Abstract
Stephen Fritz, Ostkrieg: Hitler’s War of Extermination in the East, University Press of Kentucky: Lexington, KY, 2011; xxiv + 640 pp., 49 illus.; 9780813134161, $39.95 (hbk)
Robert Citino, The Wehrmacht Retreats: Fighting a Lost War, 1943, University Press of Kansas: Lawrence, KS, 2012; xxviii + 410 pp., 32 illus.; 9780700618262, $34.95 (hbk)
Rolf-Dieter Müller, The Unknown Eastern Front: The Wehrmacht and Hitler’s Foreign Soldiers, trans. David Burnett, I.B. Tauris: London, 2012; xxxii + 287 pp., 81 illus.; 9781780760728, £25.00 (hbk)
Ben Shepherd and Juliette Pattinson, eds, War in a Twilight World: Partisan and Anti-Partisan Warfare in Eastern Europe, 1939–45, Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke, 2010; xv + 262 pp., 6 illus.; 9780230575691, £63.00 (hbk)
Alex Kay, Jeff Rutherford and David Stahel, eds, Nazi Policy on the Eastern Front, 1941: Total War, Genocide, and Radicalization, University of Rochester Press: Rochester, NY, 2012; x + 359 pp., 9 illus.; 9781580464079 $85.00 (hbk)
In the first decades after the Second World War historical writing on the eastern front was dominated by self-serving, exculpatory memoirs by former German generals. They sang the same tune: they had not known, they had not seen, and they had not heard of the horrendous atrocities taking place in front of their very eyes. The course of the campaign in the Soviet Union went something like this. Brilliant planning by the German General Staff was ruined by Hitler, who insisted on attacking everywhere, denying the German army a Schwerpunkt, or point of concentration. In the initial battles of encirclement the Wehrmacht achieved the most spectacular victories in the history of warfare. The Germans almost reached Moscow before the Russian winter hit, halting the Germans in time for a Soviet counterattack. As German armies reeled back, Hitler issued a no retreat order, which almost doomed Army Group Center to annihilation. In the summer of 1942 Hitler launched an offensive in the south, but again dissipated German strength by simultaneously trying to capture the Caucasus and Stalingrad. The advance into the Caucasus slowed in inhospitable terrain, and the Sixth Army got bogged down in street fighting in Stalingrad. Germany’s unreliable allies, the Italians, Hungarians and Romanians, collapsed under a Soviet offensive, leading to the encirclement and destruction of the Sixth Army, which Hitler refused to allow to retreat from Stalingrad. The Wehrmacht’s last chance was the Kursk offensive in the summer of 1943, but the Red Army turned the tide for good at the colossal tank battle at Prokhorovka. Following Kursk, Hitler’s refusal to permit retreats and to allow German generals to conduct a flexible defense, coupled with the Soviets’ inexhaustible supply of men and materiel, doomed Germany. The Russians slowly but surely, although rather incompetently, pounded their way to Berlin. The German Army, however, had fought honorably, untainted by the atrocities SS troops perpetrated behind the front.
Little of this narrative remains intact. In the 1970s and 1980s this picture began to change as studies of the eastern front based on archival sources demonstrated the centrality of that theater, and provided a more accurate course of events. Following the collapse of communism and the opening of Eastern European and former Soviet archives, a flood of new scholarly work appeared, demolishing decades-old myths. Scholars not only emphasized that the Soviets played the decisive role in defeating Hitler, but the German military’s reputation underwent a complete reversal. Far from the ‘clean’ professional force of nonpolitical soldiers, the German Army emerged as an institution stained with the blood of innocent Jews, civilians, and murdered prisoners of war.
The five works under review all contribute to the ongoing revision of the German campaign in the Soviet Union. The genesis of Ostkrieg arose from Stephen Fritz’s frustration over his inability to find a text on the eastern front that emphasized the connection between military operations and Nazi crimes. A wide audience will be thankful for his frustration, because we now have a comprehensive, clearly written and affordable study incorporating recent research on the eastern front. Presented from the German perspective, Fritz synthesizes studies by American, British and German historians over the past thirty years. He hopes to ‘provide a deeper understanding of the complexity and immensity of the Ostkrieg by anchoring the military events of the war within their larger ideological, racial, economic, and social context’ (xx). Herein lies the true value of his work. Fritz examines the interrelationship of the war, the Nazi genocide against the Jews and German economic planning, and ably demonstrates how Nazi ideology shaped military operations, economic exploitation and plans for racially restructuring the eastern territories.
In planning Operation Barbarossa, the German General Staff displayed irresponsible overconfidence and assumed that the Soviets would simply collapse after Germany attacked. One aspect of the campaign, however, was carefully prepared from the start: this was to be a war of annihilation. The Einsatzgruppen would eliminate Germany’s racial enemies and the seizure of food would result in the starvation of millions of Soviet civilians. Fritz clearly shows the Wehrmacht’s complicity in Nazi crimes from the beginning. Senior military commanders’ lack of protest over Einsatzgruppen activity, their role in the starvation of Russian prisoners of war, and especially in the intended starvation of millions of civilians, revealed their acceptance of the National Socialist worldview.
In his discussion of the Final Solution, Fritz takes a moderate position in the intentionalist-functionalist debate. Denying that Hitler had a plan to exterminate the Jews from the beginning, Fritz demonstrates how vague orders from above, coupled with increasingly radical implementation from below, led to a murderous combination. He places himself in the ‘euphoria of victory’ camp, claiming that Hitler decided to murder European Jews between mid-September and mid-October of 1941, when it seemed certain that Germany would prevail over the Soviets.
The Wehrmacht’s failure to defeat Stalin in 1941 resulted from wishful thinking during the planning stage, a catastrophic supply situation, unexpectedly tenacious Russian resistance, and the Germans’ dispersal of their strength in an attempt to seize several far-flung objectives simultaneously. Although Fritz maintains that a German victory remained possible the following year, Hitler’s July 1942 decision again to split his forces and pursue objectives in the Caucasus and at Stalingrad provided the Soviets with the opportunity to turn the tide. Fritz identifies 1942 as the fateful year of the war, as this was when Hitler resolved to exterminate all Europe’s Jews and made mistakes that lost the war.
In highlighting the connections between ideology, economics, genocide and the course of the war, Fritz provides a satisfying explanation of why German soldiers fought so tenaciously to the end. In addition to ideological motivation, primary group loyalty, and the desire to protect their homes, soldiers’ fear of retribution for crimes committed in the Soviet Union provided a compelling reason not to surrender. In addition, Fritz conveys how the memory of 1918 influenced decisions made by Hitler and other leading Nazis. Determined to avoid another revolution during wartime, Nazi leaders made certain both to remove ‘dangerous’ elements from the home front, and to provide the German civilian population with a steady supply of food, regardless of the consequences for millions of Soviets.
Through his synthesis Fritz emphasizes that Hitler was not responsible for all mistakes, that the German army actively participated in the war of extermination, and that the mythic Soviet victory in the massive tank battle of Prokhorovka near Kursk was actually a Soviet disaster. He also points out that most frontline German soldiers were not involved in the slaughter of civilians, urging caution not to overcompensate: the ‘clean’ Wehrmacht should not be replaced with one uniformly tarnished. Fritz’s work is well edited, includes an impressive bibliography, and contains only minor errors. He identifies Heinz Guderian as a field marshal (460), when his highest rank was Generaloberst, and two maps portray Army Group North’s front incorrectly. In addition, there is virtually no discussion of the Arctic Front in northern Finland, or of naval operations in the Baltic and Black Seas.
While Fritz argues that 1942 was the year that doomed Nazi Germany, Robert Citino asserts that campaigns in the Soviet Union and Mediterranean in 1943 deserve greater scrutiny. Citino’s The Wehrmacht Retreats picks up where his previous work, Death of the Wehrmacht, left off. As in earlier studies, he relates events to Prusso-German military culture and emphasizes three key concepts to a long-standing German way of war: a war of movement (Bewegungskrieg), the quest for a battle of encirclement (Kesselschlacht), and mission tactics (Auftragstaktik), or commanders establishing objectives and leaving it to subordinates to accomplish them. But how, Citino asks, did the Wehrmacht fare when it could no longer fight in this manner? In 1943 the Germans were bogged down in positional warfare, the initiative had passed to the enemy, and Hitler granted his generals little leeway. As an example he describes how a promising German counterattack to split Allied forces on the beaches of Salerno collapsed due to Allied air power, artillery and naval gunfire.
Following a review of Germany’s overall situation, Citino provides a summary of the Allied landings in North Africa in November 1942 and the advance on Tunis. He observes that although much scholarship on the invasion of Sicily focuses on tensions between the British and Americans, German–Italian relations were considerably worse. Following the invasion of the Italian mainland, Field Marshal Albert Kesselring embraced positional warfare, forcing the Allies slowly to batter their way from one defensive line to the next. The best Kesselring could hope for was to delay defeat, not to achieve victory.
The situation was no better in the east. Although Field Marshal Erich von Manstein briefly stabilized the front in the spring of 1943 and Germany withdrew from the Caucasus, the offensive at Kursk revealed that the German way of war had shifted from a war of movement to positional warfare. Subsequent Soviet counteroffensives drove the Germans further to the west. The Soviets’ greatest advantage was their ability to conduct consecutive operations, attacking on one sector after another in the second half of 1943. The only major German attack was at Kursk, and it failed. Citino shows the interconnectedness of the Russian and Mediterranean fronts well, and he is more critical of Manstein and Kesselring than most authors. In the conclusion he castigates the German officer corps for so willingly fighting a war for Hitler that they knew was lost.
The main weakness of this work is its almost exclusive reliance upon published sources. The author consulted numerous studies prepared for the US Army by German generals after the war, but no other unpublished documents. In addition, the style is at times distracting. While it is doubtless true that many historians write in a rather stuffy manner, Citino seems to have overcompensated. For example, we read that, ‘the US Army was putting its game face on’ (11), that the Germans ‘were all in the midst of a teachable moment’ (123), that ‘US firepower had laid a big hurt on the German attackers’ (187–8), and that World War II ‘covered the earth like a Sherwin Williams advertisement’ (200). Yet his notes are scholarly and thorough, with excellent historiographical summaries. It is almost as if the text is directed to one audience, and the notes to another.
If the Wehrmacht was ‘fighting a lost war’ in 1943, then how did it hold out until 1945? Leading military historian Rolf-Dieter Müller’s The Unknown Eastern Front, a translation of a 2007 German publication, examines Hitler’s allies and auxiliaries on the eastern front and ends with some startling conclusions. The book is divided into three sections: Hitler’s allies; volunteers from neutral and occupied countries; and volunteers from Eastern European nations. Müller examines each group on a country-by-country basis, providing a brief synopsis of events in each country during the interwar years before examining their contribution to Hitler’s war in the east. This will be a very helpful work to those unfamiliar with the assistance Germany received fighting the Soviet Union, but more information about these soldiers’ motivation to side with Germany is needed. Even those knowledgeable about foreign soldiers fighting with the Wehrmacht may be surprised to learn that, based on a percentage of its population, Estonia contributed more soldiers than any other country, with 60,000 troops out of a population of 1.2 million. Neighboring Latvia provided approximately 100,000 armed men, of which some 40,000 died fighting Stalin.
Müller challenges conventional wisdom regarding Italian, Hungarian and Romanian military performance. Hitler blamed his allies’ collapse for the Stalingrad debacle, a charge many historians have accepted, but Müller contests this assertion. First of all, the allies’ lack of heavy anti-tank weapons – and their poor state of armament in general –was largely Germany’s fault. The Germans had pledged to equip allied armies, but provided only a hodge-podge of obsolete weapons with few heavy guns. In addition, allied armies defended sectors that were far too long, even without considering the presence of several Soviet bridgeheads over the Don. Finally, although Hungary attempted to switch sides in October 1944, Hungarian soldiers fought in 1945 alongside Germans in Posen and Breslau, and provided half the troops for the offensives in Hungary. Müller makes a strong case that scholars should be less dismissive of Italian, Romanian and Hungarian military competence. The second group of nations providing soldiers for the eastern front consisted of neutral and occupied countries, which supplied far fewer men than Germany’s allies. Müller discusses the contributions of Spain, France, Belgium, Holland, Denmark and Norway. These countries sent a total of about 150,000 men, nearly one-third of them Spanish.
The final section concerns Eastern European nations, meaning Poland and various parts of the former Soviet Union, participating in the war against Stalinism. Poland’s inclusion is somewhat of a mystery; it provided only about 20,000 men as wagon drivers and receives as much space as Latvia, which sent two SS divisions and numerous police units. Aside from Cossacks, Estonians, Latvians and peoples from the Caucasus, Hitler proved extremely reluctant to allow ‘Slavic subhumans’ to join the struggle. His ideology caused serious disadvantages, for Russians and Ukrainians may have joined in droves to fight Stalin had Hitler allowed it and had the German occupation been less brutal. Nonetheless, by the end of the war approximately 250,000 Ukrainians and 800,000 Russians (200,000 volunteers and 600,000 Hiwis, translated perhaps too literally as ‘willing helpers’) had joined the Germans against the Soviets.
Müller’s most startling claims come in his concluding remarks. Contextualizing the contribution of foreign soldiers on the eastern front, he points out that at the start of Barbarossa, Finnish and Romanian forces covered nearly 1200 kilometers of the 2000 kilometer-long front, and non-Germans provided one soldier out of four who invaded (255). This permitted Germany to concentrate its initial attacks in central Russia. He further asserts that Hitler could not have launched the 1942 summer offensive against Stalingrad without Hungarian, Italian and Romanian forces to cover the flanks. Non-German volunteers also provided much rear-area security, and Russian Hiwis performed essential tasks that freed more German soldiers for combat. ‘At the latest after the catastrophe at Stalingrad, it was only with the aid of foreign helpers that the Wehrmacht could keep the Eastern Front from collapsing’ (256). Finally, Hungarian participation was essential to Hitler’s final offensives in spring 1945, especially those to protect Hungary’s oil fields.
Unfortunately, there are serious problems with the translation and editing of this volume. None of the footnote numbers in the text match the endnotes for the section on Hungary. Readers will be astonished to learn that, ‘Partisans killed more Soviet citizens than German soldiers did’ (xxvii). Other inaccuracies include the assertion that the Murman railway was built using German prisoners of war in World War II (9), rather than during World War I, and that Hitler’s ‘only visit abroad’ was to Finland in 1942 (14). There are numerous other errors.
Partisan warfare played an important role in the east, where it was much more effective than in the heavily urbanized west. War in a Twilight World contains nine well-researched essays focusing on Eastern Europe, with four essays on the Soviet Union, two on Poland and three on Yugoslavia. In the introduction the editors distinguish between guerrillas and partisans. Guerrillas are irregular forces, specializing in hit-and-run attacks, whose main aim is to overthrow the existing order. Partisans are guerrilla fighters who assist regular forces in a struggle to re-establish independent government. This volume also examines the occupiers’ response to partisan warfare, with case studies highlighting regional similarities and differences. What emerges from this study, as from Fritz’s work, is a more nuanced picture of the Wehrmacht, certainly not clean, but not entirely dirty either. Some units behaved in a more restrained manner than others. The essays also shed light on the often strained relations between partisans and the civilian population.
The essay by Kenneth Slepyan describes the Soviet government’s attitude toward partisans, and the problems partisans caused for civilians. Mistrustful of citizens outside its direct control, the Soviet government initially recruited partisans from supposedly trustworthy party members and secret police. Only in spring 1942 did it urge more citizens to resist. Relations between partisans and civilians were tense. Partisans raided villages to obtain recruits, food and other supplies, at times taking so much that civilians had no hope of survival. Rape and murder by partisans were not uncommon. Alexander Brakel discusses problems the Soviets faced controlling partisans in Belorussia’s Baranovichi region. He concludes that partisans hurt civilians more than they helped, due to requisitioning and German reprisals for partisan activity. Contrary to the Soviet myth of a nation-wide mass partisan movement, Brakel contends that it involved at most 500,000 out of 70 million people under German occupation. He also asserts that partisans’ military contribution was negligible, as they tied down insignificant numbers of German troops. Soviet partisans killed fewer German soldiers in the entire war than died on average in a single month at the front (94).
Remaining in the Baranovichi region, Erich Haberer focuses on the German Gendarmerie (rural police) and its local helpers. Here peasants recognized the Germans as the force of stability and order, and regarded partisans as bandits. Peasants willingly reported partisans to the Germans due to resentment over food requisitioning and the violence that often accompanied it. Until 1944 the Germans maintained control of the region, successfully launching raids and ambushing partisan patrols. These German police acted with relative restraint. German anti-partisan operations were not always as brutal as normally depicted, and some peasants accommodated themselves to the power in place. Another example of German restraint is Jeff Rutherford’s examination of the German 121st Infantry Division’s response to partisans around Pavlovsk, a Leningrad suburb. This division also behaved with less than the usual brutality and carried out few major reprisals, although its food requisitioning caused thousands to starve. The division granted concessions to the town’s inhabitants, permitting church services and agreeing to town leaders’ request to revert to the town’s tsarist name.
The first of the articles on Poland, by Paul Latawski, claims that between 1939 and 1943 the strategic goal of the Home Army, directed by the Government-in-Exile in London and by Colonel Stefan Rowecki in Poland, was to avoid indiscriminate partisan attacks due to fears of German retaliation. An attack had to yield results that would justify heavy civilian losses. Instead, anticipating a situation similar to that of 1918, the Home Army wanted to preserve its strength until Germany collapsed, when it would lead a national uprising to regain control of Poland. Claire Hubbard-Hall examines Gestapo methods in Tomaschow Mazowiecki, in Poland’s Radom district, and argues that the Gestapo developed a successful strategy to combat partisans by recruiting hundreds of paid Polish informants. Contrary to some historians’ assertions, she found few ethnic Germans among them, mainly because Volksdeutsche had difficultly gaining Poles’ trust. Some informants proved quite successful, enabling the Gestapo to infiltrate underground groups and arrest many Poles in the resistance.
In an essay that conforms more to accepted interpretations, Ben Shepherd discusses the 342nd Infantry Division’s harsh actions in an anti-partisan operation during the Serb national uprising in the fall of 1941. He determines that the division commander’s Austrian ethnicity was decisive. More so than Germans, Austrians had an enduring animosity toward Serbs, and the divisional commander called for harsher penalties than those stipulated. In another chapter Alexander Korb investigates the reasons for Ustasa massacres of up to 7000 Serb civilians during a joint German–Ustasa anti-partisan operation in summer 1942. While German forces attacked communist partisans in the mountains, Ustasa units murdered thousands of Serbs in the lowlands. This angered the Germans because they worried that atrocities would increase partisan support. The Germans could not control Ustasa fighters, whose units exercised a degree of independence. The volume’s final essay, by Gregor Kranjc, analyzes the propaganda of the Germans, the collaborationist Slovene Home Guard, and communist partisans in the Ljubljana province from 1943 to 1945. The Germans were at a disadvantage as occupiers who were losing the war, but their propaganda effectively cautioned traditional Slovenes against the communist threat to their religion and conservative values. Home Guard propaganda defended the Church and warned of collectivization and communist atrocities, but had trouble shaking their image as German lackeys. Communists attempted to downplay their anti-church reputation and claimed to have led the struggle against foreign occupiers for Slovenian freedom. In the war’s final months, the communists also warned Slovenes to join them before it was too late.
While Fritz and Citino argue for 1942 and 1943 as the time when the war turned against Germany, the final work under review, Nazi Policy on the Eastern Front, 1941, argues the case for 1941. This outstanding volume contains superbly researched essays by 11 young scholars from seven countries. The unifying theme is the extent and speed of radicalization in German military, racial and economic policy in 1941. The editors define radicalization as ‘a willingness to contemplate, plan, and execute ever more extreme policies in order to achieve ever more far-reaching goals’ (1). David Stahel examines German planning for, and the first six months of, Operation Barbarossa. The Germans envisioned an easy victory over the Soviets, but shoddy planning, faulty intelligence, difficult road conditions and tenacious resistance denied Germany victory in 1941. In this situation the Germans had to improvise and radicalize their fighting methods. A telling statistic is that barely five weeks into Barbarossa, Guderian’s 2nd Panzer Group reported only 30 percent of its tanks as serviceable (32). Stahel makes a good case for poor German planning, but is improvisation the same as radicalization?
In the Soviet Union the Germans first encountered heavy fighting in cities. Adrian Wettstein assesses urban warfare doctrine on the Eastern Front and makes a compelling case for radicalization. Although German soldiers received orders to avoid unnecessary cruelty against civilians in Rotterdam and Warsaw, there were no such instructions for Russian cities. Leningrad saw the climax of radicalization in urban warfare, because here the Germans considered the use of poison gas in artillery shells and aerial bombs. The Germans were not alone in this radicalization, for Stalin ordered the mining of Odessa and Kiev. In another example of Nazi crimes, Felix Römer discusses Wehrmacht compliance with Hitler’s criminal orders, especially the Commissar Order and Martial Jurisdiction Decree. The latter proved much more damaging, as it led to the execution of tens of thousands of civilians in reprisals or during anti-partisan operations. These orders for the first time required the German army to commit murder, and granted all officers the right to execute civilians suspected of criminal activity – broadly interpreted. The Commissar Order decreed that all Red Army political officers be shot, but some officers, such as 11th Army commander General Eugen von Schobert, went further and instructed that political commissars in the civilian administration suffer the same fate. Thus radicalization began at the top with Hitler’s Commissar Order, but intensified at lower levels. Römer asserts that compliance with the Commissar Order was more widespread than previously thought; all armies, corps and more than 80% of divisions involved in Barbarossa executed commissars (88).
In perhaps the most shocking essay, Alex Kay describes German plans to alleviate food shortages in Europe, and feed Wehrmacht units in the Soviet Union, by taking food from the Ukraine and withholding it from cities in northern Russia. This policy envisioned the starvation of some 30 million Russian civilians. Although the course of the war prevented the realization of this plan, the policy affected Soviet POWs, who were starved in the winter of 1941–1942. It is difficult to imagine greater radicalization. Kay points out that the starvation policy did not originate with Hitler, although he approved it. In a case study of this hunger policy, Jeff Rutherford describes the mass starvation of Pavlovsk’s inhabitants due to the radicalization of the 121st Infantry Division’s requisitioning policies. Once German forces settled in for the siege of Leningrad, the disastrous supply situation meant that they could either receive food or ammunition from Germany. They chose to receive ammunition and took food from the surrounding region, resulting in the starvation of thousands of civilians. Another form of economic exploitation is discussed by Paolo Fonzi: German currency policy in Ostland, which consisted of the Baltic States, eastern Poland and western Belorussia. Hitler did not want the Reich to experience economic hardship (inflation, shortage of consumer goods), so Germany exploited the economies of occupied lands.
Germany did not act alone in the murder of European Jews. Wendy Lower analyzes the participation of Hungarians, Romanians, Slovaks and Ukrainians in the onset of the Holocaust in Ukraine. The Romanians emerge as the most enthusiastic murderers, followed by Ukrainians, Hungarians and Slovaks. Ukrainians sometimes launched pogroms even before the Germans arrived. Lower observes that in Ukraine, Order Police shot more Jews than the Einsatzgruppen. Anti-Jewish measures in general underwent a process of radicalization in the first months of Barbarossa. Leonid Rein shows that what began as limited murders within a few months expanded to include all Jews, regardless of age or sex. Some troops, especially men with families, had problems murdering Jewish women and children, so the Germans introduced gas vans, which were in use in Belorussia by spring 1942. Another example of radicalization from below is Martin Holler’s investigation into whether Einsatzgruppe D commander Otto Ohlendorf paved the way for extermination of all Roma, sedentary and itinerant, in southern Russia. He surveys the murder of all Roma in the Crimea and finds 30 per cent survived because they were protected by Tatars as fellow Muslims. In other parts of the Soviet Union, Roma were killed later, often with a differentiation between settled and itinerant Roma. Holler concludes that Ohlendorf on his own initiative radicalized Nazi persecution of the Roma, and used methods similar to those used against Jews: registration, isolation and alleged resettlement.
Everyday life in Minsk is the topic of Stephan Lehnstaedt’s essay. More than half the population of this city, about 240,000 before Germany invaded, died during three years of occupation, largely because of food requisitioning and deportation of forced laborers to Germany. Moreover, anti-partisan operations in the Minsk vicinity were particularly brutal. For example, in October 1941 the 707th Infantry Division reported shooting 10,431prisoners but capturing only 90 rifles (245). Germans in Minsk, living in barrack-style quarters and with leisure activities strictly organized, became radicalized due to a culture of violence – occupiers could rob, rape and kill locals without fear of repercussions. The effects of the invasion of the Soviet Union were not limited to Eastern Europe. In the volume’s final essay Thomas Laub analyzes changes in German policy in occupied France. After Stalin called upon European communists to attack the Nazis, acts of resistance steadily increased in France. In response, the Germans began to call for reprisals in August 1941. At the end of the year the Germans introduced the Night and Fog Decree, used mainly in Belgium and France, to deport Jews and communists to concentration camps. The continuation of the Russian campaign also meant that Germany required more workers, and thousands of young men escaped to the countryside to join the resistance. German efforts at Draconian reprisals failed to reach levels similar to those in the Soviet Union for two main reasons: the Germans had to rely on French police for most arrests, and German soldiers never regarded the French people as subhuman.
The five volumes reviewed here all further advance our understanding of the eastern front and provide a more complex and nuanced view of events in the east from 1941 to 1945. The German–Soviet war was unprecedented in many ways, in terms of the length of the front, the number of men deployed, the casualties – military and civilian – suffered, and the sheer barbarity of the struggle. The studies discussed above furnish additional evidence of the Nazis’ murderous intentions and actions against Soviet civilians, prisoners of war, Jews and Roma. While the Wehrmacht was by no means the untainted force its generals tried to portray, neither was it a uniformly barbarous host. There are examples of German soldiers and police acting with greater restraint and flexibility than normally depicted. These studies also present compelling evidence that the radicalizing impetus of German racial, military and economic policy emanated from all levels, including Hitler and other Nazi leaders, mid-level bureaucrats, generals and common soldiers. In the campaign in the Soviet Union, the distinction between front and rear vanished. The war raged throughout the length and breadth of the occupied Soviet Union with the weapons of warfare, terror and hunger.