Ostkrieg: Hitler’s War of Extermination in the East (review)

The Soviet-German war of 1941–1945 was many things: it was the largest air-land conflict in history; it was the nexus between the Third Reich’s territorial, economic, and racial aspirations; and it was without a doubt the decisive theater of World War II. No wonder that, in the words of historian Edward L. Homze, the campaign has had difficulty finding its Thucydides.

This impressive book by Stephen G. Fritz echoes one from an earlier generation of the historiography of the Eastern Front: Alan Clark’s Barbarossa: The Russian-German Conflict, 1941–45 (New York: William Morrow, 1965). Although hamstrung by a lack of Soviet sources and perhaps over-reliant on the apologetic and self-serving memoirs of some of the senior German commanders, Clark managed to convey something of the massive scope of the campaign. He not only covered the military course of events, but dwelled on German occupation and racial policies, the bureaucratic struggle within the Nazi state in formulating those policies, and the suffering of the civilian population caught between the clashing armies. Although Clark’s book has been thoroughly superseded in most of its particulars by later scholarship, it is still in print nearly fifty years after it first appeared.

Since then, treatment of the Eastern Front has diverged. Military historians have greatly enriched our understanding of the operational course of events. David Glantz and others have led the way in producing exhaustive campaign and battle studies, in the process reappraising and to a large extent rehabilitating the reputation of the strategic and operational performance of Soviet commanders—including for example their shrewd use of deception (maskirovka). Individual battles, notably Stalingrad and Kursk, have been dissected using primary material from both sides.

Meanwhile, scholars of Nazi racial policies and the Holocaust produced landmark works examining the origins and course of the Nazi expansion and programs of mass murder against “Jewish-Asiatic Bolshevism.” Several noteworthy studies examined the role of the “ordinary men” of the police battalions. And the German Army, far from being a “clean” fighting force that viewed the brutal activities of the Waffen-SS and police with detached disdain, was revealed to be a willing participant in the war of extermination.

With some commendable exceptions, the military histories tend to examine combat operations in something of a vacuum, while the Holocaust studies community has not always appreciated the military-strategic dimension of events. The time is certainly ripe for someone to attempt a grand synthesis of all of these scholarly threads. Fritz, the author of important earlier works on the German army and the Nazi state at war, has tackled the ambitious task. In just under 500 pages of powerfully written text, Fritz delineates what he calls “one enormously deadly enterprise” (p. 140). Ostkrieg recounts the war in the East primarily from a German perspective—it was, as the subtitle notes, “Hitler’s war of extermination.” While providing full coverage of the organizational and bureaucratic dimensions, Fritz gives Hitler’s ideology a prominent place in the story. It was the Führer’s nihilistic world view that gave birth to the undertaking, his opportunism that shaped its course, and his searing memories of the German collapse in November 1918 that prolonged the struggle. Yet at the same time Fritz clearly outlines the role of the multifarious Nazi civilian and military agencies that advanced the extermination program for their own ends. In the end, Fritz argues, Hitler “was pushed by circumstances in the direction he always intended to go” (p. 75).

A crisp and well-researched narrative of the military course of events serves as the book’s backbone. Fritz’ account moves effortlessly between the highest levels of grand strategy to the battlefield. The vast majority of the important events and controversies (the clash between Hitler and his generals over the second phase of the summer 1941 campaign, the significance of the battle of Moscow in 1941...