in Australia. His previous publications include Operation Barbarossa and Germany's Defeat in the East (2009), Kiev 1941 (2012), The Battle for Moscow (2015) and Retreat from Moscow (2019).
Stahel applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Hitler's Panzer Generals: Guderian, Hoepner, Reinhardt and Schmidt Unguarded, and reported the following:
The Page 99 Test worked very well for my last book (Retreat from Moscow), but not so well here. Why? Hitler’s Panzer Generals is organised thematically (not chronologically), so the page in question detailed how leading German generals were public celebrities and the objects of youthful adulation and acclaim. This tells us about the public side of being a general in Nazi Germany and how success was about much more than strictly military endeavours. This created competing priorities for generals looking to advance themselves because building a thriving career was at least as much about the public perception of success as anything actually achieved. Thus, just as Nazi Germany projected order and stability, but engendered chaos, so too did the German army project military competence and discipline, but in practice had generals chasing individual status and prestige. Their successes were trumpeted to the heavens, but while their failings were blamed on rivals in a dog-eat-dog world of savage career competition.Learn more about Hitler's Panzer Generals at the Cambridge University Press website.
Importantly, however, the book is about much more than just how the panzer generals managed and promoted their career prospects. The book also explores the private world that their wartime letters shed a great deal of light upon. The stresses of command, the heavy losses and the mental anguish of constant campaigning in the East took a very real toll on the generals. There is also consideration of their criminal complicity in ubiquitous war crimes. Likewise, military matters are another major feature with their wartime letters providing vital information about how the war was being conducted and what the generals understood, and did not understand, about the conflict.
For all that has been written about German generals in the Second World War, my one hope was that the reader would gain a great deal of new information and perspective – and while I’ll let the reader judge my success – I am happy with the result.
The Page 99 Test: Retreat from Moscow.
--Marshal Zeringue
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