Operation Barbarossa: Nazi Germany's War in the East, 1941-1945 - Hardcover

Hartmann, Christian

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0199660786 ISBN 13: 9780199660780

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2013

Synopsis

The war between Nazi Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union that raged between 1941 and 1945 was the ultimate confrontation between the two great totalitarian ideologies of the twentieth century. Unprecedented in the scale of the destruction that it wrought and the deep historical scars that it left behind, it was a gargantuan conflict in every sense of the term: in the vast territories over which it ranged, its intensity and duration, the huge numbers of people involved, and last but by no means least, the millions of victims that it claimed.

The invasion of the Soviet Union was the conflict that Hitler had always ultimately planned for: a pitiless war of conquest and destruction in which the Fuehrer dreamed of creating his 'Thousand Year Reich', destroying his ideological opponents, and enslaving or 'eliminating' whole peoples in the process. It was right from the start a struggle for survival, conducted with great bitterness and savagery by opponents who knew that defeat meant the destruction of everything they stood for.

The outcome of this bitter struggle was quite as momentous as the struggle which had preceded it. By 1945 a huge swathe of Europe between Berlin and Moscow had been reduced to a devastated wasteland in which whole societies had been erased from the face of the earth. Over 26 million Soviets and between four and five million Germans lay dead. The victory of the Red Army transformed the Soviet Union into one of the world's two superpowers. It also saw the complete destruction of Hitler's megalomaniac vision for the East, the division of the German Reich, and the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe for a generation.

In Operation Barbarossa, German military historian Christian Hartmann draws upon the latest research, enriched by a wealth of eye-witness testimony from both the Soviet and the German sides, to paint a masterly overview of these momentous four years and their human consequences--one that is both gripping and at times deeply moving.

About this title

About the Author

Christian Hartmann works as a historian at the Institute for Contemporary History, Munich, and is Senior Lecturer at the Staff College of the German Armed Forces in Hamburg. A board member of the German Committee for the History of the Second World War, he is also a historical adviser to the History Channel in Germany. He has published widely on the history of Germany in the Second World War, including a biography of General Halder, head of the Wehrmacht General Staff in the opening years of the war, and is the editor of four volumes in the German Documents on Foreign Policy series.

From Booklist

In terms of troops engaged, material, casualties, and geographic scope, WWII on the Eastern Front dwarfed the Allied efforts against Germany in the west. In addition, as Hartmann repeatedly illustrates, the struggle between the totalitarian powers, Germany and the Soviet Union, was fought with almost unprecedented savagery and was openly viewed and espoused by some Germans as a war of annihilation. Hartmann, a historian and consultant to the History Channel in Germany, first published this compact, fast-moving account that manages to cover the major military campaigns while conveying a sense of how ordinary soldiers on both sides experienced the combat in Germany, in 2011. He offers some interesting assertions and rejects some revisionists’ claim that Hitler’s attack was preventive, since Hitler always planned to seize European Russia. Despite the supposed technological superiority of the Wehrmacht, Hartmann shows that Germans quickly became dependent on horses and carts to move across vast areas. This is a superbly written survey of a seminal conflict that is ideal for general readers. --Jay Freeman

About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0199660786
• ISBN 13: 9780199660780
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208