Just to add to this, I definitely second the recommendation of the Carrel books, Hitler Moves East and Scorched Earth, the latter being my favorite. They're slightly biased accounts, but excellent reading. There are just so many battles on the eastern front that these books touch upon which people in the west know very little about, each one about the size (or bigger) of the very largest battles in the west. Most people know Kursk and Stalingrad or Berlin (the more famous ones) and Western literature tends to put these battles on the same scale as El Alamein, Italy, and Normandy or what not, but the battles on the Eastern Front just dwarfed anything that happened in the West.
I'm reading a new book published in 2009 by David Stahel called "Operation Barbarossa and Germany's Defeat in the East" which is proving a fascinating read. I normally read pure military history, but this one is a bit different. The book is broken out into 2 parts, the first is the reasoning behind and the logistical and military planning for Barbarossa. The second is the conduct of the campaign following the progress of 2 or 3 panzer groups (i'm still on the first part). The premise of the book is that Barbarossa and the war was basically lost in August of 1941 only a few months after Barbarossa was launched. After that, Germany simply didn't have the men and material to sustain the grinding war it became and were ultimately destined to lose from that point onward.
Anyway, it's definitely a book I highly recommend and I'm only about 100 pages into it. Very interesting thesis and extremely well researched and documented.
