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Hitler's Panzers East: World War II Reinterpreted

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R.H.S. Stolfi is here to tell you that Hitler lost World War II with one blunder in August, 1941. Stolfi argues that an immediate, all-out drive by the German Army Group Center against Moscow on the eighth week of Hitler's massive invasion of Soviet Russia (Operation Barbarossa) would ultimately have destroyed the Red Army. Instead, Hitler halted Army Group Center in August and ordered Guderian's 2nd Armored Group southward toward Kiev, losing the opportunity to take Moscow, and with it the war.

Had Moscow fallen, Stolfi believes that Germany would inevitably have conquered Russia. His thesis is that the Leningrad and Kiev fronts would have been isolated and annihilated, a decisive portion of Soviet industry would have fallen into German hands, and the Wehrmacht would have driven on to Gorki and the Volga by December, forcing Stalin's government to surrender or else be overthrown by a populace unwilling to keep fighting a lost war.

Stolfi's thesis is interesting and provocative, but he argues it ineptly. His research is impressive in its depth, but far too limited in scope. While he has done excellent work with the German primary sources, he has ignored the vast majority of the Soviet sources. While the German sources suffice to support many of Stolfi's points, it is inexcusable to rely exclusively on German intelligence (Abwehr) reports to evaluate the Soviets' losses, armed strength, plans and intentions. Stolfi also ludicrously relies on postwar statistics to judge how much Soviet industrial capacity Germany could have captured.

The thesis that the Wehrmacht could have taken Moscow rings true. Given that Operation Typhoon (October 2, 1941) did in fact carry the Germans into the suburbs of Moscow against fierce resistance, encircling and destroying vast Soviet forces at Vyasma and Bryansk, one may plausibly suppose that an earlier German attack against less prepared defenses, in the more favorable weather conditions of August, could have taken the capital. Also convincing is Stolfi's claim that Hitler's decision to send Guderian southward reflected the German tyrant's inability to understand the blitzkrieg method, and that Hitler as a military leader had a siege mentality rather than a blitz mentality.

But Stolfi is not nearly so persuasive in arguing that the fall of Moscow would inexorably entail the fall of Soviet Russia. The author consistently analogizes the campaign in Russia to Germany's earlier campaign in France, concluding that Russia was "no more than a bigger cat in a bigger bag." A fundamental difference between the two campaigns appears to have escaped him; the Germans' crushing victory over the French and British in May 1940 was accomplished in the absence of any Allied strategic reserve. Once the Germans broke through at Sedan, the Western Allies had no uncommitted forces to throw at Guderian's armored corps as it raced to the sea, and thus could only hurl uncoordinated piecemeal attacks at him with whatever units they could pry loose as he trapped their armies in Flanders.

In contrast, the Soviets had a strategic reserve vastly larger than the Abwehr realized. And Stolfi, dependent on German sources, appears no more cognizant than the Abwehr of those reserves' size. Total Red Army strength with reserves at the start of Barbarossa is estimated at 12 million, but Stolfi suggests that his hypothetical assault on Moscow, by causing an additional 1 million casualties beyond those the Russians actually incurred historically, would have destroyed Soviet Russia's strategic reserve. In reality, the Soviet reserve was large enough to fight on.

Stolfi also posits the likely political collapse of Stalin's government had Moscow fallen. This is possible, but a corresponding collapse of the Russian will to fight is unlikely. The Russians were confronted with an invader whose words and deeds plainly proclaimed its intention to enslave all Russians to the "master race." Whoever might have replaced Stalin at the helm, he would certainly be chosen above all for his determination to drive the enemy from Mother Russia.

Stolfi also argues, unpersuasively, that the Germans had accurately assessed the rigors of war in Russia, citing a few accurate Abwehr estimates of Russian numbers in certain arms, and claiming that the Germans, out of respect for Russian strength, massed as much strength as practical against the enemy. This is not true. Germany left 51 divisions in the western theater, 22 of which could easily have been used in Barbarossa, the Western Allies being in no condition to invade Europe in 1941. The Abwehr's gross underestimation of Soviet air strength is not mentioned. Even by Stolfi's own calculations, the campaign would have lasted through December had Moscow fallen, yet Stolfi claims the Wehrmacht was right not to burden its supply system by providing winter clothing to the troops. Accepting Stolfi's own appraisal of the ultimate progress of the Wehrmacht after taking Moscow, one notes that the predicted final advance is still well short of the line Archangelsk-Kotlas-Gorki-the Volga-Astrakhan, which Barbarossa proposed to achieve. I accept Guderian's verdict over Stolfi's: "We have severely underestimated the Russians, the extent of the country and the treachery of the climate. This is the revenge of reality."

So could Operation Barbarossa have succeeded? Maybe, but Stolfi has not proven it. Illogical argument, selective evidence, and research tunnel-vision make for an unconvincing final thesis. At best, Stolfi has established that, if Germany ever had a chance, it was likelier by taking Moscow in 1941 than Stalingrad in 1942. But too often Stolfi's strident insistence that the blitzkrieg war machine was literally unstoppable by anything other than Hitler himself dredges up bad memories of the World War I cult of the offensive, which killed millions pointlessly with its vapid nostrum that imprudence assures victory, and the enemy's capabilities do not matter.

Almost alone of all WWII historians, Stolfi takes up the cause of the German Army's tactical and operational abilities, and by inference their faults (see M. Cooper, THE GERMAN ARMY for the best argument). He also clearly demonstrates what few arm chair strategists and many military members fail to grasp: no military operation EVER takes place in a political vacuum. The German style of fighting, effective as it was, was completely incompatible with Hitler's political/strategic thinking. That is why this book is so important to fairly evaluate Hitler's interference in the conduct of military operations. Fortunately for Humanity, he did, and was one of the Allies' greatest assets. But that obscures the point that the German Army knew its business in conducting war winning battles and campaigns. Contrary to conventional belief, the Germans did not attack Russia to get to Britian, they did not underestimate the magnitude of Soviet military power, they did not neglect the logistical matters of decisive campaigning, and they did not fall prey to superior tanks. On the contrary, the German Army from 22 June 41 until the end of Sep of the same year demonstrated that they had the ability to go the distance and win the battle at the gates of Moscow. Whether that would have been enough to win the war, given Hitler's penchant to fight everyone, is cause for another book.

There are some weaknesses to keep in mind. The author states that he has relied on German sources; upon contemplation, this sort of makes sense since he is evaluating the victorious Wehrmacht, not the one that lost. It is doubtful that Soviet materials would shed much light on operations during the first few weeks of combat. In some cases by the time the Russians figured it out, the Germans were 60 miles past. The author does assume a "monolithic" panzer mentality in the German Army. With the exception of Guderian, Hoth, and Rommel, no one above the rank of Colonel in 1941 KNEW what to do with a tank. Manstein is taken to task for failure to exploit a tank victory, but the author ascribes no other but local significance to this. This assumption is important, because those mentioned above were not calling the shots at OKH or OKW. Further, as stated in other review, the case for final collapse is not there. The author attempts to show that hundreds of thousands of Russians would surrender when they figured out that the Germans wouldn't shoot them on capture. What is not mentioned, is that the fate of a Russian POW was not that heartening anyway. Finally, the author fails to give credit to the Soviet tactical response of attacking wherever in contact. This was the correct response to the German blitz tactics. Anything that would cost time and wear and tear was bound to have some influence on German decision makers. The Americans did it in the Bulge. Imagine if the French had adopted the same attitude. Things would have turned out different

In balance, though, it is a very good read. It presents a different perspective, a "what-if", and some good analysis of military power and its relationship to the political master.

One may differ with the author's conclusion, but one cannot deny the book is a fascinating analysis of the Barbarossa blitzkrieg campaign in Russia.

For example, the author superimposes a map of the French campaign upon a map of the Russian campaign area to give a sense of comparative scale.

Excellent 'rate-of-advance' maps are also included, showing the progression of the German offensive by the week. By viewing these, one gets a sense of the true German intention as well as areas of strong Russian resistance.

An astute reader can draw many conclusions on the mechanics of motorized war and the Barbarossa Campaign.

To reject the entire work simply because one disagrees with the author's opinion is folly.

It is an insightful work as far as close analysis of the 'blitzkrieg' technique is concerned.

R.H.S. Stolfi's work, Hitler's Panzers East shows, definitively how the German army was capable of defeating Soviet Russia and its vast armed forces. Stolfi supports this viewpoint with carefully researched data from German intelligence services (Soviet sources have been distorted by propaganda)depicting how the Wermacht looked at a Russian campaign with foreboding and dread. Stolfi's data accurately depicts how the strength of Soviet forces was gauged with great accuracy by German intelligence, often corretly on or even overestimating Soviet resources and armed forces.
By August of 1941, the Germans had indeed defeated eight of nine Soviet field armies opposing Army Group Centre. The last remaining army and any reserves were grouped by the Soviets directly in front of Moscow. These units were relatively well-equipped, but poorly trained and led. Considering the speed with which the Germans had tackled Soviet defenses and attacks, it would seem safe to say that, considering the conditions, the units in front of Moscow would be desposed of in record time, even for Army Group Centre. Assuming Moscow is captured, the Soviet Northwestern Front would have been forced to fight on reversed fronts, so, as a result, Leningrad would fall, a huge blow to morale for the Soviets. Those forces opposing Field Marshal Rundstendt's Army Group South would be forced to withdraw behind the Volga to avoid destruction, as Stofli rightly concludes that after Army Group North was freed up it would slowly take the current position of AG Centre while AG Centre would wheel south to cut off the escape route of the powerful Russian forces retreating east. Odds are, that most of the Russian forces would be cut off and destroyed. The Soviet government would retreat probably to Molotov where it would eke out an existence with less than 30% of its armed forces against German troups in winter positions on the Western side of the Volga.
The only thing keeping the Germans from attaining this lofty goal was Hitler's meglomania and belief that Moscow was purely a geographical target. With this in mind, he ordered most of the mobile units of AG Centre to assist AG South in the capture of Kiev. It was with this ill-fated decision that the Germans gave up almost certain victory, thereafter, the possibilities of winning the war or even achieving a stalemate rapidly diminished.
This is by far, one of the most difinitive works on the possibilities of World War II and should be read by all those who have learned in their history classes that the German invasion of the USSR in 1941 could not have succeeded.

I first came across the question of German hesitation to strike directly for Moscow in August 1941, during a wargame I played many years ago. After the successful conclusion of the battle of Smolensk, the German Army Group Center (which was the most powerful of the three employed in the Eastern Front) was immobilized for a period of two months in that area, giving the Red Army ample time to regroup, mass reinforcements and construct fortifications in the main axis of German advance. The Germans lost precious time encircling Soviet forces in the Kiev area and defeating counteroffensives near Smolensk and Yelnya. But these were not the main reasons for halting their advance, as Mr Stolfi explains. Fuhrer's indecision and vacillation were the real brakes applied to the German panzers: "Several books on the Second World War interpret these attacks as "stiffening Soviet resistance" which forced the Germans to halt well short of Moscow and showed that they had severely underestimated the challenges of a campaign in Soviet Russia. The interpretation is a mistaken one. The Army Group Center forces halted, as planned and ordered by Bock, to reorganize briefly and launch the final attack on Moscow or advance south into the Ukraine".

The German Army was so far superior to its enemy, that it inflicted casualties at a constant rate of 20:1 for the whole summer period of 1941. The vast success of Operation "Typhoon", launched in October 1941 proves what the Germans could have achieved if they had decided to move against Moscow earlier. As the author says in page 116, "influenced by the German loss of the Russian campaign, writers have researched and identified factors contributing to the German defeat rather than factors that, in the successful beginning of a blitz, could have led to German victory. The Germans lost the war after reaching the decisive turning point in the brief period from 22 June to 13 August 1941. At that time they had an overwhelming chance of winning, but later, as their strategic situation deteriorated, they had virtually none. Factors presented by the conentional wisdom to account for German defeat include the time-honored numbers and stubborn toughness of the Russian soldier, and Russian space, winter, and mud. More modern factors include the fanatic, determined leadership of the Soviet Communists, theri organizational abilities, and the resources and productive capacity of the Soviet state. All these factors contributed to the insuperable difficulties of fighting a long war in Russia in the painfully drawn-out, anticlimactic period from August 1941 to May 1945, but none contributed conclusively to the Germans' winning or losing the opening blitz."

Mr Stolfi believes that Hitler was characterized by a "siege mentality" and has many convincing arguments to support this view. Hitler never was a firm believer of the blitzkrieg war, nor had a deep understanding of the true capabilities of the panzer forces. Although he took bold strategic decisions in very quich succession, he was a timid operational mind and was very afraid of operational risks, as was proved often in France (1940) and Russia (1941-43). Mr Stolfi analyzes why the battles of Stalingrad, Kursk and Alamein were not the turning points of World War II and why the August 1941 must be considered so. He insists that if the Germans had captured the Moscow - Gorki area they would had incapacitate the Soviet state because that was the most important industrial, rail and telephone node of the USSR. To support this argument he uses maps of European Russia where he superimposes the campaigns of France (1940) and Scandinavia (1940) as well as the terrible loss of industrial capacity that the Soviets would had suffered if the Germans had reached the Volga river at Gorki. This is a very well written and documented book which is highly recommended to anyone interested in the complex strategic mysteries of World War II.

R.H.S. Stolfi's "Hitler's Panzers East" is a great read. The central thesis of the book is that had Hitler not stopped his armed forces -- specifically, Army Group Center under Bock -- by diverting them, they could have captured Moscow and quite possibly won World War II. Ultimately, the German armed forces reached the outskirts of Moscow with winter approaching. It is important to remember that there were 3 separate thrusts by the German army into the Soviet Union as part of Operation Barbarossa. Army Group North led by General Leeb was heading towards St. Petersburg (Leningrad); Army Group Center under General Bock was headed for Moscow; and Army Group South under General Von Rundstedt was driving for Stalingrad/Caucasus Mountains.

The central point: did Adolf Hitler's decision to divert Army Group Center in August 1941 southward (to take Kiev and assist Army Group South) prevent and delay Army Group Center's ability to seize Moscow? Stolfi makes a very convincing case that the answer is most assuredly YES. Relying on many German Army documents, German general's books/biographies, Stolfi makes a convincing case that Hitler's one chance to defeat the Soviet Union was in 1941, not 1942 or 1943.

The book meticulously goes into detail regarding battle strengths of the competing Soviet and German armies. During the early months of Barbarossa, the ratio of Soviet-to-Germans killed or wounded ranged from between 10:1 and 20:1. The Russians were taking on very heavy losses, and the German pincher movements were engulfing massive amounts of captured Soviet POW's, including 600,000 at Vyasma-Bryansk. The pincher movements employed by the German armies resulted in the biggest series of captured POW's in the history of warfare. By comparison, when the Nazi's surrendered Stalingrad in 1943, the 6th Army was just over 90,000 men.

Stolfi goes into detail on the competing war mentalities of "siege" and "blitzkrieg" with the former being more closely aligned with Hitler. Stolfi uses many examples to show that whereas the Army had the blitzkrieg mentality, Hitler repeatedly got scared and worried about going too far too fast, evidence of a siege strategy. I thought this was an interesting concept, but not one that needed to be continually revisited throughout the book.

One wonders if any recently de-classified Russian archival material would have influenced Stolfi's analysis. However, given the inaccuracy and propaganda and Communist Party-driven edge to Soviet historical analyses and even 1st-source documents (many deliberately wrong so as to cover up Party errors), I am not sure that Stolfi would have gotten a different picture of competing Soviet vs. German strength if he had access to information other than from the Germans and U.S./British. I have attempted to reach Professor Stolfi on this, but have been unsuccessful to date.

"Hitler's Panzers East" is a very good story that will cause you to really think about what might have been. Could Hitler have really captured most of the Soviet Union, and would this have meant the end of communism decades earlier? Would Hitler then have turned his attention to Winston Churchill and Great Britain? Would Churchill and the British armies/navies flee for Canada (as was being planned) to fight the war from the US-North American continent? Would the US have entered World War II if Hitler had conquered the Soviet Union and Japan did NOT attack Pearl Harbor a few months later? Finally, is it possible that if Barbarossa had succeeded, that the Cold War might have been not between Western democracies and Communism, but between Western democracies and a global Nazism promoted by Hitler and Nazi Germany?

These questions today came alot closer to being relevant than one might suppose based on the analysis in Stolfi's book.

Stolfi's analysis is both innovative and excellent. Like Holmes, he notices the clue of the "barking dog in the night." Watson says, "But there was no dog barking in the night." "Precisely," says Holmes.

Stolfi's thesis is that at the end of July the Soviets were on the ropes. There was nothing between the Germans and Moscow which could have stopped them. Everyone was champing at the bit to go for the jugular, i.e. Moscow. Take Moscow and the entire Eastern Front would be turned inside-out. The Red armies in the North and South would be on exterior lines, forced to fight on reversed fronts, without direct communications with each other. Continued Russian resistance no doubt depended on continued existence of the hated Communist regime, which was by that time very doubtful. With the Germans reported at Khimki, there were open incidents of rebellion in the streets.

To criticize Stolfi for repetition is to misunderstand the nature and obligations of logical argument and marshalling of evidence. He takes the case from each of several decisive perspectives and determines that no matter how you look at it, the Germans had the Russian campaign won at the end of July -- and with it, WW II. Defeating Russia, and thus obtaining the resources necessary to for the strategic forces buildup which Germany had not completed before 1939 (and these resources would have been secure from Allied bombing), Germany would have been able to turn West again, never fighting on more than one front (which was merely a variation on the classic German strategic theme that it must never fight a war on two fronts). America, preoccupied with the Japanese in the Pacific and faced with a fait accompli in Europe, might never have gotten involved in WW II in Europe anyway.

The only thing which saved Russia was Hitler and his characteristic penchant for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. His diversion of the attack away from Moscow for two months allowed the dissolving Russian defense to solidify. Even then, even with the mud and the early snow, the Wehrmacht still almost made it. But in the end, the German army's expertise couldn't counteract Hitler's interference again as they had been able to do in the campaign in France in 1940

What Stolfi points out is that the German military were not the simpletons they are often made out to be by the "they could never have defeated the combined industrial might of the Western democracies" crowd of critics. As he very astutely observes, if they won in the very beginning, as they had in France and Norway and the Balkans, then there would never have been a chance for that great might to be deployed. You can't play catch-up ball when the game is over without extra innings.

Stolfi's book is a brilliant exercise of military history, and is very interestedly supplemented by DiNardo's "Germany's Panzer Arm" and van Creveld's "Fighting Power." The German army was specifically designed to do the job it did in France and almost did (and only missed doing by a strategic hair's breadth) in Russia -- i.e. kick butt in the first few weeks and preempt the deployment of the superior strength of the opposition.

Once all is said and done, Stolfi's book is a stunning look at what almost happened to our world. Things would be profoundly different today in ways we can probably never imagine. In the end, his most compelling argument (which he approaches from the many important facets of the problem) is that they damned near did it just the way they said they were going to try to do it.

As a person who's long studied military history (especially World War II) I must say that I was raised on the usual standard histories of Barbarossa. Such works repeated ad infinitum and ad nauseum the reasons for German's defeat: the vast Soviet pool of manpower, the German underestimation of the rigors of the campaign, the "harshness of the Russian winter" and such. I never found such arguments completely convincing, nor did I ever read any serious discussion of Army Group Center's sudden stop after taking Smolensk, aside from such tripe as "stiffening Soviet resistance" or "German supply problems". Finally comes a book which presents a whole new look at Barbarossa, and the strategic possibilities of the German army.

R.H.S. Stolfi has done a masterful job of giving an entirely new thesis on Barbarossa, and backs it up with a mountain of evidence. To those critics who maintain that Stolfi tries "proving" the Germans would have won the European war had they not stopped the drive on Moscow, I would vehemently disagree. What Stolfi claims is that the Germans set up the preconditions for victory by late July of 1941, and therefore had the best chance of winning than at any other time during World War II. That they would have is no more preordained than the prevailing notion that the Soviet Union was preordained to win.

The central theme of Stolfi's argument is that the German advance from June 22 to the end of July was of such a huge scope, of such astonishing breadth, of such lightning speed, and of such overwhelming power that it was on a pace to deny the Soviets the one thing they needed to survive -- time! All talk of vast Soviet reserves (now being stretched by Soviet propaganda to the impossible figure of 12 million!) would simply count for nothing if the Soviets didn't have the time to utilize such reserves. One only has to look at a map and see how much of European Russia had been seized by German arms to realize how much of those potential "reserves" (whether 12 million or some much lower, but more realistic figure) had been lost to the Soviets permanently.

The real factors to determining any realistic hopes of Soviet survival are not of vast but un-utilized manpower at the time of the Barbarossa Summer, but of the actual Soviet armies existing at the time. Stolfi doesn't have to exaggerate to state that much of the Red Army had been either destroyed or roughly handled during the first 2 months of Barbarossa. That included virtually all of the numerous field armies posted on the frontier, as well as many rushed towards the threatening German forces as they advanced into the interior. The situation in the Russian's Western Special Military District (which corresponds to the German's Army Group Center) was particularly disastrous. The Germans had destroyed the equivalent of eight Soviet field armies in the great encirclements of Bialystock, Minsk, and Smolensk. What was left, west of Moscow, by the end of July Stolfi estimates as the equivalent strength of a mere 35 divisions (at most 22 intact divisions, the rest being bits and pieces of escaped Russian units already roughly handled). That Army Group Center, if unleashed early in August as Generals Hoth and Guderian demanded, could have destroyed this force is beyond question. Von Bock would have the 55 intact, victory-flushed divisions he began the campaign with (so relatively light had been German losses), and 3 more added from the general reserve. That the Soviet Union was "in extremis" at the end of July must be obvious to even the most slavish followers of the "standard" history of Barbarossa.

Critics of Stolfi can hardly deny this conclusion, but instead point to the tired old refrain of "vast reserves" to stop the Germans, even if they succeeded in taking Moscow. Whether such "reserves" were in quality anything like the regular Soviet armies already lost is questionable, to say nothing of the German armies they would face. But the fact is that in early August virtually no reserves had been built up in the area east-northeast of Moscow (Stolfi's "Moscow-Gorki Mobilization Space"). It took the Soviets from August to December 5th (when they launched their counterattack) to build up this force of roughly 15 field armies (bearing in mind that each Soviet field army was much smaller than it's German counterpart -- being roughly equivalent to a German corps). But what Stolfi contends is that the taking of Moscow and the area east of it by September would have completely STILLBORN such a Russian build-up! Not only would the largest population center (by far) from which these reserves were drawn from have fallen, but the remaining reserves could not have possibly concentrated there in an area held by German arms.

The loss of the greater Moscow area would obviously been of a tremendous blow to the Soviet war machine, being the biggest population and industrial region of the USSR and the hub of the Soviet communications and transportation network. It also would have precluded any coordinated defense of the country as a whole, and set the entire Soviet government (including the military high command, the Ministry of Defense, and the Communist Party leadership) on the run. The psychological blow to both Russian soldier and peasant alike would have been devastating.

Could Stalin's murderous, unpopular regime have even survived such a loss? That's certainly debatable. Setting the Communist government on the run would have given much opportunity for anti-Soviet forces within the country to set up a "provisional" government of the sort that took over from the Tsar in April, 1917. That such a government would have no stomach to continue the disastrous war is fairly certain, and would have made a settlement with Hitler, probably along the lines of Vichy France. Then Stolfi's assertion that the war would be largely over by the end of 1941 would have been true, regardless of Stalinist forces holding out in the hinterlands.

Barring such a debacle to the Communist regime, the war, of course, would have continued, probably well into 1942. Only on this point is Stolfi alittle weak, claiming only that "mopping up" operations would have continued into 1942. But the important question in this scenario is what realistic chances would the Soviets have had of stopping the Germans, let alone taking the offensive? With the freeing of the bulk of Army Group Center for operations in the north and south (particularly Guderian and Hoth's powerful Panzergruppes), the still formidable Russian forces on the Ukrainian and Leningrad fronts would have faced the most nightmarish situation possible -- fighting on their original fronts against Army Groups North and South, while simultaneously fighting on REVERSED fronts against Army Group Center's forces knifing down into their rears (and receiving little in the way of reinforcements and supplies, to boot). Any military strategist worth his salt will tell you that's a situation virtually assured to bring about the destruction of both Soviet army groups, and probably in relatively short time.

With the loss of these last pre-war "professional" field armies, the Soviet cause would have been truly hopeless. Yes, the Soviets could have still built-up new armies to the east -- armies made up largely of old reservists and green conscripts, and poorly equipped, at that. To gauge the chances these new "conscript" armies had of surviving long, one need only look back to the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. When the two principal armies of Imperial France were surrendered in late 1870 at Sedan and Metz (and the Third Empire fell to a provisional republican government), the French did continue the war, and succeeded in raising huge "armies" of green levees with only a smattering of quality troops. The record of these ill-trained, ill-equiped, hastily drawn "armies" is wretched: equally unable to sustain offensive operations or stand on the defensive when the mighty Prussian Army attacked. they were severely mauled. The elan of the French people to continue the war against the hated Prussian Army was hardly enough to sustain the hapless republican army which tried to hold beseiged Paris, or the line south of Paris. After a string of disasters, the French finally woke up to reality and sued for peace, taking the best terms they could. Without their first-rate professional army, the French nation had only been living on borrowed time. The analogy to a situation where the Soviets tried to build up similiar untrained and untested "armies" of reserves and conscripts in eastern Ukraine or the Urals is simply too obvious. Hitler's vaunted army would have made as short a work of them as Von Moltke's did of the Republican French.

And what of aid from the U.S., as some critics have alluded to? Even if it could somehow reach the remaining forces deep in European Russia it would have been far too little to have any effect. One need only review the relatively paltry sums of aid the USSR did receive by sea during the course of 1942 to lay that argument to rest. Again, the Soviets needed TIME above all to survive. Based on how the German generals conducted the blitz, and especially the speed-above-all attitude of Guderian and Hoth, I cannot conclude that the Soviet Union would have been given the time to recoup.

Some of Stolfi's critics try and point to recently declassified Soviet documents to "prove" the Soviet's strength -- but I find such arguments fatulous in the extreme. For one thing, they're simply another rehash of the same tired refrain. Moreover, that the Soviets were a totalitarian dictatorship with both the ability and need to heavily propagandize every event is obvious. That the Soviets would outright lie to preserve the myth of their "inevitable" victory, both during and after the war, is likewise assured. Stalin's hold on power would have been undermined had the Russian people really known the dire straights there were in. I give these assertions no more credence than Hitler's numerous claims that Britian was as good as defeated in 1940. How can thinking people rightly reject Nazi propaganda, while accepting on it's face Stalinist propaganda? Absurd.

In summation, Stolfi does a fine job marshaling his facts and presenting them in coldly logical method. He views the campaign from every concievable angle and demolishes the tired old notions of both Western and Soviet sources. He succeeds in taking the reader back to Barbarossa Summer to show the real possibilities of that time. Forget all the standard accounts you've read on Barbarossa and judge Stolfi on his own merits. Once you've read "Hitlers Panzers East", all the previously written volumes on the subject will ring very hollow.

An interesting analysis, but not wholly convincing. While Stolfi perhaps makes a plausible case for the Germans being able to take Moscow in late 1941, he fails to establish his claim that this would have finished off the Soviet Union, and thus guaranteed German victory. The USSR had plenty of reserves further east, and may still have been able to turn the Germans back, especially with American help (which came anyway).

Stolfi's book defies conventional historical wisdon when he makes a convincing argument that the Wehrmacht could have won in the Soviet Union in July/August 1941. Germany's Army Group Center was poised for the final offensive against Moscow at the end of July 41 when Hitler vacillated and turned attention toward economic objectives. Yes, this book reinforces the beliefs of former generals that the loss of WW2 was Hitler's fault, but Stolfi presents an interesting study of the Fuehrer's dual nature, one of siege mentality during military campaigns, after being able to make brilliant political decisions to attack in the first place. The author makes an excellent point that Germans were excellent at winning the initial battles and therefore brought campaigns to quick conclusions in their country's favor. When unable to quickly force opening decisive battles, the Wehrmacht did not fare so well. I would highly recommend this book even though it is based entirely on German resources. Most of traditional history of this campaign has come from a Soviet regime with a political agenda of its own. It is a point of view worth considering.