Ostkrieg: Hitler's War of Extermination in the East

Preface

xix Preface For decades after the end of World War II, much of our understanding of the German-Soviet war came from the German perspective, for the very good reason that only German documents and archives were readily available. Equivalent Soviet sources were either unavailable, marred by ideology, or limited in their circulation because of language problems . Moreover, the various histories of the Ostfront, or eastern front, that emerged were skewed in other ways as well. Many of the earliest accounts were written by German generals who did not have access to original records but wrote from their own diaries or memories, the latter being, of course, both unreliable and easily distorted over time. In addition , German officers writing either on their own or under the auspices of the U.S. Army’s historical project rather consciously sought to create an image of the Wehrmacht as professionally competent, technically proficient , and, above all, “clean.” In this version of history, which largely confined itself to accounts of battles and military events, not only had the army suffered from Hitler’s megalomania, constant interference, and poor strategic and operational judgments, but its leaders had neither known of nor condoned the massive crimes committed against the Soviet civilian population, especially the Jews. In the narrative the generals created after the fact, the military operations and the massive crimes perpetrated by German forces on the eastern front existed in two separate and parallel spheres, with little interaction between the two. This, of course, was later shown to be a self-serving cover-up, but for a variety of reasons—not least the growing impact of the Cold War—this initial version of events stuck in the Western mind. Thus, standard narratives of the Ostkrieg, the war in the east, available in English primarily focused very narrowly on the sweep of military events and ignored the intersection of the war and Hitler’s overtly ideological, racial, and economic plans for the conquered eastern territories. Two things have combined to change this view, at least among professional historians. The first was the collapse of the Soviet Union some xx  Preface twenty years ago, which gave historians unprecedented access to formerly unavailable archival material. As a result, over the past fifteen years there have been, and continue to be, a number of excellent new accounts in English of the eastern war from the Soviet perspective, ranging from the detailed studies of David Glantz to the narrative overview of Richard Overy to the integrative analysis of Evan Mawdsley. All these have deepened and enriched our understanding of the conflict by providing the badly needed Russian context. At the same time, the massive ten-volume “semiofficial” history of the war initiated some four decades ago by the Military History Research Office of the German Bundeswehr has not only exploded the myth of the clean Wehrmacht by showing its complicity in Nazi crimes in the east but has also integrated the separate “wars” on the eastern front into the Vernichtungskrieg, or war of annihilation, originally envisioned by Hitler. This history having finally been completed , the interested English-language reader faces a dual problem: not only have the English translations lagged behind the German originals, but the entire ten volumes (some with two parts) run to well over fifteen thousand pages. In addition, other German historians, in investigating specific issues, have produced outstanding works on a variety of topics ranging from the decision for and implementation of the Holocaust to the larger Nazi plans for a racial-demographic restructuring of the east to the question of the continuing support for the Nazi regime. It is important, then, to note from the beginning what this book is not. It is not a work based on primary research; rather, it is intended as a synthesis, an integrated narrative based primarily on exhaustive research by German, British, and American historians over the past two or three decades. It is also clearly told from the German perspective, with no pretense of being a balanced account of the war. My aim is to provide a deeper understanding of the complexity and immensity of the Ostkrieg by anchoring the military events of the war within their larger ideological, racial, economic, and social context. There have been many military histories and numerous other works that have highlighted the atrocities committed on the eastern front but none that have attempted to integrate the military, ideological, and economic dimensions. Without a sense of the comprehensively murderous nature of Hitler’s...