Eric and Eliot welcome David Stahel, Senior Lecturer at the University South Wales, Canberra and author of a multivolume history of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union and other works on World War II on the eastern front. They discuss the historiography of World War II on the eastern front, the new primary sources he has tapped for his historical work, the sheer scale of the combat operations and the virtues of writing operational military history (as opposed to concentrating at the grand strategic level), the tensions inside the German high command between Hitler and the Army command as well as the rivalries among the army commanders on the eastern front. They cover the issue of how professional vs. how ideologically committed to Nazism the military commanders were, how the war turned from a war of maneuver to a war of attrition that doomed Nazi Germany to military failure and the echoes of history that can be found in the war that Russia is waging in Ukraine today.

Operation Barbarossa and Germany's Defeat in the East:

https://a.co/d/egI7OKv

Kiev 1941: Hitler's Battle for Supremacy in the East:

https://a.co/d/5xRmorZ

Hitler's Panzer Generals: Guderian, Hoepner, Reinhardt and Schmidt Unguarded:

https://a.co/d/8d3Xw2F

The Battle for Moscow:

https://a.co/d/h9Idyjf

Shield of the Republic is a Bulwark podcast co-sponsored by the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia.