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War and Genocide on the Eastern Front, 1941–1945

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 May 2007

NORMAN M. NAIMARK
NORMAN M. NAIMARK*
Affiliation:
Robert and Florence McDonnell Professor of East European Studies, FSI, Stanford University, Encina Hall E107, Stanford, CA 94305-6055, United states; [email protected].
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Extract

The historical connection between war and genocide is clear and apparent. Scholars of mass killing have repeatedly pointed out the linkages between the First World War and the Armenian genocide of 1915, between the Second World War and the Holocaust, between the 1993–4 war and the genocide in Rwanda, and between the war in Bosnia and the genocide in Srebrenica. Scholars of war, most often military historians, have been less ready to tie what they see as two distinct social phenomena – war and genocide – into the same bundle. This was especially the case, until recently, for the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, and the subsequent mass murder of the Jews. The Wehrmacht, the German fighting forces, were seen to be implementing an enormously ambitious military campaign against the Soviet Union, which, in the end, they lost. Meanwhile, the Nazi security organs – the SS, the SD, and the Einsatzgruppen – carried out the ‘Final Solution’, inspired primarily by Hitler and the Nazi hierarchs.

Type
Review Articles
Information
Contemporary European History , Volume 16 , Issue 2 , May 2007 , pp. 259 - 274
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2007

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References

1 See, for example, Norman, M. Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in 20th-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 187–90Google Scholar; Eric, Weitz, A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 240–1Google Scholar; and, most recently, Scott, Straus, The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 10–11.Google Scholar

2 See Omer, Bartov, The Eastern Front 1941–45: German Troops and the Barbarisaton of Warfare (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986)Google Scholar, and his Hitler's Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).

3 A useful compilation of this scholarship in English is Hannes Heer and Klaus, Naumann, eds. War of Extermination: The German Military in the Second World War, 1941–1944 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2000)Google Scholar.

4 See, for example, Christian, Gerlach, Kalkulierte Mord: Die Deutsche Wirtschaftsund Vernichtungspolitik in Weissrussland, 1941 bis 1944 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1999)Google Scholar; Dieter, Pohl, Nationalsozialistische Judenverfolgung in Ostgalizien, 1941–1944 (Munich: Oldenburg, 1996)Google Scholar; and Berkhoff, Karel C., Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine under Nazi Rule (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Browning, like Bartov, has spawned many interesting and important lines of research. Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: HarperCollins, 1993).

6 Daniel, Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (London: Little, Brown, 1996)Google Scholar.

7 An excellent example of this complex approach is contained in Wehler's, Hans-UlrichDeutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte: Vom Beginn des Ersten Weltkriegs bis zur Gruendung der beiden deutschen Staaten, 1914–1949, vol. 4 (Munich: Beck, 2003)Google Scholar.

8 Michael Geyer anticipated Hull's general approach in his work. See, for example, his ‘German Strategy in the Age of Machine Warfare, 1914–45,’ in Peter Paret, ed., Makers of Modern Strategy: From Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 527–97.

9 Here and elsewhere in his book, Arnold argues in particular with Gerlach's powerfully documented presentation of the Nazis’ premeditated eliminationist occupation policy in Belorussia. See Gerlach, Kalkulierte Mord, 44–81.

10 This problem was first explored by Alexander Dallin in his classic, and in many ways still unsurpassed, history of the occupation, German Rule in Russia, 1941–1945: A Study of Occupation Policies, 2nd rev. edn (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1981). Dallin's study was first published in 1957.

11 Karel Berkhoff concurs: ‘there is no evidence that any German in the Reichskommissariat Ukraine, or anywhere else in the “East,” ever lost his life for refusing to carry them out ‘the orders to kill]’. Harvest of Despair, 306.

12 Chiara notes that 3.3 million German soldiers (87 per cent of the army) stood on the eastern front at the beginning of Barbarossa, 100,000 of whom were designated for security in the rear. In addition there were some 30,000 military and civilian functionaries in the fully developed occupation administration. Ibid., p. 969.

13 See Deak, Istvan, Gross, Jan T. and Judt, Tony, eds., The Politics of Retribution in Europe: The Second World War and its Aftermath (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003)Google Scholar.