Hitlers Heerführer. Die deutschen Oberbefehlshaber im Krieg gegen die Sowjetunion 1941/42 (review)

For the last twenty years or so, scholars on both sides of the Atlantic have endeavoured to come to grips with the issue of the Wehrmacht's complicity in Hitler's war of annihilation against the U.S.S.R. To what extent can the German armed forces in general and the Ostheer in particular be said to have been bystanders, more or less willing accomplices or even key players in the policies which resulted in the death of millions of Soviet civilians and POWs? The views put forward on the issue range from those willing to at least occasionally give the accused the benefit of the doubt (Jürgen Förster, Christian Hartmann, Klaus Jochen Arnold) to those fervently convinced of German guilt (Christian Streit, Omer Bartov, Christian Gerlach).

In view of the ink already spilt on the subject (Hürter's bibliography takes up twenty-six pages of very fine print) and the apparent impossibility of reconciling some of the opposing views, the challenge of bringing a genuinely fresh perspective to the debate would seem to be daunting to say the least. Johannes Hürter has managed to do so by adressing the issue of personal responsibility. Rather than cast damnation on "the Wehrmacht" as a collective entity, he puts those individuals in the dock without whose acquiesence not one political commissar or Jewish civilian could have been shot in 1941: the twenty-five generals who during the first twelve months of the war in the East held command of an army, army group, or both. Even though arguably the victorious allies had already attempted to do something similar in 1948 in the twelfth Nürnberg trial, Hürter is able to do so from a much broader documentary base (including many private papers) and makes a point of incorporating the formative experience each of these officers had gone through, first in the Kaiser's and then the Weimar Republic's army (pp. 21– 122). He follows suit by looking at each individual's reaction—insofar as there is a record of it—to the marriage of convenience between Hitler and the old elites (pp. 123–201).

At this point, the chronological structure of the book changes over to a thematic one: while this presupposes a certain foreknowledge of the Russian campaign, it has the major advantage of giving the remainder of the book a very user-friendly setup. After a chapter dealing with the preparations for war and the issuing of the orders which flew in the face of international law (pp. 203–65), the author devotes considerable space to the operational problems involved in actually waging the campaign (pp. 266–358), followed by the Ostheer's treatment of enemy combatants (pp. 359–441) and civilians (pp. 442–508). The final chapter is devoted to examining the role played by his protagonists in the first months of the Holocaust on Soviet soil (pp. 509–99).

Apart from the breathtaking thoroughness of Hürter's research, this reviewer was struck by two features which set his work apart from that of most of his predecessors. Firstly, he has a serious grounding in military history and as such, is able to put many of the actions of his "defendants" in a historical context (the small chapter on the daily workings of an Armeeoberkommando is an excellent example of this). Just as importantly, he has by and large managed to withstand the overpowering urge which so many of his predecessors (German ones in particular) have been unable to resist: to relentlessly castigate those responsible for so much human suffering if not in person, then at least in print. As a result, the overall picture which Hürter paints of the actions of this small elite group, while still mostly black, has shades of grey in it and is all the more credible for...