The Retreat: Hitler’s First Defeat by Michael Jones

The author writes, “On 15 December 1941, German soldier Heinz Otto Fausten fled from a Soviet tank attack on his retreating column. Risking his life, he later returned to one of the baggage carts to retrieve his diary. Fausten was in an elite Wehrmacht unit – the 1st Panzer Division – the troops who had spearheaded Adolf Hitler’s assault on Moscow. Now, as the unit collapsed all around him, in a hellish retreat in extreme winter weather, Fausten felt his experience to be so remarkable that he should record and preserve it.”


In December 1941, Joseph Stalin launched a counter offensive and drove the German armies from Moscow making this the Wehrmacht’s first failure of World War II. Read the dramatic story here. Michael Jones plans to follow this book with a companion volume, Total War, telling the story of the fighting from Stalingrad to Berlin.