Mitteilungen der Gemeinsamen Kommission für die Erforschung der jüngeren Geschichte der deutsch-russischen Beziehungen / Soobshcheniya Sovmestnoi komissii po izucheniyu noveishei istorii rossiisko-germanskikh otnoshenii (review)

The second volume of the German-Russian Historical Commission's irregularly published Mitteilungen contains topical essays, reports on current projects, and relevant documents (e.g., the Archival Law of the Russian Federation of 2004). The first part of the volume consists of the papers of a workshop organized by the commission in 2002 concerning the years 1942-1945. Jost Dülffer describes the "GermanWar in the East 1942: Plans and Reality" as an increasingly chaotic conjunction of unsuccessful blitzkrieg, the "war of extermination" against the Jewish and Slav populations, and unrealistic plans for the German settlement after victory. As for the percentage of Wehrmacht soldiers personally involved in war crimes, Christian Hartmann argues that more than 80 percent of the soldiers fought at the front, whereas most crimes were committed away from the fighting. Nonetheless, he concedes that the Wehrmacht not only bore direct responsibility for crimes committed at the front but was institutionally responsible for war crimes in areas under military administration, against prisoners of war, or committed by other units with the support of the Wehrmacht. How was Adolf Hitler able to gain the complicity of his overwhelmingly conservative generals? Johannes Hürter answers the question by pointing out that, on the one hand, the German generals would not risk a confrontation with the Führer. On the other hand, anti-Semitism, anti-Bolshevism, the idea of German supremacy, and the conviction that the end justifies all means were already deeply rooted in their minds. The cliché that the German military administration in the USSR behaved "better" than the German civil administration also has to be revised, as Dieter Pohl shows. Altogether in the German-occupied territories of the USSR, approximately 24 million people were forced into slave labor. Mark Spoerer questions Christian Gerlach's thesis that the maltreatment and the majority of deaths of these people were—except in the case of the Jewish population—a consequence of "extreme economization" rather than of exterminatorial ideology.

As the German tanks racing toward Baku's oil fields ran out of gas because of poor decisions by the German high command (as discussed by Rolf-Dieter Müller), Iosif Stalin was able to evacuate 2,500 major arms factories in 1941 that had been located near the front, a process recounted by Mikhail Myagkov. Vladimir Khaustov highlights a parallel in the two sides' secret services: In times of military reverses, both sides increased the number and thus reduced the training and hence the efficiency of their agents. In a summary, Michael Salewski argues that the "Wende at Moscow" (despite reaching the Soviet capital, the German blitzkrieg that aimed at an early surrender failed in 1941) was not recognized as such by most people at the time.

The second part of the volume contains reports on current and finished research projects, including "The Comintern and German-Soviet Relations," a collection of documents edited by Bernhard Bayerlein; "The German Communist Party and Moscow 1928-33," a monograph by Bert Hoppe; and a documentary on the years 1939-1941. The already published volumes of documents on the "German October" of 1923 and the "Thälmann scandal" of 1928, including Stalin's correspondence on the subject, reveal the direct Soviet involvement in the abortive Communist putsch in Germany as well as in the internal affairs of the German party. See Hermann Weber and Bernhard H. Bayerlein, eds., Der Thälmann-Skandal: Geheime Korrespondenzen mit Stalin (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 2003); and B. Bayerlein, L. Babicenko, F. Firsov, and A. Vatlin, eds., Deutscher Oktober 1923: Ein Revolutionsplan und sein Scheitern (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 2003). The documents provide readers with insights into the background of Stalin's political thinking. A project on "Soviet and German Prisoners of War and Internees," discussed by Klaus...