STALINGRAD...an eyewitness report of World War II's most decisive battle. Drafted into the German infantry when he was scarcely out of school, Benno Zieser fought his way deep into Soviet Russia--advancing, retreating, digging in, destroying tanks with hand grenades, battling snipers, killing the enemy in hand-to-hand combat. Outnumbered and outmaneuvered, he and his platoon struggled on, till their bravery was no longer an act of patriotism but a desperate effort to survive. Few of them did. At Stalingrad, the Wehrmacht soldiers reached the end of the line: nothing could spring the giant trap set by Russian crack troops closing in on them. Zieser's account of the war's most brutal battle is intensely moving and honest--a personal ordeal with a universal meaning. On the last day of January, 1943, the German Sixth Army surrendered to the Russians at Stalingrad. After a winter campaign of unparalleled horror and hardship, the Wehrmacht was beaten. THE ROAD TO STALINGRAD is a shattering eyewitness account of that lost battle--written by a survivor. Benno Zieser was drafted at the age of nineteen and fought in the infantry at Stalingrad. In this book he tells of his first naive enthusiasm--then the shocking realities: The frozen wastes of an unconquerable continent...gutted roads strewn with abandoned equipment...the anonymous graves by the wayside...the colossal fraud behind Hitler's promise of victory. Not since All QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT has a German author written such a powerful indictment of war--but Benno Zieser's book is fact, not fiction.