Nagorski did an amazing job weaving all of the known facts together and offering a new perspective and new insights into the mi...  Read More

Nagorski did an amazing job weaving all of the known facts together and offering a new perspective and new insights into the mindsets of the major players of WWII. Always enjoy his books - smart, accessible and well written!   Read Less

I just finished reading 1941. What a contribution author Nagorski has made to understanding that war and its principal players,...  Read More

I just finished reading 1941. What a contribution author Nagorski has made to understanding that war and its principal players, and on such an intimate level. He is really a fine scholar and a great writer, in a class with my other favorite historian, David McCullough. It was quite an interesting and, dare I say it, an enjoyable read. Moreover, his attention to details profoundly deepened my appreciation for the enormous human suffering and other costs of the war. Who knew that two million plus horses died on the Russian front!1941, the Year the Germans Lost the War was so worth my time as a reader. I recommend it to anyone interested in history, World War 2, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin, FDR, or the ways in which humanity blunders into immense tragedy. By the way, I have visited neo-Nazi and Holocaust denier web sites simply to recommend this book to those who frequent such sites. A good dose of historical truth is a powerful antiseptic when poured into cesspools of hate.   Read Less

I received a free digital review copy from the publisher, via Netgalley.It must be frustrating to be an expert advisor to an im...  Read More

I received a free digital review copy from the publisher, via Netgalley.It must be frustrating to be an expert advisor to an impetuous and power-mad leader who thinks he knows better than the experts in any field. Nagorski gives the example of the military and financial advisors who told Hitler in the late 1930s he shouldn’t be aggressive, because France, Britain, the USSR—and the US if it came to that—would be able to come up with greater sustained military resources in the future. But did this egomaniac, who knew nothing about economics and had been a corporal in the army, listen? Of course not. Instead of taking the advice, Hitler decided that he needed to strike immediately, while the other powers hadn’t yet built up their armaments.So yes, Germany cruised to easy victories in 1940, but Hitler made a series of delusional decisions in 1941 that Nagorski argues doomed the Third Reich not to a 1,000-year reign, but a few at best. First, Hitler decided to invade the USSR, thinking he could do what Napoleon had failed to achieve. But did he start in, say, April, so he’d have a good long stretch of time before winter set in? No. He was angry at Yugoslavia after it rejected the Tripartite Pact, so he decided he needed to punish them, which delayed his invasion of the Soviet Union until late June of 1941.When Germany invaded, many civilians and even Russian soldiers were welcoming, figuring the Germans would save them from the starvation and collectivization forced on them by Stalin. But the Germans were under orders to treat the conquered harshly, and they did—with rampant murder of civilians and soldiers alike. Nagorski argues that Germany might have been more successful in the USSR had it treated the conquered better; soldiers might have joined them and civilians willingly fed, quartered and clothed them.Much of the book focuses on Hitler’s misadventures in the USSR. It’s only the last 25 pages or so that he turns to Hitler’s final big blunder of the year. After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and the US declared war on the Japanese, Hitler decided it would be a good idea to declare war on the US. In short order, Germany was facing foes that vastly outweighed it in population, territory and resources.Although Nagorski’s thesis is focused on Hitler and the German military, he also provides a lot of information about Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin and their governments’ plans and actions. Although it’s well-known that Stalin rejected intelligence that told him the the German invasion would be coming in the spring of 1941, it’s interesting to read Nagorski’s description of just how deeply in denial he was; to the point of insisting that there must be a mistake when news began to pour in that the Germans were actually invading in overwhelming numbers and causing catastrophic damage to the USSR.Scholars and longtime readers of WW2 history won’t be surprised by anything in Nagorski’s book, but this is a good, readable popular history of a pivotal year of the war   Read Less