In a Russia raped by the German blitzkrieg, war created terrible necessities. But none was more terrible than that which threw into the battlefield a battalion of women - fighting women, scheduled to die.

The innocent and the perverted; the ignorant, the intellectual, all were there. And all were women, fighting a hopeless battle against outrageous odds, knowing that they faced only one fate worse than death... capture.

Many died, some fared worse, maimed by the sick urges and passions that follow in the trail of war - that claimed so many hapless victims among the tragic WOMEN'S BATTALION.

© Press Editorial Syndicate 1967
An original Mayflower publication
Published as a Mayflower Paperback 1967
Reprinted 1967 (twice), 1968, 1969, 1970

The sordid murder of a Polish prostitute would not normally have aroused much attention in Warsaw in 1942. But in this case all the evidence points to a German General as the murderer, or rather, to one of three generals: a Corps Commander, scion of the old Germany; his Chief of Staff, who concealed his true nature behind a mask of flippant irony; and a commander of the élite Nibelungen Division, who looked like a statue portraying heroism.

A similar crime was committed in Paris in July 1944, when the same three generals were assembled there. The investigators were on the point of proving their case when they were frustrated by the dramatic 'Night of the Generals' - the attempted coup against Hitler.

But in 1956 a third murder occured in Dresden...

HANS HELMUT KIRST made his name with the great Gunner Asch trilogy, a satire on German Army life, and became the most successful German author since the end of the last war. His novels have sold in staggering numbers throughout Europe.

Translated from the German by J Maxwell Brownjohn
First published in Great Britain 1963
First issued in Fontana Books 1965
Twelfth impression October 1974
© 1962 by Verlag Kurt Desch GmbH., München
English version © 1963 Wm.Collins Sons & Co. Ltd.