Abstract
On 22 June 1941, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, arguably one of – if not the – key turning point of the Second World War and the twentieth century as a whole. For Adolf Hitler, the attack on his arch enemy, this so vehemently despised ‘Judeo–Bolshevik entity’ in his warped worldview, had been central in his thinking and foreign policy. Not only would a defeat of the Soviet Union - very few doubted that Germany would score a rapid and easy victory – provide the ‘Lebensraum’ the German people so desperately needed according to Hitler, it would also offer the chance to subjugate and kill millions of Slavs, Soviet political commissars, and above all Jews.
The army that attacked the Soviet Union was, however, not composed solely of German soldiers. On the contrary, as editor David Stahel writes in the introduction to Joining Hitler’s Crusade, ‘together Germany’s allies in 1941 mobilized well over 700,000 troops for the war against the Soviet Union’ (11). Stahel makes very clear, however, that the propaganda slogan of a ‘common crusade against Bolshevism’ was little more than that: in most cases it was an ‘opportune by-product of their participation and not the main motive for entering the war’ (11).
That Germany’s allies provided troops for Operation Barbarossa is perhaps not that surprising. Yet many flocked to Germany’s colours also from occupied countries such as Belgium, Denmark, France, Norway and the Netherlands, the Baltic States, and even the Soviet Union. Stahel has done a great job in gathering numerous national experts on this variety of countries, with the main advantage that many local sources become available to the English reader. Moreover, the various authors succeed in presenting succinct and well-written chapters, pointing at both similarities and differences in the motivations to join Germany’s Vernichtungskrieg against the Soviet Union.
There were a number of similarities between Germany’s foreign volunteers. The majority of them came predominantly from poor families and the lower middle class, had been hit hard by the Great Depression of the 1930s, and had parents who had been from the right spectrum of politics or were members of fascist parties. Joining the Wehrmacht or Waffen-SS offered opportunities for decent pay, there was a sense of adventure, and for some the struggle against the Soviet Union was indeed seen as a crusade.
At the same time, there were also marked differences between the countries discussed in Joining Hitler’s Crusade. To Finland, joining the war against the Soviet Union – the so-called Continuation War (1941–44) – seems above all to have been from the point of retaking territory lost after the Winter War of 1939–40. To do so, it mobilized an army of almost half a million soldiers in 1941, which was, as stated by Henrik Meinander, relatively speaking ‘a greater mobilization than in any other country involved in the Second World War’ (36). Although Finland in the end had to sign an armistice with the Soviet Union in 1944, Meinander concludes that the country ‘suffered significantly less from joining Hitler’s war in the east than Germany’s other Allies’ (45), especially compared to Eastern European countries. These latter countries were also actively involved in the murder of Soviet Jews. For example, in the case of Romania, as clearly analysed by Dennis Deletant, ‘Transnistria was the graveyard of an estimated figure of between 220,000 and 260,000 Jews, and for up to 20,000 Romas’ (73).
Recently, historians have been pointing increasingly at the difference of the war experience between Western Europe and ‘the East’. Whereas in the former war was basically absent from the late summer of 1940 to the summer of 1944, Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union were the scene of intermittent (partisan) warfare, and killing on an immense scale. In the Western European countries, the German occupation authorities showed more flexibility and pragmatism, with one great exception, that is the persecution of the Jews, although the numbers of Jews killed from those countries differed markedly.
Some Western European countries provided quite large numbers of volunteers. For example, 12,000 Danish male adults volunteered for the Waffen-SS, of which around a third died. As Joachim Lund ably shows, they were driven by anti-communist sentiments and/or Nazi sympathies. There were echoes of such sentiments in the press. Lund quotes the leading liberal daily Jyllands-Posten, which declared that the war against the Soviet Union made it possible ‘to wipe out Bolshevism completely, and that this will have to be the goal of every civilized European people, seeing that Bolshevism is a plague on the whole world’ (p. 241).
This call for ‘a crusade against Bolshevism’ also resounded in the Netherlands: between 22,000 and 25,000 Dutchmen volunteered for the Waffen-SS. Indeed, more Dutchmen were killed in German Feldgrau than in Allied kaki. Like elsewhere, however, joining the war against Russia had multiple reasons, which are well explained by Evertjan van Roekel. As always, there was no simple ‘black and white’ story. This also applies to volunteers from within the Soviet Union. From a German perspective, the Cossacks and military units formed from among them ‘were some of the most dedicated and effective elements’ (404). As Oleg Beyda and Igor Petrov explain, this had to do with their higher motivation because of the Russian Civil War and the policy of ‘de-Cossackization’, as well as the events of the 1930s. Other chief collaborators were Ukrainian nationalists, who were also explicitly involved in the murder of Jews. However, in the end, the Germans did not succeed in mobilizing very large forces from within the Soviet Union. It soon became clear that the Nazis were even worse than what had been experienced earlier. In the words of Beyda and Petrov, ‘The Nazis by the end of 1941 had alienated a population that initially had shown a cautiously neutral attitude towards them, and elements of which had been quite positively inclined’ (424). However, in the Nazis’ warped racial thinking, these people were subhumans, and needed to be treated accordingly: ‘With racist arrogance, haughtiness, cruelty and repellent crimes, together with colonial ambitions and appetites, the Nazis squandered anti-Soviet moods and civil disagreements’ (425). By late 1941 it was clear Nazi Germany was not going to quickly destroy the Soviet Union. Even the quite extensive number of volunteers from all over Europe could not change that basic fact.