War of Extermination: The German Military in World War II, 1941-1944 (review)

In 1995, the Hamburg Institute for Social Research opened a provocative traveling exhibition entitled "War of Extermination: Crimes of the German Armed Forces, 1941-1944." Composed of large photographic wall panels and facsimile documents, "War ofExtermination" graphically illustrated the critical role Germany's military played inimplementing the murderous racial policies of the Nazi regime. Wherever it appeared, the exhibition generated heated discussion between defenders of the myth of the "clean" army and those (typically younger) Germans prepared to accept the truth about the army's criminal conduct.

Confronting the horrors of the past, however, was only one of the Hamburg Institute's goals in creating the exhibition. The second objective entailed educating Germans about the atrocities committed by ordinary German troops and officers. It was to this end that the Institute also published a volume of scholarly essays on the subject. Bearing the same title as the exhibition, this volume was at the time a significant addition to the literature concerning Nazi genocide. Five years later, in 2000, Berghahn Books published an abbreviated English-language translation under the new title War of Extermination: The German Military in World War II, 1941-1944. Like the German original, this translation too proved to be an important, if somewhat problematic, contribution to our understanding of the Wehrmacht's brutal conduct during World War II.

War of Extermination opens with a new preface by Volker R. Berghahn, an introduction by the two editors, and Chapter One, written by Hamburg Institute founder Jan Philipp Reemtsma. Berghahn's preface provides a retrospective summary of the reasons why it took so long for the subject of German army crimes to enter postwar German cultural discourse. Citing a scarcity of documentary sources from the 1950s to the 1980s, political pressure resulting from West Germany's position as an American ally in the Cold War, and an over-reliance on the postwar memoirs of former Wehrmacht officers, Berghahn shows that scholars who sought to set the record straight, such as Manfred Messerschmidt, Klaus-Jürgen Müller, and Michael Geyer, worked in isolation while outlining the German Army's role as a pillar of the Nazi state. Heer and Naumann's introduction and Reemtsma's essay continues this line of inquiry by clarifying the continuity between the Clausewitzian notion of a Vernichtungsschlacht, or "battle of annihilation," and the radicalization of this concept by Hitler and his military commanders into a "war of annihilation" against enemy armies as well as civilian populations perceived as "enemy." As a result of this evolution of warfare, Reemtsma argues, killing the enemy became an end in itself and not simply the means by which military victory was to be achieved.

Sixteen chapters organized into three sections make up the remainder of the book. Part one deals with German crimes; part two is entitled "Formations"; part three covers the aftermath of the war. This organization is largely unnecessary, given the overlapping essay topics in each section. The focus remains on war crimes, whether these are investigated through broad analyses, such as Christian Streit's discussion of the mass murder of Soviet prisoners of war, or via the micro-histories of individual formations, such as Theo Schulte's essay on Army Rear Area 582, and Bernd Boll and Hans Safrian's important piece on the Sixth Army. Contributions by Hannes Heer on the mentality of German soldiers and Bernd Hüppauf on photographic evidence of the atrocities also do not fit part two, as neither piece examines the history of a specific unit. Part three begins with an excellent essay by Manfred Messerschmidt on the postwar genesis of the myth of the "clean" army, and includes essays by Omer Bartov and Klaus Naumann on the German historical profession and German society's responses to the myth. The repetition of themes...