Much of the existing literature on the German-Soviet War has been narrated along parallel tracks: operational histories; histories of occupation and mass violence; and, more recently, studies of memory and aftermath. The last several decades have steadily eroded these compartments, showing that “front” and “rear,” soldier and civilian, were mutually constitutive throughout. The reviewed volume squarely heralds that integrated outlook and, at its strongest, models how to study the Eastern Front as a single historical diamond with many facets.

The volume’s sixteen chapters are organized into three logical parts: Germany’s war of extermination; Axis and Allied countries; ideology and economic pragmatism. Rather than offering neat packaging, the structure is meant to track causality. Annihilation did not remain confined to frontline institutions and practices. Nor can the Eastern Front be understood as a self-contained dyad in which the war’s end functions merely as a hinge: German destruction and Soviet reconstruction extended wartime logics into the postwar world. The reader is cautioned that approaching the conflict exclusively through the entangled histories of Germany and the USSR risks obscuring its transnational character. “Internationalization” thus serves as an interpretive corrective for scholarship on empire, nationalism, collaboration, borderlands, and memory politics.

Part I sets the volume’s tone by placing combat and atrocity in a shared, dynamic frame. David Stahel opens with a pointed institutional recalibration of German decision-making and order-breaking during the winter crisis of 1941–42. Stahel nudges readers away from explanatory tropes that foreground Adolf Hitler’s intervention and instead draws attention to the army as an actor with its own initiative, culture, and constraints. Edward Westermann then turns to Liepaja, demonstrating—through a tightly focused killing-site study—how local mass murder connected to the wider processes of the Final Solution. Together these chapters underscore a central point of the volume: operational choices, institutional norms, and genocidal practice did not unfold in separate spheres but were tightly braided.

Violence was also made intelligible to perpetrators, as David Harrisville’s chapter reveals. The Wehrmacht practiced a particular moral bilingualism, enticing soldiers with fantasies of racial mastery while simultaneously supplying the mores of traditional honor; in the end, invasion was cast as just and annihilation as necessary. Propaganda was not mere “messaging” for the masses to parrot, rather, it enabled perpetrators to reconcile self-image, institutional expectations, and radical actions. This leads naturally to the fate of Soviet POWs, one the largest defined victim groups of Nazi violence in the “East.” A persistent imbalance in scholarship remains: while the catastrophic mass death of 1941–42 has been widely studied, later-war policy and POW experience have often remained less visible, particularly from Soviet perspectives. Maris Rowe-McCulloch addresses this gap methodologically, drawing on Soviet materials alongside German records to reconstruct captivity on Soviet soil, including the role of civilians as witnesses and participants in the occupied landscape.

Part II is a sustained invitation to reconsider what counts as the Eastern Front. The chapters map participation and coercion across a wide spectrum: the Italian expeditionary corps in the Donets Basin; Soviet POWs in Romania; Luxembourgers in German uniform; the formation and self-understanding of the Polish People’s Army; Lend-Lease aircraft and air battles over Ukraine; and Ukraine as a major site of occupation and labor exploitation. The cumulative effect is to show that the war operated through multiple institutional regimes, which shaped factual experience, frameworks of violence, and postwar narratives of responsibility. A particular strength lies in how these chapters foreground wartime dilemmas of sovereignty as active forces rather than background conditions. Coerced service (Luxembourg), state-building under Soviet tutelage (Poland), and the complex administrative partitioning of occupation zones (Ukraine) all implicate questions of citizenship, legitimacy, and the ethics of commemoration—issues still unresolved in many countries.

In Part III the volume resists treating 1943–45 as denouement. Instead, late-war German retreat and Soviet rebuilding are presented as interlocked processes. In one sense, the “East” went west: scorched-earth retreats and evacuations facilitated the migration of “Eastern” frontline practices onto German soil. Material devastation, in turn, shaped representation and imaginative rebuilding (in Stalingrad and Smolensk). Nothing was forgotten, and even less was forgiven. The war persisted long after formal cessation, leaving too hard a legacy behind. By placing scorched-earth retreat and post-occupation rebuilding in the same part as POW policy and memory work, the volume invites readers to see “legacies” not as an afterword, but as wartime logics operating under altered conditions. In other words, the late-war protracted coda needs to be taken seriously. Devastation and evacuation were not merely tactical choices, but practices shaped by ideology and solidified by institutional habits. Reconstruction and postwar governance were not simply restorative; they generated new claims about modernity, legitimacy, and collective memory.

The collection’s limitations will be familiar to any reader of edited volumes. The degree of historiographical intervention varies from chapter to chapter; some essays feel like sharp pivots, others like careful consolidations of existing research trajectories. The case-study strategy—one of the book’s strong suits—also means that certain aspects receive less sustained treatment. For instance, a broader comparative synthesis of German anti-partisan warfare across multiple regions would further bolster the volume’s argument for integration.

Overall, the volume is both timely and academically sound. Its greatest strength is not any single “new” thesis, but its coherence across many authors, and the productivity that coherence generates. The moral and institutional mechanics of annihilation, and the war-peace interdependence that the volume traces, are its strongest takeaways. In that sense, the book speaks well beyond its core subfield. Military historians will find compelling analyses of occupation, language, and captivity that complicate operational narratives. Scholars of genocide and occupation will find a widened cast of actors and regimes. Finally, cross-disciplinary readers will find a grounded account of how coercion, participation, and rebuilding generated material and symbolic claims that outlasted the war itself, and continue to shape eastern Europe and the wider world more than eight decades later.