Stalingrad

A very dear and very well read friend of mine with no interest whatever in military history recommended Beevor's Stalingrad shortly after it came out. It looked very uninteresting years ago, when I skimmed it very rapidly, but only too interesting today. 

Up to three and a half million Soviet prisoners of war are said to have been starved to death by the Germans, though some historians dispute this figure and think it was fewer than two million. According to Soviet records quoted by Anthony Beevor, 470,000 were killed by the Red Army as punishment for retreating.