David Stahel

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David Stahel (* 1975 in Wellington ) is a New Zealand military historian who deals with European military history and the Second World War , in particular with the German Wehrmacht in the German-Soviet War .

Stahel studied at Monash University and Boston College , received his master's degree in War Studies from King's College London and received his doctorate in 2007 from Humboldt University Berlin . He has been a Senior Lecturer in History at the University of New South Wales since 2012 .

He wrote books about Operation Barbarossa , the Battle of Kiev and the Battle of Moscow . The book about the Barbarossa company emerged from his dissertation in Berlin and supports the thesis that Hitler's campaign in Russia failed right at the beginning in August 1941 when the prospect of a Blitzkrieg victory vanished. Stahel sees the carelessness with which the German generals met Hitler's requirements and pushed aside all concerns about elementary facts such as the size of the country and the climatic conditions, overestimated their own capabilities (logistics, insufficient motorization of the infantry, etc.) and underestimated those of the enemy as militarily unprofessional behavior of the Wehrmacht leadership. In addition, there was strategic indecision regarding the priority of an advance to Moscow (favored by Chief of Staff Franz Halder , but ultimately not enforced against Hitler) or to the raw material areas in the south, which Hitler advocated. A decisive factor in the failure of the Blitzkrieg concept in Russia in 1941, according to Stahel, was Hitler's decision after the Kesselschlacht near Smolensk to concentrate his forces on the conquest of Ukraine and the siege of Leningrad instead of the conquest of Moscow, as Halder advocated, but like the The rest of the generals did not oppose Hitler's decisions. In his books, in addition to detailed military analyzes, he also takes into account the larger strategic and political environment, including the radicalization of warfare by the German armed forces with the aim of a war of annihilation.

Fonts (selection)

  • Operation Barbarossa and Germany's Defeat in the East , Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2009
  • Kiev 1941. Hitler's Battle for Supremacy in the East , Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2012
  • Operation Typhoon. Hitler's March on Moscow , Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2013
  • The Battle for Moscow , Cambridge, 2015
  • as editor: Joining Hitler's Crusade: European Nations and the Invasion of the Soviet Union , Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2017
  • Editor with Alex J. Kay : Mass Violence in Nazi-Occupied Europe , Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2018
  • as editor with Alex J. Kay, Jeff Rutherford: Nazi Policy on the Eastern Front, 1941: Total War, Genocide, and Radicalization , University of Rochester Press, 2012
    • therein by Stahel: Radicalizing Warfare: The German Command and the Failure of Operation Barbarossa , pp. 19-44

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Review by Bernd Bonwetsch , Year Books for the History of Eastern Europe, Volume 60, 2012 Issue 2, pp. 295–296.
personal data
SURNAME Stahel, David
BRIEF DESCRIPTION New Zealand military historian
DATE OF BIRTH 1975
PLACE OF BIRTH Wellington