| Summary/Abstract |
This article primarily examines the work conducted by the intelligence service of the German Army known as Fremde Heere Ost [Foreign Armies East, FHO] and the influence it had on the strategic and operational decision making of Adolf Hitler in the southern sector of the Eastern Front in 1942. Using mainly archival material, FHO estimates of Soviet formations in terms of their deployment areas and strengths during Operations Blau and Edelweiβ are discussed. The FHO organization and Hitler’s own thoughts on military intelligence are also outlined in brief. The article shows that a persistently and excessively optimistic depiction of the supposedly wretched state of the Soviet armed forces by German military intelligence convinced Hitler of the correctness of his decision to resume the offensive in summer 1942 and later to attempt to capture simultaneously his objectives of Stalingrad and the Caucasus oilfields.
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