What were the main reasons for the German defeat in the East?

Introduction

The defeat of Germany in the Second World War has been a subject that has fascinated historians ever since the events occurred. The reasons behind this have been a hotly debated topic ever since, none more so than the balance between eastern and western theatres and the reasons behind the defeat in the Soviet Union.[1] However this picture has been obscured by two main issues, the extent of the involvement of the German Army (Heer) in atrocities in the USSR, the so called ‘clean Wehrmacht’ myth and Cold War politics.

Both of these issues framed the initial post-war theories promoted by German generals interviewed by the US Army’s Foreign Military Studies (FMS) programme.[2] They sought to blame their defeat on Hitler’s poor strategic judgement, interference with operational level decisions and the overwhelming amounts of men and equipment fielded by the Red Army. A mass of memoirs and histories were written in support of this theory, which was only challenged at the time by the Soviet viewpoint, which was of a German military defeat by a superior military science.[3] Yet from the 1970’s this viewpoint was under attack, from historians who had access to Soviet archives, such as Albert Seaton,[4] John Erickson[5] and Earl Ziemke,[6] and Holocaust historian, Omar Bartov[7] who presented a very different view of the war and the conduct of the German generals. This led to a wide debate on the reasons behind Germany’s defeat, ranging from the strategic and technological,[8] to economic,[9] to manpower[10] and to military defeat.[11]

In order to understand the defeat of Germany in the East, this essay will look at the four main competing historiographic strands prior to 1995, presented by German historians, English language ones, the English-language ‘Russian school’ and Soviet historians. Then it will consider the development of the historiography post-1995 and then another section on some economic and infrastructure approaches that do not fit comfortably within the above framework.

The main obstacle to uncovering the substantive reasons for Germany’s defeat in the East is whether an accurate assessment can be made on the existing data, the extent to which the data has been corrupted by the myth of the ‘clean Wehrmacht’ or Cold War politics and whether research since 1995 has gone far enough to correct those biases. The essay will concentrate on whether historians have established an accurate and credible chronology of the war, whether the relative importance of those events, one with another, can be established and whether key issues, such as the Soviet Union’s use of a ‘broad-front’ or ‘narrow-front’ strategy have been settled. Unless substantial progress has been made on these issues, any theories on the reasons behind Germany’s defeat can be nothing but speculation.

Paul Carell

The German historiographic perspective prior to 1995

Federal German historiography was deliberately corrupted from the top downwards, starting in November 1945 with the ‘Generals Memorandum’ drafted by Franz Halder, former Chief of the General Staff.[12] This set out a narrative which blamed Hitler for the conduct of the war and the SS for all atrocities. It enabled the German officer corps to claim that it had behaved honourably during the war. This was followed in 1950 by Adenauer’s ‘Himmerode Abbey Meeting’ with the generals which hammered out an agreement between them and government over the foundation of a new German Army, the Bundeswehr.[13] Following the meeting, war crimes prosecutions were greatly reduced and the generals rehabilitated, in exchange for their co-operation in forming the Bundeswehr and fighting the Cold War.

This was followed in 1951 by US General Eisenhower’s declaration that the honour of the great majority of Wehrmacht soldiers was intact.[14] The myth of the ‘clean’ Wehrmacht was created Halder and his team writing their ‘historical’ record, by rehabilitated war criminals such as von Manstein and Guderian in their memoirs, in ‘Landseer literature’ by old soldiers and popular writers such as Paul Carell.[15] Attempts were even made to rehabilitate General Eduard Wagner, who was deeply implicated in the atrocities in Russia.[16]

A handful of historians challenged this narrative at the margins, such as Uhlig and Jacobsen in their writings but they failed to address the substantive issue.[17] Later in 1988 the Historikerstreit (historian’s dispute) controversary between conservatives Ernst Nolte, Andreas Hillgruber and liberal historians, showed serious divides, yet they avoided the main issue of German military culpability in war crimes and instead focussed on interpreting German history.[18] Some work was done on the Commissar Order and the treatment of Red Army POWs, yet this left the conduct of the anti-partisan war and more general war crimes untouched.[19]

Similarly, the need to portray the war as an ‘adventure’ shifted the focus more towards ‘knightly’ Panzer warfare, stressing modernity and technology and away from the trench warfare and daily slog of the many infantry horse-drawn units.[20] Tales of individual heroism, of famous units such as the Gross Deutschland (Greater Germany) division even started to rehabilitate the Waffen SS (military SS), ignoring the fact that the SS Totenkopf Division was originally drawn from concentration camp guards. By focussing on heroic battles and away from crimes in the army rear area and in the partisan war, the narrative was able to present a picture of honourable soldiers facing a brutal enemy.

The consequences of the ‘clean Wehrmacht’ decisions affected the historiography, since to maintain this narrative, many events of the Soviet-German War had to be forgotten or twisted. The focus of the war had to be on the victories of the summer of 1941, on the martyrdom of the Stalingrad, Manstein’s ‘sickle-cut’ manoeuvre in March 1943 and the brave defence of the Reich. Other events were downgraded or ignored. The siege of Leningrad with its deliberate targeting of civilians was ignored, the positional warfare of the Rzhev ‘cauldron’ forgotten,[21] and the brutal sweeps through the occupied Russian countryside in search of ‘bands’ (German term for partisans) downplayed.[22]

The Anglo-American view prior to 1995

How did the English-speaking world react to this course of German historiography? From a very early stage, even during the Nuremberg War Crimes trials, the US Military was keen to harvest the knowledge of the Wehrmacht, which led to the setting up of the Foreign Military Studies programme. The programme originally looked at US-German encounters, (A to C series,) yet the later series in the early 1950s (P and T series) started to record Soviet-German operations. They included testimony from former SS officers[23] and introduced the topes of Hitler’s strategic errors, Soviet overwhelming numbers, the bestial Soviet soldier and the German general’s brilliance, as these studies were guided by Franz Halder.[24]

As the Cold War grew in intensity, so did US interest in reviving the German military as a counter to Soviet influence in Europe and especially once the Korean War broke out.[25] The harshness of the Nuremberg Trials was gradually curtailed as the commander of the American zone, General Lucius Clay, reduced the sentences or paroled those of some 79 prisoners out of 89 war criminals in his custody and executed only five out of 15 under death sentences.

Similarly in Great Britain, the imperative of the Cold War drove a similar desire to rehabilitate Germany. Civil servants such as Lord Maurice Hankey formed a group to lobby for a reduction in the Nuremberg sentences on Germans in British custody such as Luftwaffe (German airforce) General Albert Kesselring.[26] They were joined publicly by leading historians such as Basil Liddell Hart and David Irving who campaigned for the release of convicted war criminals such as Kesselring and von Manstein, promoted German military prowess and switched the importance of the war to the Western theatre.[27]

The rationale for these decisions have been debated, with Bartov arguing that many English-language politicians and scholars refused to believe that ‘honourable’ German officers could have been involved in war crimes, while von Lingen has put forward the idea that the British establishment colluded in covering up German military war crimes, downplaying the role of the military involvement in them and certainly in the case of Albert Kesselring, freeing a convicted war criminal.[28] Depending of which of these two viewpoints are adopted, British historians such as Basil Liddell Hart are either guilty of wilful ignorance or deliberate falsification. Weight is added to von Lingen’s argument by the stream of accounts of German military atrocities from Soviet sources and of similar Allied accounts from Italy and Yugoslavia which were ignored by British historians.[29]

The support of the ‘clean Wehrmacht’ myth corrupted the entire chronology of the war in the English-speaking historiography. The emphasis and importance of the war was switched to the western theatre with a chronology Dunkirk – El Alamein – Normandy with a vague mention of Stalingrad. War crimes were removed from the narrative by removing contentious events or downplaying their significance. German memoirs and histories were held up as authoritative and accurate when they were known to be otherwise.

Alexander Werth

The Anglo-American ‘Russian school’

However not all historians in the English-speaking world used German sources in their research. A small number used Soviet sources and the first of these was the extraordinary writer, Alexander Werth. As a journalist, he reported from the frontline of the German-Soviet War and as an academic he wrote one of the best single volume accounts of the war.[30] He portrayed the war as he had actually viewed it and concentrated on the major battles of Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk and Operation Bagration. His research assistant John Erickson, went on in 1973 and 1985 to write one of the best two volume accounts and continued with further studies on the Red Army from 1919 onwards.[31] Erickson had extensive access to Soviet archives and many contacts within Soviet academia which allowed him to produce an authoritative study of the war, however his reliance on the contemporary Soviet official histories was reflected in his writing which retained a purely military viewpoint.

The remainder of the ‘Russian school’ came from military intelligence backgrounds with Peter Vigor as founder of the Soviet Studies Research Centre at Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, together with Chris Donnelly, Charles Dick and Chris Bellamy.[32] Although writing about contemporary subjects much of their research was based on that of the Soviet-German War. Moreover, this British example inspired the United States to set up the Soviet Army Studies Office in the mid-1980s under Dr. Bruce Menning and later under Col. David Glantz. In particular Glantz, combined contemporary interviews with German officers with Soviet documentary evidence to produce a synthesis that exposed gaps and inconsistencies in both sets of narratives.[33] This canon of works outside the ‘clean Wehrmacht’ narrative, included the two-volume account of Earl Ziemke of the US Army Historical Centre, who used a combination of German and Soviet documents to produce a more nuanced viewpoint.

Despite Werth raising the question of German Army atrocities in 1964:

‘For had not “ordinary Fritzes “, too, taken part in the extermination of partisan villages? And did not the “ordinary Fritzes”, in any case, approve of what his SS and Gestapo colleagues were doing?’[34]

and echoed by Erickson, nonetheless the school was too small, focussed on the purely military side of the war and intelligence based to make much impact on the wider historiography. It was swimming against the tide of Dallin’s accounts of German occupation, drawing on German records and Armstrong’s account of anti-partisan warfare which attracted great interest from the US military establishment.[35] Smelser has put forward the idea that the sheer volume of popular publications on the German military and the fact that Erickson’s books were long out of print was a factor in the lack of influence of the ‘Russian school’.[36] He draws parallels between the Confederate ‘lost cause’ myth and the historiography of the German generals and their appeal in popular culture.

Georgi Kumanev

The Soviet perspective

The Soviet Union had broadcast German atrocities around the world during the war and afterwards at the Nuremberg Trials however, to a large extent the West simply regarded this as propaganda. The revelation of the Katyn massacre, and knowledge of the GULag discredited Soviet accounts when they revealed the German concentration camps in the Baltics in mid-1944 onwards.[37] Secondly the dictates of dialectic materialism required Soviet historians to follow a Party line in their accounts. This allowed errors by national leaders and military generals to disappear or be reduced in importance. This was not seriously challenged by German scholars due to their own fractured chronology of the war.[38]

The combination of these two factors led to a constrained six-volume official history of the German-Soviet War published in 1960[39] and a more general four-volume history of the Second World War in 1973.[40] Once perestroika (literally ‘openness’) loosened the constraints of dialectic materialism a revised four-volume history appeared in 1997.[41] All of these accounts stressed Axis atrocities.

Soviet military science divided the war up into three periods and then into ‘strategic operations’, ‘operations’ and individual ‘battles’ using strict criteria.[42] However, the canon of operations changed over time, as the first sources list just 50 ‘strategic operations’.[43] Subsequently, the freedom of perestroika allowed a debate on the subject which appeared in the pages of Voenno-Istroicheskii zhurnal (Military History Journal) towards the end of the 1980s which added further operations and altered the importance of some.[44] This process continued after the end of the Soviet Union, with a final list of 75 ‘strategic operations’ and around 340 operations appearing by 2001.[45]

Nonetheless this process came under challenge from 1995, as Glantz argued that there were major inconsistencies in the narrative of the war and particularly in the canon of operations which may have excluded as many as 40% of them.[46] These were either defeats or failed operations, with the motivation of concealing large casualty figures or to protect the reputations of wartime generals. Other operations were downgraded in importance for similar reasons with Glantz giving the example of the Uman-Botasani Operation March-April 1944 which was the first successful ‘deep’ operation by a tank army. It was the failure of the following Iasi-Kishinev Offensive April-June 1944, which threatened the reputation of Marshal Konev that meant that it had to be downgraded.[47]

Similarly, Gerasimova has argued that the four Rzhev Salient operations (including Zhukov’s Operation Mars, the Rzhev-Sychevka Offensive) should either be regarded as a continuation of the Moscow Strategic Operation finishing in March 1943 or should form their own strategic operation.[48] Either way this would make the Rzhev Salient, both the largest Soviet operation of the war and the costliest, surpassing the Stalingrad Strategic Operation.

Yet these changes have wider implications than just the vanity of generals. Glantz has argued that the conventional construct of the war, with Stavka pursuing a ‘narrow-front strategy’ is supported by both Soviet and German historiography and dovetails conveniently with the myth of Hitler’s ‘stand-fast’ and festung (fortress) strategy.[49] Instead he argues that the ‘missing’ operations show that Stavka pursued a ‘broad-front strategy’ and, if this is true, then Hitler appears considerably less dogmatic than before and German generals more culpable.

Omer Bartov

The post 1995 perspective

1995 was the year in which the edifice of the ‘clean Wehrmacht’ came crashing down. Its demise was caused in large part by two events, one internal and one external to Germany. The first internal event was the Vernichtungskrieg. Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941–1944 (‘Wehrmachtsausstellung‘) (War of annihilation. Crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941-1944. ‘Wehrmacht exhibition‘) exhibition at the Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung between 1995-1999, 2001- 2005 and the smaller Fotofeldpost: Geknipste Kriegserlebnisse 1939-1945 (Mailed Photos: Snapped war experiences 1939-1945) exhibition of 2000 at the Deutsch-Russisches Museum Berlin-Karlshorst.[50] Both of these exhibitions of soldiers wartime ‚Foto‘ demonstrated that ordinary soldiers knew about and recorded atrocities. The first Hamburger exhibition attracted 800,000 visitors and the second 420,000, large amounts of press coverage and started a national debate about the involvement of the military in war crimes.

The second, external event was the publication of a book by the Israeli historian, Omar Bartov, which exposed the barbarity of war in Russia and German military complicity in it.[51] In fact, Bartov had been addressing this issue since 1989 and other historians such as Messerschmidt, Streit and Förster had started to broach the subject from the 1980s.[52] Nonetheless this particular book, by a Holocaust historian, managed to catch the spirit of the times, raising the issue to national prominence. Within a decade, the myth of ‘clean Wehrmacht’ was dead, yet the consequences of its existence remained long after it had gone.

That the baleful effects continued was something of a surprise, as by 1995 the Soviet Union had fallen and Soviet archives were thrown open for inspection under President Yeltsin. Similarly, the German archives had been returned home and were available across the West. Yet much effort was wasted in controversies such as the ‘Icebreaker’ one and there was such a large canon of existing writing and historiography that change was slow and there was no public taste for it.[53] This is best illustrated by the German official history which by 2001 had published volume VII and the narrative was well into 1943. The amount of space devoted to the course of the war reflects the ‘pre-1995’ historiography with volumes IV/I, IV/II and a map book devoted to the six months of 1941,[54] a single section out of six, in volume VI on the events of 194255 and volume VIII on the two-year period of 1943-44.[56]

Attempts to comprehensively reassess the chronology of the war, including its substantive features have been few and far between, with notable exceptions being made by Glantz, Overy and Mawdsley in English and Ueberschär in German.[57] The latest Russian twelve-volume official history of 2011 was an improvement, even though it continued to ignore many subjects.[58] At the same time, Russian archives have revealed attempts by German staff officers during the war to establish a proper chronology based on a series of operations.[59]

One of the chief obstacles to establishing a proper measure of the relative importance of operations, was a lack of reliable casualty figures. For the Wehrmacht, the last ‘official figure’ given by the Ober Kommand der Wehrmacht War Diary was 3.9 million[60] yet Overmanns has argued that the real figure is near 5.3 million, 25% larger.[61] On the Soviet side, the work by General Krivosheev has released some information from the archives, yet matching it to specific operations remains problematic.[62] On such shaky foundation historians have based their accounts of the Soviet-German War.

E.H. Carr

The economic perspective

The traditional view of the Soviet economy, stresses the evacuation of the industry to the Urals Kombinat and its economic revival after that, which allowed the Soviet economy to build more tanks and planes than the German one until 1944 when they reached some level of parity. This story dovetails nicely with the ‘Soviet horde’ perspective.

However, we have a good understanding of the Soviet economy from the later work of E.H. Carr, Davies & Wheatcroft, Harrison & Barber which gives a more nuanced approach.[63] They make the point that in overall terms, the Soviet wartime economy remained smaller than it had been in 1941. That it reached in peak of production in 1943, falling back in 1944, as the workforce of women and old people, together with their machine tools, became exhausted. It was not sustainable at that level. The German economy and Soviet were both about the same size in 1941 and the former gained around 20% extra production from Occupied Europe, so its growth in 1944 was sustainable until wrecked by Allied bombing. Moreover, as O’Brien has pointed out, Soviet generals expended those weapons at an astonishing rate, using up whatever they were sent, while German machines lasted longer. 64 So, the important question was that posed by Harrison, ‘How did the Soviets survive in 1942?’[65]

A second area overlooked in early accounts, was the ability of the Soviet state to raise new armies. By the time of Operation Taifun in October 1941, the Germans had effectively destroyed the peacetime Red Army and while the arrival of ‘Siberian’ troops from the Far East was important, the garrison there was far too small to make a difference. Dunn has given an alternative viewpoint by explaining the mechanism by which new armies numbering almost six million men a year were mobilised from the rump of the unoccupied Soviet population of 120 million souls.[66] Overall, some 34 million men and over a million women were mobilised during the war and of these over 6.5 million were killed in combat with another 3.5 million POWs murdered. More modern studies of German manpower have dismissed the idea of a ‘Soviet horde’.[67]

Early accounts liked to stress the effect of ‘General Mud’ and German logistical failures in the huge expanse of the Soviet Union. The difference between the Soviet ‘Union’ railway gauge and the European ‘Standard’ gauge loom large in this story. This began with the FMS studies by Teske and Bork, was continued by van Creveld and Schuler and despite the paucity of literature, this became an established ‘fact’.[68] However more modern studies have pointed out that early writing by railway officials of the Verkehrsministerium do not support the soldier’s contentions and that many of their woes were self-inflicted.[69] Two historical examples of gauge changing, the complete conversion of 20,000 miles of Confederate railway and the British Great Western railway took only days to convert both track and rolling stock. All that was required was sufficient application of labour. The real reason for German failure was departmental infighting both within the army and with the Reichsbahn, coupled with a miscalculation in understanding how Soviet railways operated.

David Glantz

Conclusion

There have been many theories about the reasons underlying the German defeat in the East. The question is whether these theories are based on reliable data and information, whether that data contains intrinsic biases and weightings and whether these have been corrected or not. The minimum data required for such an assessment would be an accurate chronology of the Soviet-German War, correct weighting of specific events as to their importance and the resolution of the main issues with regard to strategy, operations, the economy, manpower and logistical studies. Unless this information has been established to a credible level, the true factors in the defeat of Germany during the Soviet-German War cannot be determined with any degree of accuracy.

The picture that emerges from this historiographic survey of the Soviet-German War, is of a narrative deeply tainted by the myth of the ‘clean Wehrmacht’ up until 1995, following which the opening of the Soviet archives should have led to a major reassessment of the war years. Unfortunately, lack of public interest, the attraction of easily accessible German archives and the language difficulties of research in Russian, meant that progress has been slow since then and Western historians continue to turn out Germanocentric studies with scant reference to Soviet sources.[70] For instance, David Stahel in 2009 produced a highly acclaimed study which nonetheless was quite biased, with hundreds of references to German units down to divisional level and just thirty-nine of Soviet units, none lower than army level.[71]

Nonetheless progress has been made with new narratives of the war which have started to address many of the issues of the conflict.[72] Yet there remain huge gaps in our knowledge. In the preface of the 2005 edition of his book, Mawdsley mentions that the war comprised of fifty Soviet ‘strategic operations’, however only two years earlier, this figure had been raised by Russian historians to ‘seventy-five operations’.[73] To date, even though Glantz has made efforts to correct the canon of Soviet operations, there remain substantial inconsistencies and the question of the importance of any one operation over the others remains unresolved.[74] What was the biggest battle of the war? We simply do not know; it might be Stalingrad or it may be the Rzhev campaign or another as yet unrevealed operation. Until we have a better and more accurate understanding of either the canon of operations or the casualty figures it will be hard to judge the success or failure of many of the operations or even their relative importance.

As regards the substantive issues of the war, many of these remain unresolved. Glantz has postulated that Stalin and Stavka pursued a ‘broad-front strategy’ which receives support from Bellamy[75]. Yet while Mawdsley covers many of these operations, he does not recognise them as major defeats, though he does cover Operation Mars and Jupiter in some detail.[76] Meanwhile Overy clearly follows the older ‘narrow-front strategy’ idea and does not mention these lesser-known operations at all.[77] On another issue the main source for the area of the USSR under German occupation, remains Dallin’s 1957 classic, entirely based on German records and any other coverage of the occupied areas of the Soviet Union remains patchy and contradictory.[78] While the partisan war produces widely differing opinions on the reliability of the local population and on the effectiveness of it on the main course of the war.[79]

Having assessed the current state of historiography in several languages one is forced to conclude that twenty-five years of research has been insufficient time to correct fifty years of tainted history. There is no clear consensus on the core narrative of the war, nor on the relative importance of specific operations and even important topics remain little researched. Numerous theories have been presented as being the reason for Germany’s defeat in the Soviet-German War, these are often specific to particular historiographies and adopt one or other narratives and so are incompatible with other accounts. Given this a true understanding is next to impossible.

Sir Richard Evans

Endnotes

1 Phillips P. O’Brien, ‘East versus West in the Defeat of Nazi Germany’, Journal of Strategic Studies 23, no. 2 (1 June 2000): 89–113, https://doi.org/10.1080/01402390008437792.

2 ‘WWII Foreign Military Studies, 1945-54’, Fold3, accessed 27 February 2021, https://www.fold3.com/publication/490/wwii-foreign-military-studies-1945-54.

3 Paul Carell, Hitler Moves East, 1941-1943. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1965); Paul Carell, Scorched Earth ; Hitler’s War on Russia (London: G.G. Harrap, 1969).

4 Albert Seaton, The Russo-German War, 1941-45. (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1970).

5 John Erickson, The Road to Stalingrad (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973); John Erickson, The Road to Berlin (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1985).

6 Earl F Ziemke and Magna E Bauer, Moscow to Stalingrad: Decision in the East (New York: Military Heritage Press, 1988); Earl F Ziemke, Stalingrad to Berlin: The German Defeat in the East (New York: Dorset Press, 1986).

7 Omer Bartov, Hitler’s Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich (Oxford : New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).

8 Phillips Payson O’Brien, How the War Was Won : Air-Sea Power and Allied Victory in World War II, Air-Sea Power and Allied Victory in World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

9 Mark Harrison, ‘Barbarossa: The Soviet Response, 1941’, in From Peace to War: Germany, Soviet Russia and the World, 1939-1941, ed. Bernd Wegner (Providence, RI: Berghahn Books, 1997), 16, https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/mharrison/public/barbarossa1992.pdf; Mark Harrison, ‘The USSR and Total War: Why Didn’t the Soviet Economy Collapse in 1942?’, in A World at Total War: Global Conflict and the Politics of Destruction, 1939-1945, ed. Roger Chickering and Stig Forster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/mharrison/public/totalwar2005.pdf.

10 Walter Scott Dunn, Stalin’s Keys to Victory: The Rebirth of the Red Army (Westport, CT: Praeger Security International (Greenwood Publishing Group), 2006).

11 David M Glantz and Jonathan M House, When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler, 1st edition (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1995).

12 Wolfram Wette, The Wehrmacht: history, myth, reality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), p.206.

13 Wette, pp.236.

14 Wette, p.237.

15 Erich von Manstein, Lost Victories, trans. Anthony G Powell (London: Methuen, 1955); Carell, Hitler Moves East, 1941-1943.; Carell, Scorched Earth ; Hitler’s War on Russia; Wette, The Wehrmacht, p.233; Guy Sajer, The Forgotten Soldier, 1st English translation (London: Harper Collins, 1971).

16 Eduard Wagner and Elisabeth Wagner, Der Generalquartiermeister. Briefe und Tagebuchaufzeichnungen des Generalquartiermeisters des Heeres General der Artillerie Eduard Wagner [The Quartermaster General. Letters and Diary Entries of the Quartermaster General of the Armz, General of the Artillery Eduard Wagner] (München & Wien; Melk: Gunter Olzog, 1963).

17 Rolf-Dieter Müller and Gerd R. Ueberschär, Hitler’s War in the East, 1941-1945: A Critical Assessment, 3rd rev. and expanded ed, War and Genocide (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009), p.78 & 256 note C49 & C54.

18 Richard J. Evans, In Hitler’s Shadow: West German Historians and the Attempt to Escape from the Nazi Past (Pantheon Books, 1989), p.114, https://archive.org/details/inhitlersshadow00rich.

19 Christian Streit, Keine Kameraden: die Wehrmacht und die sowjetischen Kriegsgefangenen 1941-1945 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1980).

20 Heinz Guderian, Panzer Leader. (New York: Dutton, 1952); Erhard Raus and Steven H. Newton, Panzer Operations: The Eastern Front Memoir of General Raus, 1941-1945 (London: Hachette Books, 2009).

21 Svetlana Gerasimova, The Rzhev Slaughterhouse. The Red Army’s Forgotten 15-Month Campaign against Army Group Center, 1942-1943. (Solihull, West Midlands: Helion & Company, 2013).

22 Philip W. Blood, ‘Bandenbekämpfung: Nazi Occupation Security in Eastern Europe and Soviet Russia 1942-45’ (Cranfield University, 2001), https://www.academia.edu/1445675/Bandenbek%C3%A4mpfung_Nazi_Occupation_Security_in_Eastern _Europe_and_Soviet_Russia_1942_45.

23 Max Simon, Foreign Military Studies Branch, and USAEUR, Soviet Russian Infantry and Armored Forces, FMS, P-077 (Germany: Historical Division, European Command, Foreign Military Studies Branch, 1947). SS General Max Simon was sentenced to death by a British Court for war crimes and pardoned in 1954.

24 Wette, The Wehrmacht, p.229.

25 Ronald Smelser, The Myth of the Eastern Front: The Nazi-Soviet War In American Popular Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp.53.

26 Kerstin von Lingen and Alexandra Klemm, Kesselring’s Last Battle: War Crimes Trials and Cold War Politics, 1945-1960 (Lawrence, Kan.: University Press of Kansas, 2009), p.160 & p.261. 27 Lingen and Klemm, pp.167.

28 Lingen and Klemm, p.206; Omer Bartov, ‘German Soldiers and the Holocaust: Historiography, Research and Implications’, History and Memory 9, no. 1/2 (1997): p.165. 29 Lingen and Klemm, Kesselring’s Last Battle, p.296. 30 ‘Biography of Alexander Werth’, University of Glasgow, accessed 7 March 2022, https://www.universitystory.gla.ac.uk/biography/?id=WH24228&type=P.

31 Erickson, The Road to Stalingrad; Erickson, The Road to Berlin.

32 ‘Peter Vigor’, 26 September 2013, 1st edition, sec. Obituaries, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/petervigor-ddzbjbhv76d; Chris Donnelly, ‘Charles Dick, Intelligence Corps Reservist Who Educated a Whole Generation of Senior NATO Officers in Soviet and Russian Operational Art’, The Journal of Slavic Military Studies 34, no. 2 (3 April 2021): 175–80, https://doi.org/10.1080/13518046.2021.1990557.

33 David M. Glantz, ‘American Perspectives on Eastern Front Operations in World War II.’, 4 January 1987, pp.14, https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/citations/ADA194173; Colonel David M. Glantz, ‘1984 Art of War Symposium, From the Don to the Dnepr: Soviet Offensive Operations, December 1942-August 1943: A Transcript of Proceedings’ (Centre for Land Warfare US Army War College, 1984); Colonel David M. Glantz, ‘1985 Art of War Symposium, From the Dnepr to the Vistula: Soviet Offensive Operations, November 1943-August 1944: A Transcript of Proceedings’ (Centre for Land Warfare US Army War College, 1985); Colonel David M. Glantz, ‘1986 Art of War Symposium, From the Vistula to the Oder: Soviet Offensive Operations, October 1944-March 1945: A Transcript of Proceedings’ (Centre for Land Warfare US Army War College, 1986).

34 Alexander Werth, Russia at War,1941-1945, First Printing edition (New York, N.Y.: Carroll & Graf, 1986), p.768.

35 Alexander Dallin, German Rule in Russia, 1941-1945: A Study in Occupation Politics, 2nd ed (London: Macmillan, 1981); John A Armstrong, Soviet Partisans in World War II. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964).

36 Smelser, The Myth of the Eastern Front, p.215 & p.80.

37 Werth, Russia at War,1941-1945, pp.640 & p.898.

38 Col. David Glantz rtd, The Failures of Historiography: Forgotten Battles of the German-Soviet War (1941- 1945) (Fort Leavenworth, KS: Foreign Military Studies Office, 1997), p.1-2, https://archive.org/details/2007_12_18_The_Failures_of_Historiography_Forgotten_Battles_1941_1945 _Glantz.

39 Petr Nikolayevich Pospelov et al., eds., Istroriya Velikoi Otechstvennoi voiny Sovetskogo Soyuza 1941-1945. Tom. 6 [History of the Great Patriotic War 1941-1945], 6 vols (Moskva: Voenizdat, 1960).

40 A. A. Grechko, G.A. Arbatov, and V.A. Vinogradov, Istorii͡a Vtoroĭ Mirovoĭ Voĭny 1939-1945 [HIstory of the Second World War 1939-1945], 12 vols (Moskva: Voenizdat, 1973–1976).

41 Velikai͡a Otechestvennai͡a Voĭna 1941-1945 Voenno-Istoricheskie Ocherki V Chetyrekh Knigakh [Soviet Official HIstory 4 volumes], 4 vols (Moskva: Voenizdat, 1997).

42 A.Ė. Serdi͡ukov and V.A. Zolotarev, Velikai͡a Otechestvennai͡a voĭna 1941-1945 godov : v dvenadt͡sati tomakh [The Great Patriotic War 1941-1945 in 12 volumes] (Moskva: Voennoe Izd-vo, 2011), p.8: Великая In the Soviet historiography the war is divided into three periods, the first from 22 June 1941 to November 1942, second from November 1942 to December 1943, and third from January 1944 to 9 May 1945., http://encyclopedia.mil.ru/encyclopedia/books/vov.htm.

43 S. P. Platonov, ed., Operat͡sii Sovetskikh Vooruzhënnykh Sil v Velikoĭ Otechestvennoĭ voĭne 1941-1945 gg. [Operations of the Soviet Armed Forces in the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945], vol. Том 1, 4 vols (Moskva: Voenizdat, 1958); Platonov; S. P. Platonov, ed., Operat͡sii Sovetskikh Vooruzhënnykh Sil v Velikoĭ Otechestvennoĭ voĭne 1941-1945 gg. [Operations of the Soviet Armed Forces in the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945], vol. Том 2, 4 vols (Moskva: Voenizdat, 1958); S. P. Platonov, ed., Operat͡sii Sovetskikh Vooruzhënnykh Sil v Velikoĭ Otechestvennoĭ voĭne 1941-1945 gg. [Operations of the Soviet Armed Forces in the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945], vol. Том 3, 4 vols (Moskva: Voenizdat, 1958); S. P. Platonov, ed., Operat͡sii Sovetskikh Vooruzhënnykh Sil v Velikoĭ Otechestvennoĭ voĭne 1941-1945 gg. [Operations of the Soviet Armed Forces in the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945], vol. Том 4, 4 vols (Moskva: Voenizdat, 1958).

44 ‘Results of the Discussion on the Operations of the Great Patriotic War 1941-45’, JPRS Translation of Voenno-Istoricheskiĭ Zhurnal [Military History Journal] 1985, no. 10 (1985): 10–23; ‘Results of the Discussion on the Operations of the Great Patriotic War 1941-45’, JPRS Translation of Voenno-Istoricheskiĭ Zhurnal [Military History Journal] 1986, no. 7 (1986): 46–48; ‘Results of the Discussion on the Operations of the Great Patriotic War 1941-45’, JPRS Translation of Voenno-Istoricheskiĭ Zhurnal [Military History Journal] 1986, no. 5 (1986): 48–50; ‘Results of the Discussion on the Operations of the Great Patriotic War 1941-45’, JPRS Translation of Voenno-Istoricheskiĭ Zhurnal [Military History Journal] 1986, no. 4 (1986): 48–52; ‘Results of the Discussion on the Operations of the Great Patriotic War 1941-45’, JPRS Translation of VoennoIstoricheskiĭ Zhurnal [Military History Journal] 1987, no. 10 (1987): 8–24.

45 V. I Fesʹkov, K. A Kalashnikov, and V. I Golikov, Krasnai͡a Armii͡a v pobedakh i porazhenii͡akh, 1941-1945 gg. [The Red Army in the Victories and Defeats of 1941–1945] (Томск: Tomskiĭ gos. universitet, 2003), http://militera.lib.ru/h/feskov_vi01/index.html; V.T. Eliseev, K.L. Kulagin, and S.A. Lipatov, Velikai͡a Otechestvennai͡a voĭna 1941-1945 gg.: kampanii i strategicheskie operat͡sii v t͡sifrakh [Great Patriotic War 1941-1945: Campaigns and strategic operations in detail], vol. Tom 1: (Moskva: Ob”edinennai͡a red. MVD Rossii, 2010); V.T. Eliseev, K.L. Kulagin, and S.A. Lipatov, Velikai͡a Otechestvennai͡a voĭna 1941-1945 gg.: kampanii i strategicheskie operat͡sii v t͡sifrakh [Great Patriotic War 1941-1945: Campaigns and strategic operations in detail], vol. Tom 2: (Moskva: Ob”edinennai͡a red. MVD Rossii, 2010).

46 Glantz rtd, The Failures of Historiography: Forgotten Battles of the German-Soviet War (1941-1945); Colonel David M. Glantz, The Soviet-German War 1941-1945: Myths and Realities: A Survey Essay, 2001, https://web.archive.org/web/20110709141048/http://www.strom.clemson.edu/publications/sg-war41- 45.pdf; Colonel David M. Glantz, Forgotten Battles of the Soviet-German War (1941-1945), vol. I to VI, 6 vols (Carlisle Barracks, PA: Self-published, 2006).

47 David M. Glantz, Red Storm Over the Balkans: The Failed Soviet Invasion of Romania (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2007), pp.10.

48 Gerasimova, The Rzhev Slaughterhouse. The Red Army’s Forgotten 15-Month Campaign against Army Group Center, 1942-1943., pp.150 & 154.

49 David M. Glantz, Red Storm Over the Balkans: The Failed Soviet Invasion of Romania, pp.9.

50 Wette, The Wehrmacht, p.270; Mary Cosgrove, ‘5: “Ein Stück Langweiliger Als Die Wehrmachtsausstellung, Aber Dafür Reprasentativer”: The Exhibition Fotofeldpost as Riposte to the “Wehrmacht Exhibition”’, in German Memory Contests: The Quest for Identity in Literature, Film, and Discourse Since 1990, ed. Anne Fuchs and Georg Grote (Camden House, 2006), 353.

51 Omer Bartov and Karin Miedler, Hitlers Wehrmacht: Soldaten, Fanatismus und die Brutalisierung des Krieges (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1995).

52 Horst Boog, Jürgen Förster, et al., Germany and the Second World War, ed. Ewald Osers, trans. Dean S. McMurry and Louise Wilmott, Har/Map edition, vol. 4 part 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), pp.481. The German edition was published in 1983.

53 Wette, The Wehrmacht, p.277; Alexandre Hill, The Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union, 1941-45: A Documentary History (London: Routledge, 2009), pp.26.

54 Boog, Förster, et al., Germany and the Second World War, 1998; Horst Boog, Jürgen Förster, et al., Germany and the Second World War, ed. Ewald Osers, trans. Dean S. McMurry and Louise Wilmott, Har/Map edition, vol. 4 part 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998).

55 Horst Boog, Werner Rahn, et al., Germany and the Second World War, vol. 6 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2001), Part VI The War Against the Soviet Union 1942-3.

56 Karl-Heinz Frieser, ed., Germany and the Second World War: Volume 8: The Eastern Front 1943-1944: The War in the East and on the Neighbouring Fronts, Germany and the Second World War (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).

57 Glantz and House, When Titans Clashed, 1995, Second revised edition 2005; Evan Mawdsley, Thunder in the East: The Nazi-Soviet War, 1941-1945, 1st ed. (London: Bloomsbury, 2017); Müller and Ueberschär, Hitler’s War in the East, 1941-1945, p.414; R. J. Overy, Russia’s War, 1st edition (London: Allen Lane, 1998).

58 Serdi͡ukov and Zolotarev, Velikai͡a Otechestvennai͡a voĭna 1941-1945 godov : v dvenadt͡sati tomakh.

59 ‘Akte 544. Chronologisches Verzeichnis der offiziellen Gefechtsbezeichnungen der Kämpfe und Schlachten des Heeres in der Zeit von 01.09.39 bis 21.06.41’ [File 544. Chronological list of the official battle names of the battles and battles of the army in the period from 01.09.39 to 21.06.41], Deutsch-Russisches Projekt Zur Digitalisierung Deutscher Dokumente in Archiven Der Russischen Föderation, July 1941, https://wwii.germandocsinrussia.org/de/nodes/1343#page/1/mode/grid/zoom/1; ‘Akte 557. OKH: Chronologisches Verzeichnis der Schlacht- und Gefechtsbezeichnungen für die Kämpfe im Ostfeldzug, an der finnischen Front und in Nordafrika bis Februar 1942’ [File 557. OKH: Chronological list of battle and battle names for the battles in the Eastern Campaign, on the Finnish front and in North Africa until February 1942], Deutsch-Russisches Projekt Zur Digitalisierung Deutscher Dokumente in Archiven Der Russischen Föderation, February 1942, https://wwii.germandocsinrussia.org/de/nodes/1355-akte-557-okh-chronologisches-verzeichnis-derschlacht-und-gefechtsbezeichnungen-f-r-die-k-mpf#page/1/mode/grid/zoom/1; ‘Akte 559. Chronologisches Verzeichnis der Schlacht- und Gefechtsbezeichnungen für die Kämpfe im Ostfeldzug 22.06.1941 - 07.1944 und in Italien ab 12.05.1944’ [File 559. Chronological list of battle and battle names for the battles in the Eastern Campaign 22.06.1941 - 07.1944 and in Italy from 12.05.1944.], Deutsch-Russisches Projekt Zur Digitalisierung Deutscher Dokumente in Archiven Der Russischen Föderation, July 1944, https://wwii.germandocsinrussia.org/de/nodes/1357-akte-559-chronologisches-verzeichnis-der-schlachtund-gefechtsbezeichnungen-f-r-die-k-mpfe-im#page/1/mode/grid/zoom/1; ‘Akte 67. Chronologische Aufstellung der wichtigsten Operationen, Schlachten und Kämpfe an der Ostfront und im Westen. (1941 - 1944)’ [File 67. Chronological list of the most important operations, battles and battles on the Eastern Front and in the West. (1941 - 1944)], Deutsch-Russisches Projekt Zur Digitalisierung Deutscher Dokumente in Archiven Der Russischen Föderation, September 1944, https://wwii.germandocsinrussia.org/de/nodes/889-akte-67-chronologische-aufstellung-der-wichtigstenoperationen-schlachten-und-k-mpfe-an-der-os#page/19/mode/inspect/zoom/7.

60 Percy E. Schramm Göttingen, ‘Die deutschen Verluste im Zweiten Weltkrieg’, Die Zeit, 27 October 1949, https://www.zeit.de/1949/43/die-deutschen-verluste-im-zweiten-weltkrieg/komplettansicht.

61 Rüdiger Overmans, Deutsche militärische Verluste im Zweiten Weltkrieg [German Military Losses in WW2] (München: De Gruyter, 2004),

62 G.F. Krivosheev, Soviet Casualties and Combat Losses in the Twentieth Century (London: Greenhill Books, 1997); G.F. Krivosheev, Rossii͡a i SSSR v voĭnakh XX veka: Poteri vooruzhennykh sil [Russia and USSR in wars of twentieth century: statistical study] (Moscow: OLMA-Press, 2001), http://lib.ru/MEMUARY/1939- 1945/KRIWOSHEEW/poteri.txt; G.F. Krivosheev, Grif Skretnosti Sniat: Poteri Vooruzhennykh Sil Sssr v Voinakh, Boevykh Deistviiakh I Voennykh Konflikakh [The Secret Classification Removed: The Losses of the Armed Forces of Ussr in Wars, Military Actions and Military Conflicts], 2009th ed. (Moskva: Veche, 2009).

63 Edward Hallett Carr and R. W Davies, A History of Soviet Russia, 14 vols (London: Macmillan, 1969); R. W. Davies, Mark Harrison, and S. G. Wheatcroft, eds., The Economic Transformation of the Soviet Union, 1913- 1945, First Edition edition (Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993); John Barber and Mark Harrison, The Soviet Home Front, 1941-1945: A Social and Economic History of the USSR in World War II (New York: Longman, 1991); Mark Harrison, Accounting for War: Soviet Production, Employment, and the Defence Burden, 1940-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

64 O’Brien, How the War Was Won : Air-Sea Power and Allied Victory in World War II, pp.310.

65 Harrison, ‘The USSR and Total War’. 66 Dunn, Stalin’s Keys to Victory, pp.7.

67 Rolf-Dieter Muller, Hans Umbreit, and Bernhard R. Kroener, Germany and the Second World War, vol. 5 part 2 (Clarendon Press, 1990), pp.1012.

68 Max Bork, T-7 Comments on Russian Railroads and Highways, Foreign Military Studies Branch, T-7 (Germany: Dept. of the Army, Office of Military History, 1953); Alfred Toppe, T-8 Problems of Supply in Far Reaching Operations., 28 vols, Foreign Military Studies Branch (Carlisle Barracks, Pa.: U.S. Army War College, 1951); Hermann Teske, ‘Die Bedeutung der Eisenbahn bei Aufmarsch, Verteidigung und Rückzug einer Heeresgruppe: dargestellt an d. dt. Operation “Zitadelle” gegen Kursk u. ihre Auswirkungen im Sommer 1943. [The importance of the railway in advance, defense and retreat of an Army Group: shown in Operation “Citadel” against Kursk and its impact in the summer of 1943]’, Allgemeine schweizerische Militärzeitschrift / Hrsg.: Schweizerische Offiziersgesellschaft. 121 (1955),:172; Martin van Creveld, Supplying War: Logistics from Wallenstein to Patton (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977); Klaus A. Friedrich Schüler, Logistik im Russlandfeldzug: die Rolle der Eisenbahn bei Planung, Vorbereitung und Durchführung des deutschen Angriffs auf die Sowjetunion bis zur Krise vor Moskau im Winter 1941/42 [Logistics in the Russian Campaign, the role of the railway in Planning and Supporting the German attack on the Soviet Union and the Crisis before Moscow in the Winter of 1941/2] (Frankfurt am Main; New York: P. Lang, 1987).

69 H. G. W. Davie, ‘The Influence of Railways on Military Operations in the Russo-German War 1941– 1945’, The Journal of Slavic Military Studies 30, no. 2 (3 April 2017): 321–46, https://doi.org/10.1080/13518046.2017.1308120.

70 Alexander Hill, ‘Recent Literature on the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union 1941-1945’, Contemporary European History 9, no. 1 (2000): p.170.

71 David Stahel, Operation Barbarossa and Germany’s Defeat in the East (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2012), p.474.

72 Evan Mawdsley, Thunder in the East : The Nazi-Soviet War, 1941-1945, 1st ed. (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2005); Mawdsley, Thunder in the East; Chris Bellamy, Absolute War: Soviet Russia in the Second World War : A Modern History (London: Pan Books, 2009); David M. Glantz and Jonathan M. House, When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler, Revised edition (Lawrence, Kan: University Press of Kansas, 2015).

73 Mawdsley, Thunder in the East : The Nazi-Soviet War, 1941-1945, p.xxiii; Fesʹkov, Kalashnikov, and Golikov, Krasnai͡a Armii͡a v pobedakh i porazhenii͡akh, 1941-1945 gg., pp.24 Table 1.1.

74 Glantz, Forgotten Battles of the Soviet-German War (1941-1945).

75 Bellamy, Absolute War, p.556.

76 Mawdsley, Thunder in the East : The Nazi-Soviet War, 1941-1945, pp.152.

77 Overy, Russia’s War, pp.154.

78 Alexander Dallin, German Rule in Russia, 1941-1945; Karel C Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine under Nazi Rule (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004); Laurie R Cohen, Smolensk under the Nazis: Everyday Life in Occupied Russia (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2013); Johannes Enstad, Soviet Russians under Nazi Occupation : Fragile Loyalties in World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

79 Alexander Hill, The War Behind the Eastern Front: The Soviet Partisan Movement in North-West Russia, 1941- 1944, 1st ed. (London; New York: Routledge, 2005); Enstad, Soviet Russians under Nazi Occupation.

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