The German Army and Genocide: Crimes Against War Prisoners, Jews, and Other Civilians in the East, 1939-1944 [Paperback]

Hamburg Institute for Social Research (Compiler), Hamburg Institute (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 1999

An astonishing visual expos of the German Army's crimes in World War II. For the better part of fifty years, the powerful German army of World War II has been seen as an organization of consummate skill and honor, one that had little in common with the criminal policies and ideology of the Nazi regime. Fascinating and unforgettable, The German Army and Genocide explodes that myth. Through newly discovered documents and hundreds of astonishing photographs culled from archives all across Europe, The German Army and Genocide reveals that the nearly twenty million soldiers who passed through the feared Wehrmacht (the German army) were subjected to a massive ideological indoctrination, and that many were involved in widespread crimes against civilians and prisoners of war, acting both on orders by their superiors and--in many instances--on their own initiative. Based on a three-year German exhibit that sparked riots and heated controversy throughout the country, The German Army and Genocide features harrowing photographs taken by the soldiers themselves (often gleeful) of massacres, hangings, and torture; official army documents directing military units to murder Jewish communities; private letters written home, such as one from a young soldier who boasts that his unit had killed 1,000 Jews, adding, "and that was not enough"; and military directives that definitively prove close collaboration between the SS and the regular army throughout the war.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Devastating. -- Neal Ascherson, author of Black Sea

German soldiers, it turns out, were engaged in a war against civilians and prisoners of war. -- Martin Jay, author of About the American Exhibition

Shocking.... The honorable German soldier coerced and corrupted by the Nazis has become one of the century's most powerful icons, an Everyman for an age mired in moral ambivalence.... The German Army and the Holocaust completely shatters that image. -- The Guardian

About the Author

Omer Bartov is a professor of history at Rutgers University. Scott Abbott teaches in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages at Brigham Young University.

Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: New Press, The (December 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1565845250
• ISBN-13: 978-1565845251
• Product Dimensions: 10.9 x 9.1 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #761,765 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #45 in Books > History > Europe > Serbia

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

36 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Wehrmacht Complicity in Eastern Front Genocide & War Crimes, April 1, 2000

By 

Ralph Michael Stein (New York, NY) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The German Army and Genocide: Crimes Against War Prisoners, Jews, and Other Civilians in the East, 1939-1944 (Paperback)

Through declassification of wartime documents and research into archives newly made available after the dismemberment of the Soviet bloc, far more detailed analysis of German war crimes and genocide is possible, indeed is necessary. Most studies of mobile extermination squads, the Einsatzgruppen, and the death camps emphasize the principal role of various branches of the SS in mass murder. Studies of the war on the Eastern Front have tended to focus on the herculean battles waged and the stratregy and tactics employed from the inception of Operation Barbarossa in June 1941 to the 1945 fall of Berlin to the Red Army.

Generally, the German Army, the Wehrmacht, has escaped censure for the Holocaust in its earliest improvisational form and its later administratively controlled manifestation (the German Army wins no plaudits for treating Red Army prisoners according to the Geneva Convention but this seems to have greatly bothered relatively few Western historians).

This book explodes the myth that the German Army was not complicit in wholesale murder of Jews, Gypsies and anyone else targeted by the Nazi state. Comprised of very many damning photographs from a controversial exhibit in Germany and supplmented by an expert historian's analysis, "The German Army and Genocide" is not the last word on the subject but it will spur new research and force needed reappraisal of the conventional wisdom.

The controversy over the exhibit, and this book, is not over. Presentation of the exhibit in New York City has been delayed because of claims about the authenticitiy of some of the photographs and the accompanying legends. Nonetheless an increasing coterie of Holocaust and World War II scholars are finding ample evidence that the Wehrmacht not only aided the SS and the many reserve police battalions engaged in rounding up Jews and others for murder, its top field commanders knew full well what they were enabling and, in some cases, were enthusiastic albeit not very loud supporters.

The photos in this book are not easy to view. With their penchant for documentation, the Wehrmacht captured the sometimes agonised, occasionally amazed expressions of their victims just before they were murdered. This is, however, a chronicle that should be viewed by all interested in the reality of the Final Solution and the barbarity of the German onslaught into the East.

28 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Shocking Portfolio of Evil Incarnate In the Wehrmacht!, June 17, 2000

By 

Barron Laycock "Labradorman" (Temple, New Hampshire United States) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The German Army and Genocide: Crimes Against War Prisoners, Jews, and Other Civilians in the East, 1939-1944 (Paperback)

No one who views this book can any longer doubt the complicity and cooperation of the general German armed forces, or Wehrmacht, in the murderous acts of Germany's ignominious Third Reich. Literally hundreds of graphic and horrific photographs show average German soldiers shooting, hanging, bludgeoning, or otherwise mistreating, torturing, and murdering helpless civilian men, women and children during operations on the eastern front. This is a grim but necessary book.

Most surprising is the fact that the photographs were originally part of a German exhibition held in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the end of World War Two, and constitute a damning condemnation of the role of the average German soldier (as opposed to other specialized Waffen SS or Einsatzgruppe SS units) in visiting the whole panoply of horrors of egregious war crimes on the native populations of the subjugated countries during Operation Barbarossa. These were not crimes committed against opposing military forces, but were rather crimes committed against war prisoners, Jews, and other civilian segments of the subjugated regions.

This is, by its very nature, not an easy or pleasant book to view or read. One does so reluctantly and only in an effort to learn more about the demons that ultimately threaten each of us, as we face personal responsibility for all of our acts as individuals. The conclusion one reaches after viewing these photographs and reading the accompanying text is humbling, shocking, and intensely relevant, even though some fifty years have passed. With similar shocking events composing the headlines and bylines of contemporary news casts, the most shocking thing one realizes is that the world evidently has not yet learned from its past, as events in Bosnia, Rwanda, Kosovo, and Somalia make perfectly clear. Human life is still held in little regard, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned in the blood and hate of ethnic, tribal, or national pedigrees.

One problem with the book is that many of the photographs are small and difficult to appreciate in their full impact without a magnifying device. This, however, is a small quibble with a brave, terrible, and significant book such as this one. This is a book we should share with all those cynics who doubt that the Holocaust happened. Perhaps they can explain the hundreds of photos of ordinary German soldiers committing mayhem and murder in some clever fashion. Of course, the debate over what happened is not over. But this book and the documentation it constitutes makes understanding of the Holocaust and how it happened more possible.

12 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Pure Apologetic Trash and Historical Rubish., March 28, 2007

By 

Nachtjager (Baton Rouge, LA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The German Army and Genocide: Crimes Against War Prisoners, Jews, and Other Civilians in the East, 1939-1944 (Paperback)

Once again, German intellectuals have gone the extra mile to make themselves feel guilty about WWII. If you want a book which will assault your common sense and your vision more than any other book dealing with the Holocaust or war crimes, this is it. Herr Wagner has it right, most of the incidents portrayed in this book are photos of barbarism committed by the Russians, NOT the Germans, and are scenes the Germans came upon as they moved east. This has been proven, and most of these photos are taken from former Soviet archives.

Here are just a few of the glaring problems that bother me about this book. One series of photos spread across three pages is captioned as being some 1,800 Jews rounded up in a Russian village prior to being shot. Yet, these people are very well clothed, in many cases carrying bags, some seem downright cheerful, and most interestingly, there are only four German soldiers to be seen in any of the photos, and only one of those four has a weapon - a pistol holster on his hip. These four guys shot 1,800 Jews with one pistol?

Another photo series across two pages shows "Russian soldiers in Civilian Clothes being led away to be executed" and aludes to the point that these are not Russian soldiers at all, but innocent villagers. The problem here is, the men ARE wearing Russian uniforms! Three of them are wearing Russian officer's uniforms for pity's sake! It's now a war crime to lead POWs away at gunpoint?

There are a large number of photos of German soldiers just standing around, interacting with seemingly unbothered civilians, and in one case, HEAVEN FORBID, a German soldier is shown carrying "stolen" chickens! NO JOKE!

There are photos of partisan hangings and shootings, which no one would deny took place. There are also reprisal shootings shown in this book which are most certainly legitimate. One of the most graphic of these photo spreads shows Hungarian troops shooting a dozen partisans, however, not German soldiers. A number of the lynching photos are shown multiple times from different angles to give the impression of multiple events. I find it amazing how many innocent villagers who were lynched for no good reason happen to be wearing riding breeches and jack boots in these photos (Commisars perhaps?).

I collect WWII vintage photos, and I have many photos of German POWs under guard by American and British soldiers. I have some showing German POWs and even former Hitler Youth boys (still in HJ uniforms) digging trenches while US GI's stand over them with rifles and Thompson machine guns. If I used the logic of this particular book, I would caption these photos, "German soldiers being forced to dig their own graves before being shot." I have no idea what these guys are digging trenches for and I don't think anybody shot them. The same can be said for most photos in this book. Just because there's a photo of a Russian digging a ditch, often times photographed without a German anywhere in the picture, that doesn't mean he's digging his own grave! Give it a rest!

Then there's the problem of using the exact same photos several times in this book and captioning them as seperate incidents. One photo showing two partisans being lynched is captioned early in the book as having occured in 1941, and the exact same photo appears some fifty pages later, in a smaller format, and is captioned to be a reprisal hanging in the winter of 1944 and was "a photo found on a dead German soldier."

In short, yes, crimes were committed by the German army. Crimes are committed by every army in time of war. This book is an concerted effort to create a negative image on the Wehrmacht using very sketchy evidence and inventing facts which simply did not occur. This is a book with absolutely no credibility. If you can get this one on sale for a few bucks, it's worth it just to see how outrageous it is. As a historical record of "war crimes" or "genocide", this is a work of pure fantasy and all you have to do is look at the photos and believe your eyes to realize this.