The German Way of War by Robert M. Citino

These ideas were ingrained in the German army’s culture, having originated with Frederick the Great and fought to near perfection in the 19th-Century wars of unification. Known in German as Bewengungskrieg, the Wehrmacht preferred quick, highly mobile wars of movement that relied on audacity and quick thinking subordinate commanders.

Death of the Wehrmachtelaborates on Citino’s idea of the German way of war. The combination of weather, culture, chaos, and a resurgent Soviet Red Army finally brought the Wehrmacht to its knees. He is the author of multiple award-winning books exploring the nuance of the operational level of war, and particularly the German Army in World War II.Ĭitino argues that when the German army moved toward Moscow in the fall of 1941, it was finally out of its element. Citino is the Executive Director of the Institute for the Study of War and Democracy and the Samuel Zemurray Stone Senior Historian at the National World War II museum. Citino is a work of operational history that describes what went wrong as the German Army ground to a halt in twin epic defeats at Stalingrad and El Alamein. Death of the Wehrmacht: The German Campaigns of 1942, from historian Robert M. Robert Citino, Death of the Wehrmacht: The German Campaigns of 1942 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007)įollowing a series of stunning victories in 1940 and most of 1941, the vaunted Nazi war machine finally outran its war of movement on the steppes of the Soviet Union and in the North African desert.

The German Way of War by Robert M. Citino