Hitler Strikes Poland: Blitzkrieg, Ideology, and Atrocity (review)

Except among Polish scholars, the military and political aspects of the campaign of September 1939 are terra incognita. This opening move of mankind's greatest combat is treated as a trigger event for wider war, while misconceptions abound. Andrew Rossino, a researcher at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., has written a new study on the campaign's ideological dimension that is an important step towards redressing these deficiencies. Rossino's primary concerns are Nazi anti-Polish as well as anti-Jewish policy, reprisals, and the treatment of civilian noncombatants during and in the immediate aftermath of September 1939. The claims of the book jacket aside, the focus of the monograph is Operation Tannenberg, the implementation of Nazi executive authority and racial policy. The book picks apart the Einsatzgruppen (operational groups) constituted for the task. Far from brutalized cadres, this survey reveals men selected for their efficiency and dedication to the Nazi cause. Cooperation between the army and security services was good owing to common perceptions of irregular warfare and of Poles as inferior or dangerous. Anti-Jewish violence caused some friction, mostly because it played havoc with rear services. As the campaign wore on, brutal reprisal policy gave way to unrestrained atrocity, and Rossino argues that the invasion of Poland was a transitional stage in the amalgamation of Nazi ideology and military practice that culminated in the war in the U.S.S.R. To the investigation of major crimes and patterns of behavior the author brings an array of sources, making excellent use of personal accounts and unit records. Also, the study integrates the contributions of Polish scholars, and the book's treatment of non-German issues is sympathetic.

Occasionally the study stumbles. The author freely uses testimony and research from the former Main Commission for the Investigation of Hitlerite Crimes in Poland without acknowledging that body's ideologically charged mission and contributions to the Communist regime. A brief word on the nature of the sources and the rationale for endorsement would probably have laid to rest any doubts. The characterization, especially on the basis of German reports, of Polish political associations as "paramilitaries" is questionable. Certainly the description of the Obrona Narodowa (National Defense) as such (p. 26) is inaccurate. This uniformed service of the Polish Armed Forces enrolled supernumerary reservists in independent infantry battalions, which were mobilized and brigaded with first-line units in September 1939. Such wrinkles, however, do not diminish the light shed on the conduct of German forces. Perversely, ignorance of Polish conditions is likely to have strengthened expectations of irregular warfare in the context of total war. Moreover, this study is not to be judged as a narrative of the military campaign or German-Polish conflict, on the basis of equal time for opposing sides. Adept analysis is complemented by dispassionate prose, while the notes are as clear as they are numerous. Photographs, including two compelling photo essays, augment the documentary evidence. The text is almost error free; the editors are to be complemented for rendering Polish place names in their proper form. This welcome contribution to the literature on the Second World War and Nazi Germany will find a place on the bookshelves of military, German, and Central European historians alike and assist in putting this seminal and portentous experience in proper perspective.