Writing the Nazi-Soviet War

On 28 September 1941 Alois Scheuer, a German soldier on the eastern front, attempted to write to his family about his experience of war. Like many of the soldiers in the Ostheer, Scheuer had endured enormous hardships, both psychically and mentally, but as he began his letter the powerful emotions and harsh reality of the war in which he was involved proved too much. ‘What I have experienced and lived through in this quarter of a year in Russia I cannot all put into words. There is much I would like to forget and never be reminded of again.’ ¹ For the men who experienced it, a desire to forget about the war was understandable. The atrocities that they endured, and forced others to endure, were horrendous. For the same reasons, however, a comprehensive record of the war is essential.

Hitler’s war in the east constituted the largest and most costly conflict in history, yet until the 1990s it was largely eclipsed in the West by a focus on the Anglo-American experience of the war. Whether the Soviet role in the Second World War was a victim of Cold War rivalry or, as one historian once told me, ‘we study our own history first’, there can be no denying that research into the Nazi-Soviet war got off to a slow start. The past 25 years have, however, seen a positive shift aided by the access to archives in Yeltsin’s Russia (less so under Putin), the best-selling success of books such as Anthony Beevor’s Stalingrad, and the clear opportunity for scholars to explore a wealth of new ground, including many ‘forgotten battles’ in the east. ² Seventy years on from the war, a certain renaissance in the literature concerning the Nazi-Soviet war is well under way and each year we now see multiple new titles, some of which I will discuss here as an indication of the current state of the field.

Two recent books by Stephen Fritz (Ostkrieg) ³ and Christian Hartmann (Operation Barbarossa) ⁴ take a fresh panoramic approach to the entirety of the Nazi-Soviet conflict, but in doing so have each recast Hitler’s war from a new and long overdue perspective. Both Fritz and Hartmann set out to combine Hitler’s war of annihilation with the military campaign. Previously most of the Anglo-American literature covering the eastern front from 1941 to 1945 dealt exclusively with the Ostheer’s campaigns and battles, while neglecting the parallel war waged by the Wehrmacht and German security forces. ⁵ By contrast, German-language literature tended towards the opposite approach, writing at length on the crimes of the German occupation in the east with little interest in the military campaigns, as if the progress of the war had little bearing on the radicalization of Nazi policy. ⁶ Fritz and Hartmann have now each provided a single-volume work which successfully combines each aspect of the war.

Hartmann’s study is a ‘beginner’s guide’ to the war in the east, which achieves a remarkable amount in a small number of pages and lends itself nicely to undergraduate courses. It is also not limited to the German perspective and, in spite of its title, explores the war from beginning to end, not just Operation Barbarossa. Hartmann may be unknown to anglophone audiences, but his tremendous body of work in German, especially with regard to the German army and the war of annihilation, gives him a unique expertise for such a project. While the German experience of the war makes for a somewhat stronger discussion, the book is not uneven and the Soviet side is equally represented. The chapters on the military campaign are by necessity too short to attempt anything more than the broadest of outlines, but as a result the scale and complexity of the war is somewhat lost. Yet for a pocket book of this kind much inevitably has to be skipped over – a necessary evil for anyone trying to summarize the largest conflict in history into the shortest number of pages. Still, as anyone who teaches undergraduate history will know, it is precisely its small size that means students may actually take the time to read it, and Hartmann has done a great service with this succinct account.

By contrast, Stephen Fritz’s 640-page Ostkrieg will probably have the opposite effect on students, but its size and focus (it deals exclusively with the German war effort) make it the best work yet produced to convey the complexity and scale of Hitler’s war in the east. Fritz’s expert combining of the military campaigns and the war of annihilation is its greatest strength. Treating these as separate has prevented the identification of key contextual factors which motivated or radicalized many areas of Nazi policy. In the military sphere, assessing a battle’s outcome – much less a whole campaign – necessitates an understanding of the strategic circumstances in which it takes place: the economic, political, ideological as well as the military. Here Fritz excels. Ostkrieg has a refined balance and the analysis is routinely sharp, incisive, and measured. The sections on the war of annihilation incorporate an enormous historiography in German – and one that frequently produces more debate than consensus – but here again Fritz’s treatment is judicious and fair. It reflects what is, in many ways, the real strength of Ostkrieg: the condensing of a vast array of information into a highly readable narrative that recognizes the mutual importance of Germany’s military and annihilation campaigns. Each radicalized the other, which has led Fritz to some original insights and made Ostkrieg the best summary account of Hitler’s war against the Soviet Union. ⁷

Of course in a work the scale of Ostkrieg one is bound to encounter differences of opinion and Fritz’s emphasis on 1942 as the crucial year in Germany’s war in the east differs from my own work on 1941. ⁸ Fritz is certainly not the first to make this case and there is a body of research to support some of these contentions, but I would dispute his conclusion that Germany came ‘absurdly close [. . .] to taking not one but all its objectives’ in 1942. ⁹ The Stalingrad campaign did not suddenly go wrong from one day to the next, and, as the works of Glantz and House (reviewed below) have shown, Germany was never close to victory in southern Russia. ¹⁰ It is this one section of the book where the astute consideration of strategic factors, which so successfully governs the narrative elsewhere, is absent. The flaws in Hitler’s 1942 campaign were a product of the unlearned lessons of 1941 and compounded by the strategic incompetence of the German high command. The same hubris, the same overestimation of German strengths, the same ignorance of logistics, and, critically, the utter dismissal of Soviet operational proficiency were all present. As a result, Army Group South’s impressive gains were never sustainable and only plunged the Ostheer into an even deeper crisis than the one faced in 1941.

On a more minor note, in the discussion of the war of annihilation I would add an important qualification to the suggested figure of only 5 per cent of the Ostheer being involved in serious crimes in the east. ¹¹ Firstly, there is no hard evidence for this much debated figure; it only reflects Rolf-Dieter Müller’s personal estimation. Even if Fritz accepts such an approximation, it would be better to make its contested status and less than empirical grounding clearer. To my mind such a figure is problematic because our understanding of criminal behaviour within the Wehrmacht has typically been much too restrictive. If we count all actions on the part of German soldiers which were conducted with the direct intent of causing Soviet civilian deaths, we can probably agree that the number of war criminals in the Wehrmacht may have been a rather small percentage. However, countless actions undertaken by everyday German soldiers in the east resulted in innocent deaths even though that result was not the initial intension. The ubiquitous stealing of civilian food and winter clothing resulted in untold deaths, but these are seldom considered as war crimes and do not factor in such estimations. This highlights the problem of what we understand a war crime to be, but in my opinion, however one understands it, a figure of 5 per cent allows far too much criminality to go unrecognized.

Quibbles aside, Ostkrieg remains a towering achievement. What Fritz has shown is that the Nazi-Soviet war cannot be understood either as a military campaign or as a war of annihilation without the essential context of their mutually supporting, and radicalizing, roles. It is the best single-volume text available on Hitler’s war in the east.

In Germany, operational histories are seldom attempted because of a long-standing taboo against military history. On the other hand, in the Anglo-American world much of what has been written in the decades immediately after the war is actively misleading owing to the uncritical reliance on German generals’ memoirs. Until the mid-1960s there was no public or scholarly access to the German military archives, so the generals were able to dominate the narrative of the war through their best-selling works. The predominance of these views went largely unchallenged right up through the 1970s, which established an orthodoxy that scholars have been seeking to correct ever since. At the same time the continuing popularity of books such as Guderian’s Panzer Leader and Manstein’s Lost Victories reinforces the wrong lessons over and over again. ¹² Few would be surprised that the generals sought to disassociate themselves from involvement in the crimes of the National Socialist state, but their duplicity went much further. The generals not only sought to appear non-criminal in the new post-Nazi world, they wanted to be embraced for their supposed opposition to Nazism. This set the tone for a complete reinvention of their wartime role. In the military sphere Hitler made the military mistakes they advised against, whereas they directed the operations that resulted in Germany’s great triumphs. Of course this was sometimes true, but not always, and only professional historians working from archival material can tell the difference.

Craig Luther’s exhaustive new work Barbarossa Unleashed focuses on the planning and execution of the German invasion in the summer of 1941. ¹³ Researched over a ten-year period, Luther’s work reconstructs the early weeks of the campaign in meticulous detail and exemplifies the balance to be struck between including the voice of the generals and maintaining a critical objectivity. Luther, for example, points out that Guderian’s decision to seize and hold the easterly town of Yel’nya in late July 1941 was achieved at the expense of his orders to link up with Hoth’s Panzer Group 3 and close the vital pocket around Smolensk. No such conclusion could be drawn from Guderian’s memoir, where the panzer general talked only about the need to establish a springboard for the coming attack on Moscow and ignored the fact that no such decision for the next stage of the campaign had yet been reached. Indeed Luther’s critical work is a sweeping corrective of the conventional interpretation of the Barbarossa campaign in which he repeatedly highlights the disparity between means and ends within Army Group Centre. ¹⁴ His operational narrative cannot be faulted at any substantive level.

Beyond his first-rate ‘top-down’ focus on operational factors, an even more important contribution is offered by Luther’s pioneering investigation into the German soldier’s experience of the Barbarossa campaign. Study of the German soldier’s role in the Nazi-Soviet war remains an enduring hole in the literature, and only Stephen Fritz’s excellent study Frontsoldaten ¹⁵ has given us a credible view of the war from below. Luther took the opportunity to consult the last surviving veterans in Germany, conducting numerous interviews and undertaking voluminous personal correspondence. There has also been a scrupulous effort to incorporate anything written by former soldiers (diaries, letters, or memoirs) which pertains to Army Group Centre in the summer of 1941. Of course some of this is problematic, especially given the post-war tendency of veterans to assimilate public memories and apply contemporary norms in retrospect to their actions. Not surprisingly, therefore, some of the evidence presented in chapter 9, dealing with the criminality of Hitler’s war in the east, finds much fault with the Wehrmacht high command but leaves the German solider largely exonerated of wrongdoing. Still, the insights of German veterans are for other aspects of the book a goldmine of new material. Luther has probed beneath the surface, asking questions other studies have not. What was the diet of the troops in the east? How did they spend their free time? How did they react to the demands placed upon them? Such discussion contributes greatly to our understanding of who these men were and how they endured the war the way they did. Luther also allows for a wide variety of responses to his discussion topics (often with long sets of block quotations), empowering the reader to draw their own conclusions and placing the German soldier beyond a generic, one-dimensional representation. The lengthy quotations of primary material from veterans also give Barbarossa Unleashed an originality that elevates it to the status of a record in itself.

The combination of ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ approaches makes Luther’s work a landmark study of Operation Barbarossa. He tells the story from both ends of the spectrum and with so much new first-person material that his narrative achieves a measure of readability that even those experienced with Barbarossa will find compelling.

A parallel perspective on the German soldier is presented by Sönke Neitzel and Harald Welzer in their book Soldaten, ¹⁶ which focuses on recorded surveillance protocols of German soldiers while interned as prisoners of war. The opportunity here was to discover new insights into what the German soldiers’ world was like, how they made sense of it, and, importantly, to what extent they might be considered National Socialists. Given the prospect of reading candid conversations by German soldiers, uncensored by a post-war and post-Nazi world, the protocols are a remarkable find. What they reveal is equally remarkable. The casual, even enthusiastic, approach to violence is clear and unambiguous. Indeed, there often seems to be little distinction made between acts of violence necessitated by war and acts of violence perpetrated for much more base motivations such as greed, lust, or the pleasure of violence itself. Certainly the soldiers did not feel inhibited by their violent behaviour, and in many conversations the dynamic seems to have encouraged such stories, receiving them as a form of popular entertainment or mutual acceptance. This no doubt encouraged hyperbole, but the evidence still overwhelmingly points to a culture of violent norms unimaginable in contemporary Western society. In this respect Neitzel and Welzer’s study is as revealing as it is disturbing, and informs new research on the criminality of the everyday Landser, especially in the east. What may be equally noteworthy is how Neitzel and Welzer account for this behaviour and their rejection of ideology as a primary source of motivation:

Abstract concepts like ‘global Jewish conspiracy’, ‘Bolshevist promotion of genetic inferiority,’ or even the ‘National Socialist Volk community’ played only an ancillary role. As a rule German soldiers were not ‘ideological warriors.’ Most were fully apolitical. [. . .] In our view, the decisive factor in the atrocities discussed in this book was general realignment from a civilian to a wartime frame of reference. It is more significant than all issues of worldview, disposition, and ideology. [. . .] This conclusion may seem somewhat lapidary in light of the atrocities soldiers committed, but war creates a context for events and actions in which people do things they never would have otherwise. Within this context, soldiers could murder Jews without being anti-Semites and fight fanatically for the fatherland without being National Socialists. It is high time to stop overestimating the effects of ideology. ¹⁷

The social construct of violence in a wartime setting should perhaps feature more in our discussions of the Wehrmacht, but in addition to, rather than as a replacement for, ideology as a principal form of motivation. Despite the authors’ conclusions, the book shows there is simply too much about the propensity of Nazi Germany’s soldiers to kill and terrorize that remains exceptional and, by comparison to other wars, cannot be identified with similar transitions from a civilian to a wartime environment. This is not to invalidate the thesis that such a transition takes place or that it makes killing much easier – in that sense Neitzel and Welzer’s explanation is an important contribution – but its impact cannot account for the scale of the Wehrmacht’s killing to the large exclusion of major radicalizing factors such as Nazi ideology. The book’s extraordinary evidence and its original thesis make for a stimulating read and have no doubt added a major new dimension to our understanding of the men who made up the Wehrmacht.

Another pioneering new work is a title in the Cambridge Military Histories series by Jeff Rutherford. Combat and Genocide on the Eastern Front looks at three German infantry divisions (the 121st, 123rd, and 126th) in Army Group North and their changing experience of warfare between 1941 and 1944. ¹⁸ The most immediate conclusion drawn from Rutherford’s work is the diversity of experience among German infantry divisions and the difficulty one has in speaking generically about ‘the infantry’ even within the smallest of the three German army groups. The implications point to something long suspected about the Ostheer and which Rutherford has proven more definitively than any previous study: the overarching narrative of the war in the east was subject to radical revision at the local level. Commanders and their troops interpreted and implemented orders differently, just as local populations varied considerably in their response to German rule. The military situation, terrain, climate, and geographic features, as well as the availability of resources in a given area, created contrasting conditions that directly impacted the nature of German rule. Infantry divisions were also influenced by enemy activity, which, in contrast to the usual perception offered by campaign narratives, meant that there could be many months in the Nazi-Soviet war in which certain German divisions lived in relative harmony on quiet sectors of the front. As Rutherford indicates, these periods could also lead to mutually beneficial relationships with local Russian communities.

Importantly, Rutherford shows that these divisions were first and foremost military formations which operated according to what he identifies as ‘military necessity’ and that this dictated their actions to a greater extent than has previously been acknowledged. This concept led the German army to use any and all means, regardless of their ethical or moral costs, to achieve victory on the battlefield, and it resulted in both impressive combat effectiveness and frequent recourse to violent outbursts directed at Soviet civilians. As Rutherford explains:

While the men of the 121st, 123rd, and 126th IDs plundered the civilian population for food and occasionally reacted with real violence towards the threat of irregular warfare, as called for by their ideologically driven superiors, they primarily focused on their military task: defeating the Red Army in battle. As their military situation worsened during the following months, however, the tenets of military necessity and ideology became increasingly blurred and the war in the east took on a new shade of brutality. ¹⁹

While differences were clearly apparent between the various divisions, they all reflected a capacity for unrestrained violence and ruthless exploitation in the service of their military objectives. Rutherford’s work also includes the correspondence and writings of the soldiers in these divisions, continuing the trend towards a more comprehensive view of the war from below. It is an impressive achievement which underlines the potential for future research into the many unknown divisions of the German Ostheer. Wherever such research takes us, Rutherford’s concept of ‘military necessity’ will require substantive engagement and provides an important qualification to Bartov’s divisional study ²⁰ advancing the view of an exclusively ideologically focused Wehrmacht.

While the contributions of Fritz, Hartmann, Luther, Neitzel, Welzer, and Rutherford reflect the progress in German-focused studies of the war, they have recently been matched by a surge of English-language publications highlighting the best of recent Russian scholarship. Since 1991 a new dialogue in Russian-language histories about the Nazi-Soviet war has emerged. No longer bound by Soviet-era dictates about what could be published, the diversity of these publications has reflected the full spectrum of opinion and scholarly merit, from first-rate studies to the worst of mass-market sensationalism. Most of these publications remain inaccessible to non-Russian readers, but recently an increasing number have begun appearing in English. The reason is largely due to the tireless work of Stuart Britton, who in recent years has translated and edited over a dozen titles of leading Russian scholarship. ²¹ Britton’s impressive contributions, with more books slated for publication in 2015 and 2016, have conspicuously expanded the depths of the Soviet campaign and operational accounts available to Anglo-American audiences. Two of his most recent choices for English translations are Lev Lopukhovsky’s The Viaz’ma Catastrophe and Svetlana Gerasimova’s The Rzhev Slaughterhouse. Each covers battles which are largely unknown in the West, and neither has been the subject of specific studies. Given that the fighting at Viaz’ma accounted for the loss of over half a million Soviet men and the fighting around Rzhev totalled a staggering 1.3 million Red Army casualties, these are essential books in our understanding of the Soviet experience of the war.

Lopukhovsky’s study is a remarkable work which took the author more than forty years to research and write. Motivated by his father’s disappearance in the battle, Lopukhovsky has pursued his subject with unique devotion, but, contrary to my initial expectations, the book does not read as a work of dedication memorializing the fallen Soviet men of the battle. Lopukhovsky does not pull his punches, making his study as much a work of rigorous scholarly investigation as a rallying cry against the very eulogized histories which the Soviet leadership and now Putin would like to see dominate the field. Lopukhovsky’s thirst for detail compares with the densest works of David Glantz and reflects just how superficial our hitherto understanding of the events at Viaz’ma has been. Yet for all its wonderful detail, The Viaz’ma Catastrophe, to Lopukhovsky’s own frustration, is incomplete. Researchers remain barred from the Soviet General Staff’s Archive as well as the President’s Archive (the former archive of the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the USSR). As a result, unlike histories of the Nazi regime, Soviet-focused histories are written without full access to documents generated by the general staff, the Stavka, or the main political administration. Annoyingly some of this material was previously publicly available under Yeltsin, but, as Lopukhovsky writes, in Putin’s Russia ‘the nation needs patriots, which can only be nurtured on victories and positive examples’. ²² There can be no question that Viaz’ma was a catastrophe for the Red Army, yet Lopukhovsky dispels the old Soviet line that it all resulted from an almost inevitable German superiority. Instead he rightly emphasizes the inexcusable Soviet strategic direction, which, more than anything the Germans brought to bear, accounted for the disaster. It was hardly a thesis likely to endear him to Putin’s authorities.

What Lopukhovsky achieves in 500 pages of text is much more than just a deconstruction of the fighting around Viaz’ma. The focus is on the struggle of individual Soviet units and their commanders inside the German pocket whose fate is not necessarily tied to the inevitability of the western front’s defeat. The result reflects the chaos, confusion, and fear overtaking Soviet commanders as day by day their situation worsened, but ironically it is also here that the battle of Viaz’ma begins to tell a different story: one which, without any need for dramatization or nationalistic embellishment, transforms a well-known catastrophe into countless demonstrations of individual courage, ingenuity, and exceptional endurance in the face of overwhelming adversity. Without any need for Putin’s myth makers, an honest account of the fighting at Viaz’ma tells its own remarkable story. The naval artillerymen of the 200th Separate Artillery Battalion, for example, attempted to escape through the ring of German panzer divisions holding the eastern perimeter of the Viaz’ma pocket. They not only broke through German lines and beat off enemy counter-attacks, but they then survived 17 days behind German lines (the front had extended beyond Viaz’ma) before they reached the safety of Soviet territory. ²³ Until there are more archival materials made available, Lopukhovsky’s exhaustive study will remain the final word on the Soviet experience at Viaz’ma.

Svetlana Gerasimova’s The Rzhev Slaughterhouse is perhaps best characterized as a testament to one of the most forgotten of battles of the eastern front in the Second World War. Before this book one suspects that few people in the West could point to Rzhev on the map, let alone recount its role in the war. In fact the fighting around Rzhev from January 1942 to early 1943 accounted for more Soviet casualties than the Red Army’s epic campaign in Stalingrad (1,324,823 at Rzhev to 1,129,619 at Stalingrad). ²⁴ Rzhev was not a single battle or even campaign, but rather a series of failed Soviet offensives. For this reason Gerasimova repeats Lopukhovsky’s point about access to the official documents of the Stavka and general staff. As she writes: ‘In the opinion of certain politicians, the history of the Great Patriotic War can today become a bulwark of national consciousness and unity.’ ²⁵ Not surprisingly, her study highlighting the appalling failures of repeated Soviet offensives against Army Group Centre throughout 1942 had no chance of gaining official access. Like their Soviet predecessors, Russian authorities are now seeking to control the national narrative even to the point of turning defeats into victories. The second Rzhev–Sychevka offensive (25 November to 20 December 1942), better known by its code name Operation Mars, was a thinly disguised disaster for the Red Army in which some 335,000 losses were sustained for almost no gain, but the official line has been that such horrific carnage helped make possible the successes in the south around Stalingrad. As Gerasimova observes:

the monopoly on access to these official sources remains in the hands of the few, and this select few accuse critics of the official version of Operation Mars of falsifying the historical past, of besmirching famous names, and of attempting to discredit the Great Victory. ²⁶

Absurdly, in Russia today it is those studies without official approval and lacking access to some of the key archival documentation which offer the best basis of producing objective conclusions. To this end Gerasimova’s study goes a long way even in spite of its imposed limitations.

Like so many battles on the eastern front the use of the name Rzhev is something of a misnomer. The fighting extended well beyond Rzhev’s immediate environs to include the Belyi, Zubtsov, Sychevka, Gzhatsk, and Viaz’ma areas. Gerasimova also goes beyond the administrative failings of the Soviet high command to explain the Red Army’s lack of success. In the first Rzhev-Sychevka offensive (30 July – 30 September 1942), for example, she examines the critical impact of inclement weather patterns and the availability of German reserves to plug gaps in the line. In doing so she makes excellent use of first-person accounts from both sides and concludes that the lack of Soviet success still came at a significant cost to the Germans, particularly Model’s Ninth Army. Such relentless attrition, it has been suggested, accounted for the weakness of Model’s army in the critical northern sector of the German Kursk offensive in the summer of 1943. ²⁷ However great the cost was to the Germans, Gerasimova’s conclusions are unequivocal: Soviet operations around Rzhev became a far more proficient ‘slaughterhouse’ for the Red Army than the Wehrmacht. As one Soviet veteran noted:

For 15 months we battled for Rzhev and accomplished almost nothing, until the Germans left it themselves. Let us assume that these were victories for the enemy, but these were also our most terrible tragedies. The war didn’t develop on success alone. But the history of it should be complete and credible, no matter how bitter it was. ²⁸

It is this history that Gerasimova illuminates, and while it is far from an exhaustive account, it remains a solid foray into one of the most important and least-known series of battles on the eastern front.

While professional historians contribute the bulk of studies which make up our knowledge of the Nazi-Soviet conflict, military history, perhaps more than any other branch of history, generates a remarkable literature from lay enthusiasts. Most of these works serve a popular audience and contribute little to the scholarly debate, but by no means all of them. Swedish writers Niklas Zetterling and Anders Frankson have collaborated on a number of major works in the field ²⁹ and their latest, The Drive on Moscow, 1941, is a worthy compliment to the subject. ³⁰ Researched from German archival sources and Russian secondary literature, their book sees the battle of Moscow as the turning point in Germany’s war in the east. Whereas the battles of Stalingrad and Kursk were once the principal periods of discussion in turning-point debates, recent years have seen increasing attention focused on 1941. The book covers Operation Typhoon (2 October – 5 December 1941) and tells the story from both the Soviet and German standpoints. What stands out in such a heavily battle-orientated narrative is that Zetterling and Frankson avoid the conclusion that this was a knife-edged battle in which the Soviets snatched an unlikely victory from the very jaws of defeat at Moscow. As my own research has corroborated, ³¹ the Germans were in fact a long way from ever capturing Moscow, and Zetterling and Frankson suggest that even if it had fallen ‘Stalin could have battled on even without the city.’ ³² It reinforces the point that the short-term success of German operations should not be overstated.

More critically, although Zetterling and Frankson make a compelling case, the evidence they amass is too often left to speak for itself without enough analysis to link events together and develop their argument. It leads to a retelling of the battle narrative without the authors capitalizing on the information they are presenting by means of a wider conceptual framework. While this is unquestionably a shortcoming, it is not to suggest that there was no analysis, nor that what is on offer is not good. In fact it is the strength of the concluding chapter (there is no conclusion per se) and the many insights herein that poses the question why more such analysis was not evident in the text. The Drive on Moscow, 1941 is by no means a definitive study of Operation Typhoon, but its balanced approach, jargon-free writing, and numerous illustrations will make it both accessible and attractive to readers unfamiliar with the period.

Another work by non-professional historians that merits attention is The Defense of Moscow by Jack Radey and Charles Sharp. This is the first volume in a planned three-part series looking at Operation Typhoon in October 1941. Each study will focus on a different area of the front, with The Defense of Moscow dealing with the northern drive by Army Group Centre’s Ninth Army and Third Panzer Group. Radey and Sharp make good use of German and Soviet archival material as well as published secondary sources to provide the first account of the fighting in and around Kalinin. It is a subject worthy of study in its own right, but also an essential, and often neglected, topic in accounts of the battle for Moscow. Essentially Kalinin in October 1941 was a microcosm of the German experience in the east in the first year of the war. Elements of Third Panzer Group would make a remarkably successful advance to reach Kalinin, but in attempting to go beyond the city the German command would launch a second, and even more audacious, offensive to reach Torzhok (a further 60 kilometres away). Here, however, they would flounder, being forced back in disarray by determined Soviet counter-offensives.

In spite of a more limited focus than Zetterling and Frankson, Radey and Sharp provide superb strategic context for their battle-driven narrative around Kalinin, and in doing so highlight the brazenness of German planning in the immediate aftermath of the victory at Viaz’ma. The drive on Kalinin and then Torzhok was to be the beginning of a major new German offensive to the north, wholly distinct from the drive on Moscow, and initially had little to do with protecting Army Group Centre’s northern flank as past studies have often suggested. Strauss’s Ninth Army was looking to encircle all Soviet forces north of Ostashkov in the Valdai Hills. This called for destroying no fewer than seven Soviet armies, with the aim of rolling up the Soviet flank opposing Army Group North. It was an exceedingly ambitious undertaking, which also weakened Army Group Centre’s drive on Moscow. As a result the Germans became embroiled in a battle around Kalinin, which – as Radey and Sharp demonstrate – was only their first objective in the north and was not supposed to be their last.

Radey and Sharp divide the fighting at Kalinin into four stages: first, the German breakthrough and capture of Kalinin (10 to 14 October); second, the German advance on Torzhok (15 to 18 October); third, the Soviet counteroffensives against the German forces north of Kalinin (18 to 21 October); fourth, the battle for the city of Kalinin (22 to 24 October). ³³ As so often with the Wehrmacht in the east, the promising beginning of the battle was soon undermined by hubris and the attempt to achieve too much with too few resources. Yet the fighting at Kalinin also demonstrates that such thinking was not unique to the generals of the OKH, but also evident among the field commanders. Indeed for all the daring and courageousness attributed to the panzer commanders in the early years of the Second World War, sometimes uncritically, Kalinin reflects just how dangerous a headstrong commitment to the offensive could be. Before the offensive towards Torzhok the XXXXI Motorized Corps, which would have to conduct the attack, was widely dispersed over a distance of some 75 kilometres, with exposed flanks, limited supplies, and under-strength combat formations. As Radey and Sharp observe: ‘It would appear that the panzer group was not in a good position to push on at once to distant objectives. But that is exactly what Reinhardt [the panzer group commander] decided.’ ³⁴

The Defense of Moscow is a good example of what studious hard work and a passion for the subject can achieve. Radey and Sharp took on a project with very little literature, no institutional support, and full-time careers in non-academic pursuits. Their first contribution to the literature of Operation Typhoon stands among the best operational studies on the subject, and, with two more volumes on the way, it proves that professional historians are not the only ones capable of first-rate results.

No literature review of the Nazi-Soviet war could be complete without some of the outstanding work done by David M. Glantz, ably assisted by Jonathan M. House. The enormity of Glantz’s contribution to the Nazi-Soviet war needs no introduction, but his many books and articles are only the most public side of his devotion to the literature in the field. His correspondence with fellow scholars and his selfless support of their research extends his expertise well beyond the many works he puts his name to. His most recent publication (at the time of writing) is the third instalment of his Stalingrad series. The ‘trilogy’ now extends to three oversized books with book 1 of volume III appearing (to be followed by book 2), and then there will be another companion book with documentation. Glantz informs us in the preface to volume III, book 1, that the ‘supplemental fourth volume’ will explore the ‘operations tangential to Stalingrad but that had a major effect on the ultimate fate of [the] German Sixth Army’. ³⁵ Of course such a striking number of pages (the first three volumes already number some 2,200 pages) raises its own questions about whether such a series might not benefit from a more rigorous editing process. Indeed such oversized studies often achieve their size at the expense of quality. For serious students of the battle no such concern applies here. As this literature review might already suggest, in a conflict on the scale of the Nazi-Soviet war it is precisely the detail that has been missing, and Stalingrad, as the best-known battle of the war, has already been the subject of countless books which outline a rough course of events. What Glantz and House have now done is to illustrate how much more there is to this battle and why a more comprehensive account changes our understanding of the campaign.

Volume I reveals the extent to which German planning for Operation Blue recast many of the failures that dogged Operation Barbarossa the year before. This is perhaps not so surprising when one considers that many of the same men in the OKH were directing the planning process and that the Wehrmacht as a whole had not recognized, much less sought to deal with, its acute institutional failings. Volume I traces the earliest stages of the German offensive in the south, revealing that profound difficulties were undercutting German operations long before the Sixth Army reached Stalingrad, and that the German high command remained stubbornly unresponsive to the implications of these problems. As in 1941, the Red Army was losing ground and men, but the cumulative effect of its resistance explains, according to Glantz, ‘why Paulus’s army would experience major difficulties when it tried to rid Stalingrad of its stubborn defenders six weeks later’. ³⁶ Yet Stalingrad was never the main objective, and volume I illustrates just how peripheral the city was to the original conception of the summer 1942 offensive. Indeed, as volume II traces the costly early stages of the city fighting in Stalingrad, one sees that the real objective of the campaign – the oilfields in the Caucasus – was slipping further and further from Hitler’s grasp. Yet it is the detail Glantz offers which allows us to see just how many warning signs were missed or ignored, and constitutes yet more evidence to support my own view that the German high command was fundamentally inhibited by a culture of National Socialist military thinking that insulated it from perceiving a more objective reality. ³⁷

The failure to follow a coherent strategic plan and avoid being overextended by pursuing simultaneous operational opportunities; the inability to acknowledge the constraints imposed on their operations by logistics; the utter lack of appreciation for the growth in size and skill of the Red Army – all of these are points which have been made before, but never with such an appreciation of the institutional nature of the problems, which went well beyond Hitler’s own role and which indicate an acute failing of the German general staff to address such deficiencies.

At its core volume II’s painstaking discussion of the urban warfare within Stalingrad underlines the extent to which the city assumed the unintended focus of German strategy, while at the same time Stalin and the Stavka sought only to keep Chuikov’s army alive as planning for a far more ambitious offensive to destroy Paulus’s army took shape. Still, there was nothing inevitable about Soviet success in Operation Uranus. In fact, as Glantz points out, the record of Soviet offensives until this period had been poor, emboldening the Germans to strip their flanks and gain a false sense of security from their Axis allies. Yet volume III, book 1, also demolishes the post-war German myth of blaming the disaster on the Hungarians, Romanians, and Italians for what was in reality a succession of German strategic blunders. Moreover, German intelligence was largely unaware of where the Soviets were likely to direct their next offensive and, as Glantz reveals, tipped Army Group Centre as the most likely target. ³⁸ While the German high command was directly complicit in the disaster that was to befall it at Stalingrad, the detailed analysis in volume III, book 1, of the planning and execution of Operation Uranus shows the remarkable maturing of the Red Army’s offensive capability after 18 months of warfare. Indeed, while the German command bears the largest share of responsibility for the events of the 1942–3 winter, nothing it did could change the fact that the Wehrmacht was steadily losing its superiority in operational manoeuvre.

Fifteen years ago the late John Erickson wrote that the research of Glantz and House reflected an ‘encyclopaedic knowledge’ of the Nazi-Soviet war and constituted a benchmark for excellence in the field. ³⁹ The Stalingrad trilogy reflects the fact that they maintain that standard, while bringing to light a new understanding of many old questions. Yet, unlike the state of the field when they first began to publish, this survey of recent literature indicates that both the quantity and the quality of research into the Nazi-Soviet war now extend well beyond names such as Glantz, House, and Erickson. Indeed, the rising prominence of the Nazi-Soviet war as both a field of study in and of itself, as well as a long overdue revision in the wider narrative of the Second World War, is attributable to many contemporary scholars, including many important names not represented here.

With well over 30 million people who died, either directly or indirectly, as a result of Hitler’s war in the east, it is a field which deserves – and is now achieving – its own sophisticated discourse. That said, I would note that historians from countries in the post-Soviet space are all too absent from Western debates and that there is a real need for their work to be included. Stuart Britton and the editors and contributors to the Journal of Slavic Military Studies do excellent work bringing some of this research to our attention, but one would think that the 15 successor states to the Soviet Union should now have a vocal generation of younger historians with the desire and necessary language skills to participate more fully in international debates. Their continued absence suggests something about the ongoing divide between East and West, which is itself another legacy of the Nazi-Soviet war. While challenges clearly remain, it is nevertheless my view that the future of research for the field and the pool of talent available have never been more promising.