David Stahel

David Stahel (born 1975 in Wellington, New Zealand) is a historian, author and senior lecturer in history at the University of New South Wales. He specialises in German military history of World War II. Stahel has authored several books on the military operations of the first six months of the Eastern Front, including on the launching of Operation Barbarossa, the Battle of Kiev (1941) and the Battle for Moscow.
Education and career
Stahel completed an honours degree at Monash University and Boston College. He has an MA in War Studies from King's College London and a PhD in 2007 from the Humboldt University of Berlin. He joined the University of New South Wales Canberra in 2012.
Military historian of Nazi Germany
Stahel has authored several books on the military operations on the Eastern Front, including Operation Barbarossa, the Battle of Kiev (1941) and the Battle of Moscow; all books were published by Cambridge University Press. Reviewing Stahel's Kiev 1941: Hitler's Battle for Supremacy in the East for the New Republic, the historian Richard Evans notes that "the story of the Battle of Kiev has been told many times, but seldom in such detail as it is in David Stahel’s book", at the same time "convey[ing] extremely complex military action with exemplary clarity". The reviewer writes:
Unlike more traditional military historians, Stahel is acutely aware of the wider context of the action, from Hitler’s overall aims for the war to the importance of logistics for the outcome; from the murderous racism and ruthless pragmatism with which the German leaders, military as well as political, condemned so many Soviet civilians to starve and so many Jewish inhabitants to terrible death, to the postwar disputes among historians and retired generals over Hitler’s strategy.
Evans commends Stahel for his "refreshing realism" in not "following traditional military historians’ often overly positive and simplistic descriptions of 'great' generals and 'decisive' battles" and exploring "convincingly if not entirely originally" how the foundations of the German war efforts were already beginning to crumble by the time of the victory at Kiev heralded in Nazi propaganda as decisive.
Publications
Books
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).
Nazi Policy on the Eastern Front, 1941: Total War, Genocide, and Radicalization (ed., with Alex J. Kay and Jeff Rutherford) (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2012).
Operation Typhoon. Hitler's March on Moscow (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2013).
The Battle for Moscow (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2015).
Joining Hitler's Crusade: European Nations and the Invasion of the Soviet Union (ed.) (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2017).
Mass Violence in Nazi-Occupied Europe (ed., with Alex J. Kay) (Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2018).
Retreat from Moscow (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2019).
Hitler's Panzer Generals: Guderian, Hoepner, Reinhardt and Schmidt Unguarded (Cambridge University Press, 2023).
Essays
'Radicalizing Warfare: The German Command and the Failure of Operation Barbarossa' in Alex J. Kay, Jeff Rutherford and David Stahel (eds.), Nazi Policy on the Eastern Front, 1941: Total War, Genocide, and Radicalization (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2012), pp. 19–44.
Notes
References
External links
"Operation Typhoon": , lecture by Stahel; via the official channel of USS Silversides Museum
1975 births
21st-century New Zealand historians
Alumni of King's College London
Living people
Military historians
Historians of World War II
Writers from Wellington City
Boston College alumni
Monash University alumni
Academic staff of the University of New South Wales
Humboldt University of Berlin alumni