This study is an indication of how far we have come from the era of the "all hail the Wehrmacht" school of military history and the pretense of a German army that was relatively ethical (at least in regards to the Nazi regime). What Stahel does is factor in all the realities of moral connivance and professional incapacity that we now recognize in the conduct of the German military caste into a wide-ranging strategic and operational study of the first two months of the war with Russia. The bottom line is Stahel holds that with the battle of Smolensk the vision of Operation Barbarossa as a "shock and awe" war that would bring down the Soviet regime had reached its culmination point and that Germany was already out of good strategic options to win. Which is not to say that Joseph Stalin couldn't find new and interesting ways to lose the war. Apart from that what sticks with me is the vision of Franz Halder, chief of the German General Staff, as a man who seemed to operate in a dreamland, instead of the land of the possible; there were more centers of unreality in Hitler's Germany than the immediate presence of The Fuehrer. ( )