BLOODLANDS by Timothy Snyder

[Erwin]

Just finished this very well-researched and detailed account of East Front "activities". 

The book attempts a huge scope as Tim's premise is that one cannot understand the East Front and what Hitler, Himmler and the Germans were attempting without first understanding what happened in the 30's during Stalin's purgers and mass starvation projects which (mostly) victimized the Ukrainians - stealing all the Ukrainian grain to export for foreign currency so as to industrialize the USSR (primarily to benefit Russians) and causing several million to die from starvation etc.  One gets the sense that the atrocities of the 30's are what prepared the peoples living in the Poland, Byelorussia and Ukraine (as well as the Baltics and elsewhere) to accept the German atrocities and Holocaust as they had already been shell-shocked and brutalized by Stalin's actions.

The book has a large section on Partisan activities that may be useful as a prep reading for the upcoming CMRT module that includes Partisans.  The two Warsaw uprisings are also dealt with in great detail for those interested in scenario creation and knowing who the most famous players were in the Partisan and Warsaw stories.

While Tim is an academic, his opus is very readable, easy to comprehend and doesn't overpower one.