Ah hah! You have no idea how long I’ve been waiting for a question like this. Sorry this took so long to get to!

So, first off - welcome to the club! The “Eastern Front”/Nazi-Soviet War/Great Patriotic War is a grimly fascinating conflict for many reasons. It’s absolutely apocalyptic in scale, for one. Both the military and civilian devastation, in both physical material terms and psychological terms, are simply massive. Certainly for myself as an American, the scale of the violence and trauma is hard to comprehend. The famous battles of this war - Stalingrad, Khar’kov, Kursk, Bagration - were an order of magnitude larger than those of the Western Front, and of course so were the casualties. In addition to the emotionally compelling nature of such a drama, this level of violence poses questions for us as historians - how does mass violence alter a society? How do the participants in such violence return to civil society after the war? Do societies ever truly recover from such trauma, or is it seared into their mentality for generations? The Nazi-Soviet War is also fascinating from a ‘pure’ military history angle. It represents the gruesome zenith of large-scale industrialized maneuver warfare. By the end of the war, the Red Army had emerged as the grandmasters of aggressive, complex maneuver at the operational level of warfare and their counterparts in the Wehrmacht were no slouches in their tenacious, mobile defense. This has given rise to a massive body of scholarship searching for modern military insight in this old conflict - Standing Fast is but one example of many. This ties into one of the other things that’s so interesting about the “Eastern Front”. It’s a rich case study in historiography - the ways that people study and construct history and memory, and in the ways that contemporary politics & social forces shape both our popular and our academic understanding of historical events. I’m going to (finally!) give some reading recommendations that touch on these different historical lenses, along with some more detailed discussion. Why am I leading with this, rather than just giving you a list of books? Because it sounds like you’re a pretty new student of this field, and context is everything, especially for a conflict with this many misconceptions and politicized interpretations attached to it. The full bibliography with links is at the bottom.

The very first book I am going to recommend you is Ronald Smelser & Edward Davies’ 2008 The Myth of the Eastern Front: The Nazi-Soviet War in American Popular Culture. I recommend this first because, as the title suggests, the “Ostfront” is heavily mythologized in the Western consciousness, and your study of the Nazi-Soviet War will be a lot smoother if you start off with a good understanding of what the myths are and where they come from. These myths are particularly problematic because they derive largely from postwar testimony by Nazi officers - even our usual name for it, the “Eastern Front” reflects this German-centric lens! It was, after all, only the “Eastern Front” for the Germans; this is why I prefer to call it the Nazi-Soviet War. Despite the title of the book, much of Smelser and Davies’ analysis applies to English-language scholarship on the war in general, not just American writings. This book is also a good introduction to the historiography of the war, and historiography in general will be very important to you in your career as a historian. We’ll be returning to the point of historiography later, as it is very important when you start looking at the more focused military history aspect that you brought up in your question - Major Wray’s thesis is, as we’ll see shortly, a good teachable moment in military historiography. But, we have some other important things to discuss first.

After you read Myth of the Eastern Front, I think Richard Overy’s Russia’s War and Chris Bellamy’s Absolute War are both good single-volume intros to the Russian side of the war as a whole. As a more general overview, Evan Mawdsley’s Thunder in the East is well-reviewed and appears on this subreddit’s recommended-reading list, but I actually haven’t read it so I can’t give a more thorough recommendation. They’re older and somewhat outdated, but John Erickson’s The Road to Stalingrad and The Road to Berlin were some of the first Western books to really engage with the Soviet perspective, and are must-reads if you want to get a sense of the progression of the field. They’re still okay as surveys, as well.

No study of the Nazi-Soviet War is complete without an understanding of the scale and particular barbarity of the violence inherent in the Nazi occupation. Any attempt to study the war from a purely military angle, neglecting the reality of the violence, is historically incomplete and serves to whitewash the legacies of the Nazi command staff. The Nazi military committed an almost incomprehensible number of war crimes and crimes against humanity during the years of the war, ranging from active participation in the Holocaust to the wholesale theft of food from civilians to mass executions of prisoners of war. On the topic of criminality in the Nazi military, I am far from an expert, but I will recommend the work of Omer Bartov as a starting point. Bartov’s Hitler’s Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich is pretty foundational for understanding why and how the Wehrmacht became so brutal and so criminal. It examines the prewar indoctrination of Nazi youths, the disintegration of traditional social structures, and the extremely harsh discipline in the Wehrmacht as contributing factors to the widespread brutality of the Wehrmacht in occupied Eastern Europe. In The Eastern Front, 1941-1945: German Troops and the Barbarisation of Warfare, actually a precursor to Hitler's Army, Bartov takes a deep dive on three German divisions on the Soviet front. He examines the demographics of their officers (sadly not the enlisted men as well, due to lack of records) and their casualty numbers, among other data points, to paint a compelling picture of the German war machine's material and social collapse during the fighting in Russia, as well as how that collapse mixed with Nazi war aims and propaganda to produce the genuinely vile behavior of German soldiers on the Ostfront. Richard Evans’ Third Reich trilogy, especially The Third Reich at War, also has a lot to say about the matter. Consider also looking at old FAQ answers like this one by our extremely insightful /u/commiespaceinvader.

On the subject of the civilian suffering and trauma, both in the Nazi-occupied territories and then in the areas conquered by the Soviets, Timothy Snyder’s work is a good start. Snyder’s Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin is pretty good but not without its flaws; it contains some serious misconceptions about the nature of the Holocaust & the Nazi government’s decisionmaking. As a primary source, Ilya Ehrenburg & Vasily Grossman’s Black Book of Soviet Jewry is also worth reading, though it is of course not a scholarly work but rather a contemporary report from two Soviet journalists on the evidence they found for various crimes committed by the Axis occupiers. Catherine Merridale’s Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Twentieth-Century Russia also touches on the legacy of mass death in Russian society. Atina Grossman’s chapter in Sexual Violence in Conflict Zones: From the Ancient World to the Era of Human Rights (ed. Elizabeth D. Heineman) is very illuminating, but it is not an enjoyable read. Kerstin Bischl is an up-and-coming scholar in this field - track down a copy of her article in the July 2016 issue of History 101, “Presenting Oneself: Red Army Soldiers and Violence in the Great Patriotic War, 1941-1945”. Her dissertation is also being published in book format this year, as Front Relations: Gender Relationships and Violent Dynamics in the Everyday Life of the Red Army 1941-1945, but I am not sure if a copy can be found in English yet. Truth be told, I am not as well-read on this angle as I am on some other aspects of the war, and I’m still looking for a book like Bloodlands but better.

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