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Author: Konrad H. Jarausch
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400836328
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 413
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Book Description
An ordinary German soldier’s letters home from Poland and Russia during World War II Reluctant Accomplice is a volume of the wartime letters of Dr. Konrad Jarausch, a German high-school teacher of religion and history who served in a reserve battalion of Hitler's army in Poland and Russia, where he died of typhoid in 1942. He wrote most of these letters to his wife, Elisabeth. His son, acclaimed German historian Konrad H. Jarausch, brings them together here to tell the gripping story of a patriotic soldier of the Third Reich who, through witnessing its atrocities in the East, begins to doubt the war's moral legitimacy. These letters grow increasingly critical, and their vivid descriptions of the mass deaths of Russian POWs are chilling. They reveal the inner conflicts of ordinary Germans who became reluctant accomplices in Hitler's merciless war of annihilation, yet sometimes managed to discover a shared humanity with its suffering victims, a bond that could transcend race, nationalism, and the enmity of war. Reluctant Accomplice is also the powerful story of the son, who for decades refused to come to grips with these letters because he abhorred his father's nationalist politics. Only now, late in his life, is he able to cope with their contents—and he is by no means alone. This book provides rare insight into the so-called children of the war, an entire generation of postwar Germans who grew up resenting their past, but who today must finally face the painful legacy of their parents' complicity in National Socialism.
Author: Konrad H. Jarausch
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400836328
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 413
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Book Description
An ordinary German soldier’s letters home from Poland and Russia during World War II Reluctant Accomplice is a volume of the wartime letters of Dr. Konrad Jarausch, a German high-school teacher of religion and history who served in a reserve battalion of Hitler's army in Poland and Russia, where he died of typhoid in 1942. He wrote most of these letters to his wife, Elisabeth. His son, acclaimed German historian Konrad H. Jarausch, brings them together here to tell the gripping story of a patriotic soldier of the Third Reich who, through witnessing its atrocities in the East, begins to doubt the war's moral legitimacy. These letters grow increasingly critical, and their vivid descriptions of the mass deaths of Russian POWs are chilling. They reveal the inner conflicts of ordinary Germans who became reluctant accomplices in Hitler's merciless war of annihilation, yet sometimes managed to discover a shared humanity with its suffering victims, a bond that could transcend race, nationalism, and the enmity of war. Reluctant Accomplice is also the powerful story of the son, who for decades refused to come to grips with these letters because he abhorred his father's nationalist politics. Only now, late in his life, is he able to cope with their contents—and he is by no means alone. This book provides rare insight into the so-called children of the war, an entire generation of postwar Germans who grew up resenting their past, but who today must finally face the painful legacy of their parents' complicity in National Socialism.
Author: Waitman Wade Beorn
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 067472660X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 333
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Book Description
On October 10, 1941, the Jewish population of the Belarusian village of Krucha was rounded up and shot. This atrocity was not the routine work of the SS but was committed by a regular German army unit acting on its own initiative. Marching into Darkness is a bone-chilling exposé of the ordinary footsoldiers who participated in the Final Solution on a daily basis. Although scholars have exploded the myth that the Wehrmacht played no significant part in the Holocaust, a concrete picture of its involvement has been lacking. Marching into Darkness reveals in detail how the army willingly fulfilled its role as an agent of murder on a massive scale. Waitman Wade Beorn unearths forced labor, sexual violence, and grave robbing, though a few soldiers refused to participate and even helped Jews. Improvised extermination progressively became methodical, with some army units going so far as to organize "Jew hunts." The Wehrmacht also used the pretense of Jewish anti-partisan warfare as a subterfuge by reporting murdered Jews as partisans. Through military and legal records, survivor testimonies, and eyewitness interviews, Beorn paints a searing portrait of an army's descent into ever more intimate participation in genocide.
Author: Wolfram Wette
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674022133
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 422
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Book Description
This book is a profound reexamination of the role of the German army, the Wehrmacht, in World War II. Until very recently, the standard story avowed that the ordinary German soldier in World War II was a good soldier, distinct from Hitler's rapacious SS troops, and not an accomplice to the massacres of civilians. Wolfram Wette, a preeminent German military historian, explodes the myth of a "clean" Wehrmacht with devastating clarity. This book reveals the Wehrmacht's long-standing prejudices against Jews, Slavs, and Bolsheviks, beliefs that predated the prophecies of Mein Kampf and the paranoia of National Socialism. Though the sixteen-million-member German army is often portrayed as a victim of Nazi mania, we come to see that from 1941 to 1944 these soldiers were thoroughly involved in the horrific cleansing of Russia and Eastern Europe. Wette compellingly documents Germany's long-term preparation of its army for a race war deemed necessary to safeguard the country's future; World War II was merely the fulfillment of these plans, on a previously unimaginable scale. This sober indictment of millions of German soldiers reaches beyond the Wehrmacht's complicity to examine how German academics and ordinary citizens avoided confronting this difficult truth at war's end. Wette shows how atrocities against Jews and others were concealed and sanitized, and history rewritten. Only recently has the German public undertaken a reevaluation of this respected national institution--a painful but necessary process if we are to truly comprehend how the Holocaust was carried out and how we have come to understand it.
Author: Omer Bartov
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199879613
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 253
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Book Description
As the Cold War followed on the heels of the Second World War, as the Nuremburg Trials faded in the shadow of the Iron Curtain, both the Germans and the West were quick to accept the idea that Hitler's army had been no SS, no Gestapo, that it was a professional force little touched by Nazi politics. But in this compelling account Omer Bartov reveals a very different history, as he probes the experience of the average soldier to show just how thoroughly Nazi ideology permeated the army. In Hitler's Army, Bartov focuses on the titanic struggle between Germany and the Soviet Union--where the vast majority of German troops fought--to show how the savagery of war reshaped the army in Hitler's image. Both brutalized and brutalizing, these soldiers needed to see their bitter sacrifices as noble patriotism and to justify their own atrocities by seeing their victims as subhuman. In the unprecedented ferocity and catastrophic losses of the Eastrn front, he writes, soldiers embraced the idea that the war was a defense of civilization against Jewish/Bolshevik barbarism, a war of racial survival to be waged at all costs. Bartov describes the incredible scale and destruction of the invasion of Russia in horrific detail. Even in the first months--often depicted as a time of easy victories--undermanned and ill-equipped German units were stretched to the breaking point by vast distances and bitter Soviet resistance. Facing scarce supplies and enormous casualties, the average soldier sank to ta a primitive level of existence, re-experiencing the trench warfare of World War I under the most extreme weather conditions imaginable; the fighting itself was savage, and massacres of prisoners were common. Troops looted food and supplies from civilians with wild abandon; they mercilessly wiped out villages suspected of aiding partisans. Incredible losses led to recruits being thrown together in units that once had been filled with men from the same communities, making Nazi ideology even more important as a binding force. And they were further brutalized by a military justice system that executed almost 15,000 German soldiers during the war. Bartov goes on to explore letters, diaries, military reports, and other sources, showing how widespread Hitler's views became among common fighting men--men who grew up, he reminds us, under the Nazi regime. In the end, they truly became Hitler's army. In six years of warfare, the vast majority of German men passed through the Wehrmacht and almost every family had a relative who fought in the East. Bartov's powerful new account of how deeply Nazi ideology penetrated the army sheds new light on how deeply it penetrated the nation. Hitler's Army makes an important correction not merely to the historical record but to how we see the world today.
Author: Ben Shepherd
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674043553
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 327
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Book Description
In Nazi eyes, the Soviet Union was the "wild east," a savage region ripe for exploitation, its subhuman inhabitants destined for extermination or helotry. An especially brutal dimension of the German army's eastern war was its anti-partisan campaign. This conflict brought death and destruction to thousands of Soviet civilians, and has been held as a prime example of ordinary German soldiers participating in the Nazi regime's annihilation policies. Ben Shepherd enters the heated debate over the wartime behavior of the Wehrmacht in a detailed study of the motivation and conduct of its anti-partisan campaign in the Soviet Union. He investigates how anti-partisan warfare was conducted, not by the generals, but by the far more numerous, average Germans serving as officers in the field. What shaped their behavior was more complex than Nazi ideology alone. The influence of German society, as well as of party and army, together with officers' grueling yet diverse experience of their environment and enemy, made them perceive the anti-partisan war in varied ways. Reactions ranged from extreme brutality to relative restraint; some sought less to terrorize the native population than to try to win it over. The emerging picture does not dilute the suffering the Wehrmacht's eastern war inflicted. It shows, however, that properly judging ordinary Germans' role in that war is more complicated than is indicated by either wholesale condemnation or wholesale exoneration. This valuable study offers a nuanced discussion of the diversity of behaviors within the German army, as well as providing a compelling exploration of the war and counterinsurgency operations on the eastern front.
Author: Hannes Heer
Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 372
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Book Description
How do democratic and pluralistic societies cope with traumatic events in their past? This interdisciplinary volume analyzes in detail for the first time the history and image of the German 'Wehrmacht' and the debates in Austria and Germany surrounding two highly contested exhibitions about the war crimes of the 'Wehrmacht' during World War II.
Author: Luis Raffeiner
Publisher: Pen and Sword Military
ISBN: 1399097717
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 257
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Book Description
A German soldier deployed to Russia recounts his harrowing experience as both victim and perpetrator of Nazi atrocities in this WWII memoir. Serving his country on the Eastern Front, Luis Raffeiner witnessed devastating acts committed by the German army that couldn’t be reconciled with the heroic propaganda back home. Caught up in the turmoil of the vast conflict, he struggled to make sense of the ruthlessness he witnessed—and the part he himself played in it. In this bracingly candid memoir, Raffeiner offers a detailed firsthand account of the Nazi war of annihilation in the Soviet Union. Raffeiner chronicles his family life in a remote village in the Tyrol in the 1930s, his military service in Italy, his transfer to the Wehrmacht and his training as a mechanic on assault guns. He then proceeds to his march into the Soviet Union in 1941. There he experienced, as he says, ‘war in its brutal and cruel reality’. Captured by the Red Army, Raffeiner barely survived as a prisoner of war. His dramatic and honest recollections shatter the myth of the clean conduct of the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front. He testifies to vicious actions, including some in which he himself was involved. His memoir is not a heroic tale – it shows how a man from an ordinary background can come to participate in the horrors of war.
Author: Moritz Föllmer
Publisher:
ISBN: 0198814607
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 331
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Book Description
A ground-breaking study that gets us closer to solving the mystery of why so many Germans embraced the Nazi regime so enthusiastically and identified so closely with it.
Author: Ben H. Shepherd
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300219520
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 681
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Book Description
For decades after 1945, it was generally believed that the German army, professional and morally decent, had largely stood apart from the SS, Gestapo, and other corps of the Nazi machine. Ben Shepherd draws on a wealth of primary sources and recent scholarship to convey a much darker, more complex picture. For the first time, the German army is examined throughout the Second World War, across all combat theaters and occupied regions, and from multiple perspectives: its battle performance, social composition, relationship with the Nazi state, and involvement in war crimes and military occupation. This was a true people’s army, drawn from across German society and reflecting that society as it existed under the Nazis. Without the army and its conquests abroad, Shepherd explains, the Nazi regime could not have perpetrated its crimes against Jews, prisoners of war, and civilians in occupied countries. The author examines how the army was complicit in these crimes and why some soldiers, units, and higher commands were more complicit than others. Shepherd also reveals the reasons for the army’s early battlefield successes and its mounting defeats up to 1945, the latter due not only to Allied superiority and Hitler’s mismanagement as commander-in-chief, but also to the failings—moral, political, economic, strategic, and operational—of the army’s own leadership.
Author: David A. Harrisville
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 150176005X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 324
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Book Description
The Virtuous Wehrmacht explores the myth of the German armed forces' innocence during World War II by reconstructing the moral world of German soldiers on the Eastern Front. How did they avoid feelings of guilt about the many atrocities their side committed? David A. Harrisville compellingly demonstrates that this myth of innocence was created during the course of the war itself—and did not arise as a postwar whitewashing of events. In 1941 three million Wehrmacht troops overran the border between German- and Soviet-occupied Poland, racing toward the USSR in the largest military operation in modern history. Over the next four years, they embarked on a campaign of wanton brutality, murdering countless civilians, systemically starving millions of Soviet prisoners of war, and actively participating in the genocide of Eastern European Jews. After the war, however, German servicemen insisted that they had fought honorably and that their institution had never involved itself in Nazi crimes. Drawing on more than two thousand letters from German soldiers, contextualized by operational and home front documents, Harrisville shows that this myth was the culmination of long-running efforts by the army to preserve an illusion of respectability in the midst of a criminal operation. The primary authors of this fabrication were ordinary soldiers cultivating a decent self-image and developing moral arguments to explain their behavior by drawing on a constellation of values that long preceded Nazism. The Virtuous Wehrmacht explains how the army encouraged troops to view themselves as honorable representatives of a civilized nation, not only racially but morally superior to others.
