Century. The comparisons between Hitler's Nazi Germany and Stalin's state capitalist USSR are well made. Repression and contempt for life existed on both sides. Rees has found much new material from the newly opened Soviet archives and has also turned up many eyewitnesses from both sides and their accounts provide a compellingly readable narrative. And for this alone the book is worth reading. At times it feels as if Rees is being wilfully controversial in order to be noticed. But he needn't have bothered because there was a fascinating book there anyway. --John Crace

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War of the Century: When Hitler Fought Stalin.

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