Interesting book in theory but felt it lacked in length. A look at each man through letters. It’s well written.

An interesting look into the personal lives and correspondence of the four major German Panzer generals during the attack on the Soviet Union in WW2. The story is full of personal insights with colleagues and spouses and also the political infighting and intrigue during the campaign. I found it to be interesting, but it could drag at times. Overall a good read for the history enthusiast.

Thank you to #NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for my honest opinion.

I have just finished my read of David Stahel's "Hitler's Panzer Generals: Guderian, Hoepner, Reinhardt and Schmidt Unguarded," graciously provided to me in the form of an ARC by Cambridge University Press. Frankly, it poses some challenges for me. I am not a trained psychologist, but I have read very extensively in the literature surrounding the Third Reich and its armed forces. In this well organized book, the author attempts, with varying degrees of success, to offer insights into the complex relationships between the High Command of Panzer forces on the Eastern Front and their loved ones, principally their wives, on the home front. Obviously, the idea is not without merit. The title might be a stretch since it seems to imply that this is a military history; it is not in any conventional sense. What the author is trying to do is to mine the wartime correspondence of these panzer generals (the best known of whom is Heinz Guderian) and see what kind of insights it might offer into the policies, military and political, which defined the context of their behavior and the ways in which they characterized it in their personal relations. One of the underlying premises with which I have some difficulty is the notion that, because of their relatively high rank, their correspondence might be expected to be more revealing than the heavily censored correspondence of the rank and file troops fighting under their command. I concur with the author that their correspondence was privileged in ways that men of lower rank might have envied, however, I think it somewhat more problematic to assert that these privileges were absolute in a totalitarian state like Nazi Germany. On the contrary, I suspect that they, in some ways. needed to practice more circumspection in what they put on paper than their troops. In the first of his five chapters, the author lays out his methodology with some precision. The second of the five chapters examines the four generals in question as they can be seen as private individuals and explores their personal biographies. Chapter three looks at them as public figures in the Reich and in the military. Chapter four examines complicity in implementation of criminal orders from the High Command and the Nazi party. Chapter five brings it altogether and focuses on them as military leaders functioning within the contextual features already laid out. These chapters are followed with a brief conclusion and then a very formidable Afterword, copious Notes, a Bibliography and an Index. All of that said, I think it to be, perhaps, a useful starting place for another avenue of approach into understanding the Nazi regime, particularly in its relation to the prosecution of the war on the Eastern Front. Much work remains to be done.