Operation Barbarossa: Planning The Impossible (Part 2)

Holland and Murray continue their Barbarossa series, digging into the interwar economic dependency between Germany and the USSR and the timeline of Hitler's decision to break the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Holland is at his best when he traces how Germany's resource constraints made the Soviet trade relationship both essential and strategically untenable — the economic logic of invasion gets proper treatment here rather than being reduced to ideology alone. At an hour, this has the room to breathe that the topic demands, and the series format means they're building toward the operational detail rather than rushing through it.