It is a historical fact that Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect, Minister of Armaments and most devoted disciple, lost a brother in the Battle for Stalingrad. It was a crushing blow that elicited strong emotion from one who was perceived as a black-hearted thug. But would one of the Third Reich’s most powerful men allow his younger and only brother to perish on the wind-swept banks of the Volga without so much as an effort to bring him home, or would he have used his considerable power to intervene as other members of the Party were so cravenly wont to do? At Any Price tells the story of what actually happened, though evidence in corroboration of these events is frightfully difficult to produce. In these pages Speer hires a group of experienced paratroopers to travel to the scene of World War Two’s most savage fighting with pointed instructions to bring Ernst Speer back.
Unfortunately for the Minister, the limitations of his power are heartily plumbed as the Red Army launches its biggest counter-offensive to date in the war. The German paratroops, led by the undaunted Major Sylvester Schild, fly into the seething cauldron of Stalingrad to face what becomes an impossible task.
Follow the paratroopers on a mission where they don’t just have to fear the Bolshevik hoards, but also their own Gestapo as political wrangling in Berlin between their employer Speer and other Nazi Party elites catches up with them. Accompany them as they are beaten and assaulted from the besieged City of Stalingrad back across the Russian steppe from whence they had come. Witness their crushing discovery of racial extermination on the Russian Front. And come to grips as they did that all at home would never be the same, regardless of who was going to win the war.
Exceptionally researched and vividly portrayed, At Any Price dares tell a tale from both the German soldier’s point of view and that of Hitler’s inner circle. Hear the ring of jackboots at Prinz Albrechtstrasse 8 as Himmler focuses the cross-hairs on his own comrades in arms, experience Berlin’s most bawdy and clandestine nightlife, feel the cruelty and desperation of battle on the Eastern Front as the unstoppable force of the German juggernaut meets the immovable object of the Red Army. The entire theater of war, from Paris to Stalingrad and from Narvik to the African desert, is brought to life as can only be done by one whose footsteps have traced the still-extant tank-ruts on Russia’s steppe.
