Karel Margry – författare

Kharkov, Ukraine’s second-largest city, was a major industrial hub and a key centre for Soviet tank development during the Second World War. Its strategic importance made it a focal point of intense conflict during Operation Barbarossa, changing hands four times between October 1941 and August 1943.The Germans first captured Kharkov in October 1941, but its factories and machinery had been evacuated. The Red Army liberated the city in May 1942 after heavy losses, with over 170,000 soldiers killed and 106,000 wounded. In February 1943, Field Marshal Erich von Manstein led a counter-offensive during the Third Battle of Kharkov, retaking the city through brutal urban combat, marking one of Germany’s last significant victories on the Eastern Front.However, in August 1943, the Red Army’s Belgorod–Kharkov offensive forced the Germans to surrender the city. This Fourth Battle of Kharkov, described by Winston Churchill as one of the war's decisive battles alongside Kursk and Orel, marked the turning point of Germany’s defeat in the East.Karel Margry’s analysis delves into these pivotal battles, highlighting their significance in shaping the outcome of Hitler’s invasion and underscoring the immense human cost of the Soviet-German conflict.

On the night of 7/8 April 1945, the Allies in the West launched Operation Amherst. The last airborne operation of the war in Europe, it saw some 700 men of the 3rd (French) and 4th (French) SAS Battalions, part of the Special Air Service Brigade, parachuted into north-eastern Holland. They were to assist the First Canadian Army’s advance to the North Sea by creating maximum confusion behind the German lines and securing vital road bridges.Dropped from a high altitude, in strong winds, and with navigation faltering, the men were widely dispersed, often landing in the wrong spot. But, nonetheless, the French went into battle with vigour and audacity, laying ambushes, attacking headquarters and seizing bridges. Although they were to be relieved by the ground forces within 72 hours, several sticks had to hold out for much longer before the ground troops reached them. It was 14 April – a full week after the landings – when the last men reported back in.Amherst was an operation that was costly for both sides. The two SAS battalions claimed a total of 269 enemy soldiers killed, 70 wounded and 187 taken prisoner; the actual number of Germans killed was in fact much lower, about 40. In material damage they claimed 29 enemy vehicles destroyed or captured and three railway lines cut. The French parachutists’ own losses added up to 33 killed, 35 wounded and 92 missing – a grand total of 160, meaning a loss rate of nearly a quarter of the men. Though Allied commanders at the time generally judged the operation a success, post-war assessment has been more critical.This book tells the full story of this little-known SAS operation. It is an account illustrated with a remarkable collection of rare combat photos, each of them accompanied by their present-day comparisons – the format for which After the Battle is famous.

In the history of Nazi concentration camps, and particularly labour camps, there is probably no place that bears the same stigma of wretchedness as 'Dora-Mittelbau' at Nordhausen. Located in the Harz mountains in central Germany, next to a quarry tunnel system in the Kohnstein mountain, it served to house thousands of slave workers for an underground factory known as the Mittelwerk, which produced three of Germany's best-known secret weapons: the V1 flying bomb, the V2 rocket and jet engines for the Me 262 and Ar 234 fighters. With over 20 kilometres of underground galleries, it was the largest underground factory in the world. Many of the inmates died in indescribable misery, being forced to extend the tunnels with meagre equipment and under ghastly conditions, sometimes not seeing daylight for weeks on end. Started in August 1943, Dora-Mittelbau in due course became the centre of a whole complex of underground factories in the Nordhausen area, with several subsidiary camps being set up. In all, of some 60,000 prisoners sent there between 1943 and 1945, 20,000 were driven to extinction to implement Nazi Germany's secret weapons programme, but they laboured late and in vain, for the products they yielded had little impact on the war. The V1 and V2 are the only weapons which cost more lives in production than in deployment: far more people died producing them than were killed from their impact in London, Antwerp and elsewhere.The history of Nordhausen, already gruesome in itself, ended in a crescendo of violence when, in the final weeks of the war, the surviving inmates were evacuated from the camps in death marches . One group of over a thousand men then became victim of one of the most horrendous of all Nazi atrocities. On April 13, 1945, just outside the town of Gardelegen, their SS camp guards, helped by local troops and Hitlerjugend, locked the prisoners in a big barn and set fire to the inside, burning those inside, killing them with hand-grenades, and shooting anyone who tried to escape from the burning, smoke-filled building. A total of 1,016 men died as a result. When discovered by American troops two days later, Gardelegen quickly became known as the site of one most notorious war crimes committed by the Nazis.In this book, Karel Margry recounts the history of Nordhausen concentration camp and of the Gardelegen massacre in full detail. Both stories are illustrated with unique Then and Now comparison photographs.The book contains the following two stories from ATB magazine:Issue 101: NordhausenAuthor: Karel Margry. 18,165 words, 118 black and white photos.Issue 111: The Gardelegen MassacreAuthor: Karel Margry. Text: 16,189 words, 78 black and white photos.Note:After the Battle s account of Nordhausen, when first published in 1998, was considered so accurate and comprehensive that the Nordhausen Camp Memorial asked whether they could translate it into German and use it as one of their brochures. Thus a special German edition of issue 101 appeared under the title Damals und Heute, which has been reprinted several times.

"The combination of past and contemporary pictures regarding battle locations is of a great service for those of us with a passion for history." — Globe at WarStalingrad was not only the most-crucial battle on the Eastern Front, it was the main turning point of the whole Second World War in Europe. The Third Reich had suffered setbacks earlier, notably at El Alamein in North Africa in October 1942, but the scale of the fighting on the Eastern Front was incomparably larger than any of the other war fronts and it was the fate of the armies there that decided the outcome of the global conflict. After the demise of the German 6. Armee at Stalingrad in February 1943 it was clear that Nazi Germany would lose the war.This book brings together three After the Battle stories devoted to that historic struggle. It opens with a detailed account of the fight for the city of Voronezh. Lying on the great Don river, it was a prime initial objective of the German summer offensive towards the Caucasus launched on June 28, 1942. Possession of Voronezh would secure an eastern anchor point for a northern defensive line needed for the southward advance to Stalingrad. The city was taken with relative ease in early July but, when the Soviets launched a counter-offensive, the Heeresgruppe Süd commander, Generalfeldmarschall Fedor von Bock, allowed his panzer and motorised divisions to be drawn into the protracted fight. This week-long delay – which infuriated Hitler – severely disrupted the timetable for the main offensive, and fatally contributed to the failure to seize Stalingrad in a surprise raid.The main part of the book is taken up by a comprehensive description of the gargantuan seven-month battle for Stalingrad itself. All stages are described in detail: the advance of the German armies to the city in August, the stubborn and heroic defense of the besieged Soviet 62nd Army against overwhelming German superiority in September-November; and the subsequent encirclement and annihilation of the doomed 6. Armee in the winter, ending in total capitulation on February 2, 1943.Due to the wholesale destruction of the embattled city, it was long thought impossible to apply After the Battle’s ‘then and now’ format to Stalingrad but with the help of a local expert and acknowledged student of the battle, Alexander Trofimov, we managed to match up numerous combat photos taken all over the city, giving full treatment to the months-long struggle for the city on the Volga. The same goes for Voronezh where we found another local expert, Sergey Popov, who achieved equally astounding comparisons. Without them, this book could not have been made.The German catastrophe at Stalingrad, with around 150,000 men killed or succumbing to the winter cold and around 100,000 taken prisoner (of whom only some 5,000 survived captivity), remained a national trauma in Germany. Coming to terms with the event proved difficult, the sorrow over the loss of so many German lives being surmounted by guilt over the fact that Germany had been the aggressor. In many ways, Stalingrad became a taboo, remembered in silence but avoided in public discussion. Illustrative of this is the fact that it took a full 50 years before a major feature film on Stalingrad could be produced in Germany. It was only in 1992 that the German film industry felt the time was ripe and produced and released Stalingrad, the first full-fledged war movie on the battle. We include the story of the making of this film as an epilogue to the main story.

Volume 2 of this two-volume history of Operation "Market-Garden" continues the story as XXX Corps links up with the 82nd Airborne at Nijmegen which leads to the dramatic and spectacular capture of the vital bridges there over the Waal river. But at Arnhem the tide of battle has already turned. The main force of lst Airborne is thrown back to the Oosterbeek perimeter, leaving John Frost's isolated force at the road bridge to fight it out till the end. As the Polish Brigade is dropped south of the Rhine, and the ground army desperately tries to relieve the beleaguered British paras, down in the south the Germans launch repeated attacks on the narrow corridor in an attempt to cut the Allied supply artery. As savage battles rage for possession of "Hell's Highway", the airborne battle is lost and on September 26 the survivors of lst Airborne are evacuated back across the Rhine.