The German Army on the Eastern Front: An Inner View of the Ostheer's Experiences of War

摘要

For those who lived through World War Ⅱ in Germany, the Second World War is synonymous with the Eastern Front. It is in the Vernichtungskrieg between the Third Reich and the Soviet Union that by far the majority of German casualties were sustained and where the largest part of the Wehrmacht fought as from 22 June 1941 to the utter defeat of Nazi Germany in May 1945. In their concise yet broad-ranging The German Army on the Eastern Front: An Inner View of the Ostheer's Experiences of War, Jeff Rutherford and Adrian Wettstein focus on basically every aspect of the Eastern Front from a German point of view, ranging from combat to leadership and from ideological motivations to logistics. The authors do so on a wide range of wartime documents, many of which are either new or translated from German, making them accessible to an English-speaking audience. This is especially welcome, as there is still some tendency in Anglo-American historiography to neglect the centrality of the Eastern Front in the outcome of the Second World War.