No European country was ready for World War II in 1939, not even Nazi Germany. Fortunately for the world and the German people in the end, the Nazis failed in their attempts to impose their will on Europe for very long. Why did the Nazis lose? And what brought about that defeat? For those readers familiar with the massive amount of scholarly and popular literature of World War II, this book will reveal no great surprises; however, Geoffrey P Megargee's examination of the German General Staff, both in terms of its structure and strong personalities, describes its function, untangles its dysfunction, and, ultimately, provides the kind of clear critical analysis most welcome in the complex world of historical writing.

Williamson Murray's Foreword sets the tone for the book by reminding us that in the postwar world, many former senior German officers produced a host of self-serving memoirs that shifted blame from themselves to Adolf Hitler (ix). Among many, General Heinz Guderian's "Panzer Leader" (1952) comes to mind. Guderian, like most of his former colleagues, blamed Hitler for everything and held the position that they were innocent of aggressive war, except for being loyal and capable German soldiers. Most certainly, moral, legal, and ethical blame can and should highlight the memory of Adolf Hitler, truly one of several maniacal dictators of the twentieth century; however, without the full cooperation and unbending enthusiasm of the senior German officer corps -- leftovers from World War I -- the Reichswehr of the Weimar Republic never could have evolved into Hitler's Wehrmacht. Could World War II have been avoided? Sadly, no, and Megargee traces that tragedy to its rightful sources: Adolf Hitler's National Socialist German Workers' Party (Nazis) which dictated aggressive war as a national agenda, and troops of unhappy, if not revenge-seeking, army officers looking for a way to reestablish German military prominence in European affairs. No one is innocent here. They became the perfect, though short lived, marriage from hell and in 1939 managed to unleash a world war of fearsome magnitude.

Storytelling about major battles constitutes one sort of history, a kind of exciting popular narrative of heroic and tragic exploits set in a form which entertains more than it educates. Megargee does something more difficult and critically more useful: he makes the point that modern manoeuvring armies require the extensive planning, often the work of huge staffs which set and keep the whole operation in motion. Looking at what staffs do is certainly less glamorous than looking at excitement of tank battles, dogfights, and infantry engagements, but it is just this kind of technical and professional managerial leadership in the rear that makes or breaks a military organisation. In the case of the German Army in World War II, staff dysfunction contributed significantly to its undoing.

Megargee drives this book on two major historical roadways: one shows how, under pressure from Hitler and his politicos, the senior army leadership first accepted Nazi domination, then imploded from the weight of Nazi influence and finally destroyed itself; the other shows how on all fronts, especially in Russia, the Allies engaged and defeated the badly overextended, undersupplied, badly informed, and overworked German Wehrmacht. By the end of 1941, knowing that its huge losses in personnel and equipment could not be replaced easily or at all, the General Staff acquiesced to Hitler's ill conceived concepts of attack without retreat and seemingly constant expansion. In terms of the Wehrmacht, the tree could not bend, so it broke.

The central player in this drama is General Franz Halder, an eternal optimist, who believed passionately in the staff principle of joint responsibility, which held that the Chief of Staff was equally responsible, along with the field commander, for all command decisions. Thus in Halder's time, the staff officer understood his duty primarily to be one of an advisor whose disagreement with established plans and policies was welcome, listened to, and recorded in writing (9). However, it was during Halder's reign as Chief of the General Staff that Hitler expanded his direct control of the Wehrmacht's activities down to the operational level. That the German generals resented being dictated to strategically and tactically by a former corporal goes without saying; that Hitler coddled those senior officers who dominated his ear between formal briefings became nothing short of scandalous. Halder, an old man from the old school, could not bear all this fuss and finally retired in September 1942. This is not to say he was disloyal; according to Megargee, he would have served until the bitter end (181). After Halder retired, the General Staff became more ideological and continued to flounder under the weight of its subsequent and dedicated Nazi leadership.

Instead of opposing Hitler and his National Socialists, the German Army's General Staff accepted Hitler's musings and surrendered its force to his will long before it surrendered to the Allies (232). With precision and clarity, Megargee shows how Nazi ideology dwelt on Hitler's personal belief in the power of the National Socialist will over material, strategic, and tactical difficulties. Being nothing short of negligent foolishness, believers in this philosophical claptrap became immune to the tactical realities of war. To accomplish this folly, Hitler and his senior staff officers isolated themselves far from Berlin in a huge, soggy compound deep in East Prussia -- the "Wolf's Lair" -- and, as a result, deluded themselves into believing that their armies and divisions were pieces on a map instead of men at war who fought and died at the whim of the Führer. By May 1945, it was over, Hitler killed himself in Berlin, the army surrendered to the Allies, and the world could breath a little easier, at least for a little while.

Unlike the many personal memoirs and popular histories of World War II, the author's research is nothing short of pristine. As readers work through the text, they must keep in mind that most of the major sources were written in the administrative German of the era, some of which is quite different from modern German. Megargee's mastery of highly technical military German and his brilliant use of sources from the German Military Archive in Freiburg make his extensive bibliography and copious notes usable by other scholars and an interested general readership in the future.

This important book offers historians, military professionals, and lay readers a fresh analysis of a flawed system, one which cooperated with an oppressive ideology in its own interest and wound up marching into an unwinnable war. It made the fatal error of focusing its energies on fast manoeuvre without looking at what supported it all over an extended period of time. In the Wehrmacht character prevailed over intellect (234); orders were obeyed without question from the top down, the Führerprinzp, without the use of a practical and useful checks and balance offered by the staff system against ill conceived operations. These factors and more, as Megargee rightly points out, generated the most important and far reaching lessons-learned in the book: that control from the top is an illusion which stems from uncontrolled micro management; second, the will, whether individual, collective, or national, cannot overcome reason, and that a belief in moral strength, rightly or wrongly, cannot overcome any obstacle.