Back in the early 1990s, I had a coworker at the National Archives who, like me, was heavily into military history, besides having an addiction to "Advanced Squad Leader." One thing that gave him some amusement was how the U.S. Army of the time (he was in a Guard SF unit), had a strong obsession with the WWII German military; the term he used was the "all hail the Wehrmacht" school of military history.

Flash forward to 2021, and one has this book dealing with the exploits of the 11th Panzer Division, and it leaves me feeling a little bit critical. It turns out that the author is a product of the Cold War, and also has a serious enthusiasm for the German "Heer" of the 1940s. What's the problem with that you might ask? Well, the man is a full professor and knows damn well that the German army proper of the Hitlerian period had its own streak of criminality, and yet Ganz has gone forward and written a narrative that ignores how over the last 25 years or so the historiography has changed. I'm not going to beat the man up too much, but I expect better.

So, should you even bother reading this work then? Yes. The 11th was an interesting unit and it might well have been an exception to general trends. The leadership of the division's panzer regiment seemed to set the tone, and it was heavily larded with old-guard Prussian leadership; men who apparently kept their standards and discipline. I just would have preferred that Ganz spent a little time talking about these realities; maybe he didn't think that his likely readership could handle a deconstruction of Cold War mythology. Also, do yourself a favor and read the works of David Stahel, who is probably the best current historian of German operational history on the Eastern Front during World War II. ( )