Hitler was a ‘satanic genius’. His military reputation has been tainted by the genocidal nature of the Nazi regime and by the way in which former Wehrmacht generals blamed him for every disaster after the war.
His capacity for mastering detail, his sense of history, his retentive memory, his strategic vision – all these had flaws, but considered in the cold light of objective military history, they were brilliant nonetheless. The Eastern campaign, above all, was his affair, and his violent and magnetic personality dominated its course, even in defeat. Since the war, Hitler has been a convenient repository for all the mistakes and miscalculations of German military policy. But a study of events in the East will show that occasions when Hitler was right and the General Staff wrong are far more numerous than the apologists of the German Army allow.
Thus Alan Clark, in top iconoclastic form, in his Barbarossa, possibly the best single-volume account of the four-year campaign on the Eastern Front of the Second World War.
Call it Samhain, All Saints, Guy Fawkes, or Halloween