War of Extermination The German Military in World War II [Hardcover]

Among the many myths about the relationship of Nazism to the mass of the German population, few proved more powerful in postwar West Germany than the notion that the Wehrmacht had not been involved in the crimes of the Third Reich. Former generals were particularly effective in spreading, through memoirs and speeches, the legend that millions of German soldiers had fought an honest and clean war and that mass murder, especially in the East, was entirely the work of Himmler's SS. This volume contains the most important contributions by distinguished historians who have thoroughly demolished this Wehrmacht myth. The picture that emerges from this collection is a depressing one and raises many questions about why ordinary men got involved as perpetrators and bystanders in an unprecedented program of extermination of racially inferior men, women, and children in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union during the Second World War. Those who have seen these terrible photos of mass executions and other atrocities, currently on show in an exhibition in Germany and soon to be in the United States, will find this volume most enlightening.

Hannes Heeris a historian and film director.

List of Abbreviations

Preface
Volker R. Berghahn

Introduction
Hannes Heer and Klaus Naumann

Chapter 1.The Concept of the War of Annihilation: Clausewitz, Ludendorff, Hitler
Jan Philipp Reemtsma

PART I: CRIMES

Chapter 2.Coming Along to Shoot Some Jews? The Destruction of the Jews in Serbia
Walter Manoschek

Chapter 3.Killing Fields: The Wehrmacht and the Holocaust in Belorussia, 194142
Hannes Heer

Chapter 4.Soviet Prisoners of War in the Hands of the Wehrmacht
Christian Streit

Chapter 5.The Logic of the War oflÇ