In February 1943, German forces surrendered to the Red Army at Stalingrad and the tide of war turned. By May 1945 Soviet soldiers had stormed Berlin and brought down Hitler's regime. Total War follows the fortunes of these fighters as they liberated Russia and the Ukraine from the Nazi invader and fought their way into the heart of the Reich. It reveals the horrors they experienced — the Holocaust, genocide and the mass murder of Soviet POWs — and shows the Red Army, brutalized by war, taking its terrible revenge on the German civilian population. For the first time Russian veterans are candid about the terrible atrocities their own army committed. But they also describe their struggle to raise themselves from the abyss of hatred. Their war against the Nazis — which in large part brought the Second World War in Europe to an end — is a tarnished but deeply moving story of sacrifice and redemption.

All offers of surrender from Leningrad must be rejected, wrote Adolph Hitler on September 29, 1941. In this struggle for survival, we have no interest in keeping even a proportion of the city's population alive. During the 900-day siege that followed, the German High Command deliberately planned to eradicate the city's population through starvation. By the time the siege ended in January 1944, almost a million people had died. In Leningrad, military historian Michael Jones chronicles the horrors of this epic siege, while at the same time portraying the astonishing power of the human will in the face of even the direst catastrophe. Drawing on newly available sources, Leningrad is a riveting account of one of the most harrowing sieges of world history.