Wehrmacht pragmatic reasons of seeking to forestall local partisan resistance and to lower Red Army resolve The Wehrmacht was one of history’s great armies in 1941, at the height of its strength, martial confidence, and racial and ideological arrogance Its men happily marched east, singing and laughing, burning and killing It is all on fi lm At first, all went better than well: huge Soviet formations were encircled in vast Kesselschlacht (“cauldron battles”) at Smolensk, Uman, Kiev, and Viazma-Briansk One Army Group drove toward Leningrad in the north while another entered the Crimean peninsula in the distant south But the massed tanks and men of Army Group Center that launched TAIFUN on September 30, 1941 were blocked in front of Moscow in late November, then sent reeling back by a stunning set of counterattacks During the Soviet offensive in front of and around Moscow, good German officers were shot for ordering tactical retreats in the face of a Führer Order that insisted on “fanatical resistance.” The Wehrmacht was finally beginning to pay its Faustian debt to Hitler Pounds of its flesh would be stripped away in the months and years to come, until only old bones were left in 1945, inside dishonored uniforms stained with Rassenkampf (“race war”) and war crimes The Wehrmacht’s toady service to the most criminal regime in history cannot be veiled by its considerable feats of arms, by its professional skill and pretensions Criminality on a mass scale was a central feature of the regime it sustained in power, and of the war it waged with all the professional skill it could muster Besides, in military as much as in moral terms, the Wehrmacht was overmatched and crushed in the end It lost to Soviet and democratic armies that were hastily assembled and sometimes ineptly led, but which learned to fight the Wehrmacht by fighting it, until they prevailed and it was wiped from the face of Europe The Wehrmacht’s long defeat began when it was pushed back from Moscow by twinned assaults: the Moscow offensive operation ( December 5, 1941–January 7, 1942) and Rzhev-Viazma strategic operation (January 8–April 20, 1942) Scrambling to survive a potential catastrophe, Army Group Center finally established a double line of defense in the central section of the Eastern Front that lasted more or less intact until late 1943 Hitler’s attention was instead drawn to perceived opportunities in the south Stalemate persisted around Leningrad on the northern end of the line, where it took three Red Army offensives to finally establish a narrow land link to the besieged city through the Shlisselburg corridor only in January 1943 The siege would go on, even then until January 1944 The strategic tide clearly turned with a sickening failure of Operation BLAU and its derivatives, CLAUSEWITZ, EDELWEISS, and FISCHREIHER Hitler’s great southern gamble in 1942 led to utter catastrophe when the Red Army launched Operation URANUS from December 1942 to January 1943, catching the Wehrmacht totally by surprise At Stalingrad the Wehrmacht lost an entire field army, the 6th, along with its first surrendered Field Marshal, Friedrich von Paulus There followed heavy fighting that pushed Army Group A out of the Crimea and Army Group B back across the Don, a retreat of nearly 400 miles across southern Russia That one winter of fighting in the east alone cost the Wehrmacht 327,000 men and thousands of guns and war machines That was not a rate of loss it could sustain And Germany could no longer count 1173