The last six months of 1941 can credibly lay claim to having been the most decisive period of World War II. The Third Reich embarked on a course that erased such strategic advantage as it had hitherto enjoyed, declaring war on the U.S. and expending its strength to a perilous extent in its campaign against the Soviet Union. It conducted that particular campaign with a brutality singular in scale and intensity. It also took key decisions—across occupied Europe, but with respect to the occupied Soviet Union above all—that heralded the extermination of the continent's Jews.

The planning of the eastern campaign envisioned defeating the Soviet Union in a lightning attack of ruthless ferocity. Moreover, it encompassed a brutal ideological and economic agenda, including the plunder of the Soviet Union's foodstuffs and economic resources, subjugation and decimation of its majority Slavic population, and annihilation of its “Jew-Bolshevik” intelligentsia and leadership—the latter aim soon mushrooming into the extermination of the Soviet Jews.

So vast is the literature that has emerged on the Third Reich's conduct of the eastern campaign between June and December 1941 that it is to this new, edited collection's great credit that it succeeds in pushing the boundaries of scholarship in this area so significantly. The book comprises eleven chapters by an internationally diverse lineup of emerging historians and encompasses military, economic, and ideological aspects of the Third Reich's war in the east during this period. Its key aim, which the editors elucidate in their introductory and concluding chapters, is to interweave the campaign's military, economic, and ideological dimensions and illuminate the radicalizing processes that infused them. This renders an especially valuable service to English-language readers; it enables them all the more easily to relate the body of operational military history for which, generally speaking, English-language historians can take primary credit, to the equally prolific literature on the campaign's economic and ideological aspects, for which German-language historians can be extensively credited. The book illuminates the diversity of the processes on the ground by which the implementation of a radical ideological and economic agenda was accelerated by the Reich's military failure to defeat the Soviet Union quickly and by the further brutalization of the campaign that then ensued. Among the book's most impressive achievements is the detail several chapters provide on the extent and mechanics of the complicity of army units in the field in the campaign's most brutal aspects.

All the contributions are of notable quality and significance, and though the forms they take sometimes differ, this is an observation and not a criticism. Wendy Lower's chapter on the ideologically, politically, and strategically motivated role of Germany's Axis satellites in the emergence of the Final Solution in the Ukraine, and Leonid Rein's on the role of ideology and perceived security needs in the escalation of antisemitic policy in German-occupied Belarus, are highly effective overviews, based largely upon secondary literature, of deeply complex topics. They will be particularly valuable to English-language readers who seek an initial introduction to such topics.

The remaining chapters, several of which are helpful overviews of material hitherto presented by the same authors in monograph form, are based more extensively upon primary sources. Some are broadly themed. David Stahel and Adrian Wettstein analyze, respectively, the failure of the Germans' favored mobile warfare doctrine during the campaign's opening months, and the horrendous difficulties they faced in prosecuting urban warfare. Both resulted from the Wehrmacht's overestimation of its own power and underestimation of the challenges involved in invading the Soviet Union, and both brutally radicalized the Germans' conduct of the campaign further. Felix Roemer surveys the full extent of the army's ideologically based agreement with and implementation of the “criminal orders,” most infamously the execution of captured Soviet commissars, which the High Command issued before the invasion. Alex J. Kay examines the development of the Nazis' ruthlessly utilitarian food policy, which allotted a distant third place to the nutritional needs of the Soviet population behind those of German military personnel and civilians, during the early months of 1941. Thomas J. Laub considers how the campaign's effects rippled outward, its ruthless ideological underpinning and the extent of its economic demands both serving to harden conduct of security and economic policy elsewhere in occupied Europe, in this case France.

Local- and regional-level case studies constitute the other primary material-based chapters. Jeff Rutherford examines relations between military and economic agencies in the occupied town of Pavlovsk, the tension between the former's desire for immediate plunder and the latter's for longer-term exploitation, and the harrowing effect of Nazi food policy upon occupied civilians in a particular locality. Paulo Fonzi, through the example of the jurisdiction of Reich Commissariat Ostland, examines the varying levels of exploitation through which Nazi officials sought for the Reich to gain economically from the occupied east. Stephan Lehnsteadt examines the development of an “occupiers' culture,” which infused German personnel's everyday existence with a largely contemptuous and exploitative view of the occupied population, in the Belarusian capital of Minsk. Finally, Martin Holler examines the role of Otto Ohlendorf, leader of Einsatzgruppe D, in the murderous campaign against Soviet Sinti and Roma. His use of sources found in Russian archives challenges hitherto widely held views about the roles of racial ideology and ruthless ambition in shaping Nazi actions against that particular group.

The scope and quality of this book, and its ability to interrelate such an array of complex topics, is extremely impressive. The chapters' accessible style will augment their appeal to students and interested laypeople. Moreover, such is their diversity that they afford an excellent opportunity for historians who specialize in particular aspects of Germany's war in the east to interrelate those aspects to others. By any measure, then, this book is a highly valuable addition to the literature on this area.