Nazi Policy on the Eastern Front, 1941: Total War, Genocide, and Radicalization ed. by Alex J. Kay, Jeff Rutherford, and David Stahel (review)

As the subtitle indicates, the editors and authors of this collection of eleven essays set out to analyze Nazi policy on the Eastern Front in 1941 within the framework of three concepts: total war, genocide, and radicalization. There is no conceptual discussion of genocide, however, no attempt to distinguish which Nazi programs of mass killing passed that definitional threshold, and no discussion about whether such a distinction is even useful in the context of Operation Barbarossa. In effect, the term is taken for granted. "Total war" is mentioned primarily in the introduction, where the editors usefully note that its origins lay not in Josef Goebbels' infamous speech of February 1943 but rather in German military thinking emerging from World War I. The concept was most succinctly articulated in Erich von Ludendorf 's Der totale Krieg (Munich, 1935), which proclaimed the goal of warfare to be the destruction not only of the enemy army but also the enemy nation and society.

The attempted conceptual unity of the book, as opposed to its self-evident topical unity, revolves around the idea of "radicalization." Here the editors invoke both Hans Mommsen's notion of "cumulative radicalization" and Michael Geyer's ideas about "relentless escalation," as exemplified in the Nazi embrace of ever more extreme policies to achieve ever more extreme goals on the Eastern Front in 1941. They correctly emphasize both the unprecedented and consensual nature of prewar planning for Barbarossa, as well as the various initiatives from above and from below that fed an ongoing process of intensification after the invasion. Some of the essays make only nominal or token mention of the concept of "radicalization," but most engage with it. Most explicitly, Alex Kay proclaims that cumulative radicalization was "inherent" in National Socialism and rejects what he considers to be the "apologetic explanation" (117) that he attributes to Klaus Jochen Arnold, who, he claims, characterizes Nazi radicalization as basically a situational response to Soviet behavior, Hitlerian manipulation, economic necessity, and military desperation (Die Wehrmacht und die Besatzungspolitik in den besetzten Gebieten der Sowjetunion [Berlin, 2005]).

Some of the essays usefully summarize research that the authors have presented more extensively elsewhere. This includes Alex Kay's study of the emergence of the so-called "Hunger Strategy" out of Nazi policymaking in early 1941, as well as Felix Römer's work on the pervasive compliance of German army units in the field with criminal orders, especially the Commissar Order. Several chapters are especially noteworthy and informative. David Stahel makes a strong case for the early failure of Barbarossa in the summer of 1941, i.e., that it was not just a narrow miss at the gates of Moscow in December. The disparity in mobility between the Wehrmacht's armored and motorized elite units and its traditional infantry, the impossible logistical demands posed by geographical reality, the crippling rate of attrition and the breakdown of equipment, as well as the strategic impasse between Hitler and his generals—combined with utter ignorance of the Soviet capacity to mobilize and equip reserves for continued resistance in depth—all spelled early disaster, which, in turn, accelerated Nazi radicalization: "Far from achieving the demise of the Soviet Union, the first months of Hitler's war in the east reveal an emergent colossus awoken in the east" (39). Adrian Wettstein's chapter on urban warfare doctrine notes that before 1941, the Nazis realized that the very threat of total destruction of urban centers like Warsaw or Rotterdam brought about enemy surrender. In the Soviet Union, however, the Red Army defended urban centers like Dnipropetrovsk or massively mined lost cities like Kiev, in each case without any regard for the loss of civilian life. The Nazi response was prolonged and costly fighting in (and the near-total obliteration of) the former...