David Stahel

David Stahel (born 1975, Wellington, New Zealand) is a historian, author and professor of history at the University of New South Wales. He specialises in German military history of World War II. Stahel authored several books on the military operations of the first six months of the Eastern Front, including on the launching of Operation Barbarossa, the Battle of Kiev (1941) and the Battle for Moscow.

Education and career
Stahel completed an honours degree at Monash University and Boston College. He has an MA in War Studies from King's College London and a PhD in 2007 from the Humboldt University of Berlin. He joined the University of New South Wales Canberra in 2012.

Military historian of Nazi Germany
Stahel authored several books on the military operations on the Eastern Front, including Operation Barbarossa, the Battle of Kiev (1941) and the Battle of Moscow; all books were published by Cambridge University Press. Reviewing Stahel's Kiev 1941: Hitler's Battle for Supremacy in the East for the New Republic, the historian Richard Evans notes that "the story of the Battle of Kiev has been told many times, but seldom in such detail as it is in David Stahel’s book", at the same time "convey[ing] extremely complex military action with exemplary clarity". The reviewer writes:

"Unlike more traditional military historians, Stahel is acutely aware of the wider context of the action, from Hitler’s overall aims for the war to the importance of logistics for the outcome; from the murderous racism and ruthless pragmatism with which the German leaders, military as well as political, condemned so many Soviet civilians to starve and so many Jewish inhabitants to terrible death, to the postwar disputes among historians and retired generals over Hitler’s strategy."

Evans commends Stahel for his "refreshing realism" in not "following traditional military historians’ often overly positive and simplistic descriptions of 'great' generals and 'decisive' battles" and exploring "convincingly if not entirely originally" how the foundations of the German war efforts were already beginning to crumble by the time of the victory at Kiev heralded in Nazi propaganda as decisive.

Books

 * Operation Barbarossa and Germany's Defeat in the East (Cambridge, 2009). ISBN 9780521768474
 * Kiev 1941. Hitler's Battle for Supremacy in the East (Cambridge, 2012). ISBN 9781107014596
 * Operation Typhoon. Hitler's March on Moscow (Cambridge, 2013). ISBN 9781107035126
 * The Battle for Moscow (Cambridge, 2015). ISBN 9781107087606

Essays

 * 'Radicalizing Warfare: The German Command and the Failure of Operation Barbarossa' in Alex J. Kay, Jeff Rutherford and David Stahel (eds.), Nazi Policy on the Eastern Front, 1941: Total War, Genocide, and Radicalization (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2012), pp. 19-44.