Hitler's Panzers: The Lightning Attacks That Revolutionized Warfare

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THE GERMAN ARMY of World War II continues to attract reader attention. Academic studies and military analyses, general-reader narratives and coffee-table picture books, all jostle for places in book stores and on bookshelves. Central to history and myth alike are the armored forces: the tanks and assault guns, the motorized infantry, and the supporting arms of the panzer and panzer grenadier divisions of the army and the Waffen SS. They were the heart of the army’s fighting power and the core of its identity from the first days of victory in 1939 until the Third Reich’s downfall in 1945.

The panzers have inspired a correspondingly rich literature. Works on doctrine, tactics, and equipment stand alongside studies of the panzers’ place in the German way of war and the history of war in the twentieth century. In darker contexts scholars present the panzers’ contributions to an ethic of fear and force that permeated Germany and its army before the rise of National Socialism transformed apocalyptic ideology into genocidal reality.

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