David Stahel richt zich op het Duitse leger tijdens de Tweede Wereldoorlog, met een bijzondere nadruk op Hitlers oorlog tegen de Sovjet-Unie. Zijn werk duikt in cruciale veldslagen en operaties aan het Oostfront, waarbij strategische beslissingen en hun verreikende gevolgen worden ontleed. Stahels benadering wordt gekenmerkt door diepgaand historisch onderzoek en een streven naar een alomvattend begrip van de complexiteit van het Oostfront. Zijn boeken bieden lezers scherpe inzichten in de voortgang en radicalisering van het conflict.
A comparative biographical study of four leading German panzer generals in the Second World War. Using the private wartime correspondence of Guderian, Hoepner, Reinhardt and Schmidt, Stahel sheds new light on their private lives and public personas, their leadership at the front and their culpability in Nazi criminality.
Drawing from thousands of soldiers' accounts, letters, and diaries, historians David Stahel and Craig Luther tell the story of Barbarossa but also the story of men at war in the twentieth century.
Germany’s winter campaign of 1941–1942 is commonly seen as its first defeat. In Retreat from Moscow, a bold, gripping account of one of the seminal moments of World War II, David Stahel argues that instead it was its first strategic success in the East. The Soviet counteroffensive was in fact a Pyrrhic victory. Despite being pushed back from Moscow, the Wehrmacht lost far fewer men, frustrated its enemy’s strategy, and emerged in the spring unbroken and poised to recapture the initiative
Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, began the largest and most costly campaign in military history. Its failure was a key turning point of the Second World War. The operation was planned as a Blitzkrieg to win Germany its Lebensraum in the East, and the summer of 1941 is well-known for the German army's unprecedented victories and advances. Yet the German Blitzkrieg depended almost entirely upon the motorised Panzer groups, particularly those of Army Group Centre. Using previously unpublished archival records, David Stahel presents a new history of Germany's summer campaign from the perspective of the two largest and most powerful Panzer groups on the Eastern front. Stahel's research provides a fundamental reassessment of Germany's war against the Soviet Union, highlighting the prodigious internal problems of the vital Panzer forces and revealing that their demise in the earliest phase of the war undermined the whole German invasion.