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  • Marching into Darkness: The Wehrmacht and the Holocaust in Belarus by Waitman W. Beorn
  • Leonid Rein
Marching into Darkness: The Wehrmacht and the Holocaust in Belarus. By Waitman W. Beorn. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014. Pp. ii + 245. Cloth $39.95. ISBN 978-0674725508.

This study attempts to deal with the question of the role played by the Wehrmacht in the execution of “the Final Solution” in Belarus. Focusing on massacres in five localities, Waitman Beorn delineates the process by which German soldiers became involved in the annihilation of Belarussian Jews, ranging from somewhat reluctant accomplices to full-fledged perpetrators. Beorn descends to the level of individual units and the individuals serving with these units in order to try to find new answers to the problem—put forward in 2006 by the German social psychologist Harald Welzer—of how perfectly normal people become mass murderers.

The primary basis of Beorn’s study is records of postwar judicial proceedings carried out against perpetrators of the Holocaust in Germany. Since Beorn is well aware of the limitations of these kinds of sources, he supplements them with contemporary documents, oral testimonies, and visits by him to the scenes of the events. On this basis, Beorn discerns three main factors that contributed to the process of turning [End Page 686] the Wehrmacht units in full-fledged instruments of genocide: the personalities of units’ commanders; the equation made between Jews, Bolsheviks, and partisans; and finally, the continuous exposure of the units to the Nazi genocidal project. After a brief overview of Belarusian history and the process that made the Wehrmacht into “Hitler’s Army” (Omer Bartov, 1991), Beorn uses the specific case studies from various localities in Belarus to outline the process by which Wehrmacht units became more and more deeply embedded in, cooperative with, and enthusiastic about the work of genocide: specifically, the massacres in Krupki, Krucha, Slonim, Novogrudok, and Szczuczyn in fall 1941. Beorn quite correctly identifies the key factor that facilitated the participation of Wehrmacht soldiers in the persecution and murder of Jews: a genuine belief that Jews were the instigators of partisan movement behind German lines. For this reason, he dedicates a whole chapter of his study to the conference that took place in Mogilev in late September 1941 at which participants stressed a connection between Jews and partisans. The last chapter of Beorn’s study is dedicated to the postwar fates of these perpetrators and to the question of the representativeness of their conduct for the German army as a whole.

Beorn’s microhistorical approach is certainly valuable, since it gives a face to the perpetrators and an insight into their motives. The weakness of such an approach, however, is that it leads to generalizations based on a limited number of scattered examples. When discussing the sexual relations between one German officer and Jewish women in Slonim, the author maintains that “similar interactions appear to have been quite common” (168) but brings few examples of such relations. Beorn is probably right in suggesting that the consideration of “racial defilement” played a lesser role in the East than elsewhere, but still the entire topic of sexual relations between German occupation troops and local women, both Jewish and non-Jewish, is hardly prone to generalizations, given the normative constraints on discussing such activities. Similarly, the Mogilev antiguerilla conference was probably a turning point for these specific perpetrators; but the equation between Jews and partisans had, in fact, been established in orders issued by various German commanders—for example, General von Stülpnagel in Ukraine. Before the Mogilev conference, this association had already expressed itself in the assaults and murders of Jews, as for example in Bialystok in late June 1941, where Jews, burned to death in the local synagogue, were subsequently dubbed “guerillas” in the Wehrmacht’s report.

Unfortunately, the reader does not get the whole picture of the role of the Wehrmacht in the execution of the Holocaust in Belarus. Beorn restricts the term Holocaust to “the murder of Jews by the regime” (4). Thus, contrary to the subtitle of his book, he deals only cursorily with the role played by Wehrmacht in depriving them of their civil...

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