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34 of 45 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A Sweeping Condemnation of Crimes of the Wehrmacht, June 16, 2007
Wolfram Wette's book, "The Wehrmacht", is an attempt to take a simple question (Were all members of the Wehrmacht guilty of war crimes under international law?) and assert a simple answer (Yes. All but a dozen of the claimed 20 million members of the Wehrmacht were guilty of war crimes.).
The problem is sometimes there are no simple answers, only simple questions, as Mr. Wette uses too broad a brush to review and condemn equally the actions of each member of the Wehrmacht.
In one sense, all members of the Wehrmacht were equally responsible in that they were all engaged in wars of agression. But that does not take into account the individual actions, and responsiblities, of each member of the Wehrmacht. Nor does it take into account the fact that, beginning as early as 1935, Germany had universal conscription and most men had no choice but to serve in its armed forces in one capacity or another. Nor does it factor in that all members of the German population, including especially members of the Wehrmacht, were inundated daily with messages of hate and fear dissemininated by the first modern master of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels. Nor does it make any allowance for the fact that after the war started in 1939 it was a crime against the state to criticize Hitler or the war effort, and later it became a crime of treason, punishable by death, for anyone, including members of the Wehrmacht, to mention appeasement in any form. Nor does it even mention that direct threats against the regime were dealt with summarily, e.g., the murder of S.A. leader Ernst Roehm (who at the time led a personal army of 2-3 million men), his associates, and others on 30 June 1934 in the "Knight of the Long Knives." Nor does it mention that by 1939 the regime had the current U.S. equivalent (i.e., by proportion of the population) of 1,000,000 people held in concentration camps or in "protective custody" for political crimes. Nor does it mention that all political parties were banned by 1935. In other words, life in Hitler's Germany was not the bastion of freedom of expression and freedom of choice the author would lead you to believe.
The inherent problem with the author's conclusions is that they stem from his faulty premises: Over and again he cites an example of how one officer (or even several) believed or acted, which he supports with a citation, but presumptuously, and too generously, he goes on to apply it to each and every member of the Wehrmacht, which conclusion he does not support with any authority other than his own opinion.
The author also repeatedly misstates the facts he does cite. For example, he refers to Rommel's memoirs as a post-war attempt by him to whitewash the Wehrmacht. Unfortunately, Rommel died before the end of the war so it's a bit of a stretch to claim he wrote them after the war. He also constantly refers to an exhibition of war crimes put on by the Hamburg Institute for Social Research. But what he does not tell you is that the entire exhibition was withdrawn under claims of fraud and forgery, then put on again in a redacted, less conclusory format. In addition, he claims there was really only one attempt to assassinate Hitler, the July 20, 1944 plot, when in fact there were at least three dozen documented plans to assassinate Hiter. Further, he claims the Soviets treated German prisoners of war well, i.e., much better than the Germans, but the figure he provides for the number of German soldiers who died as Soviet prisoners of war is off by a factor of ten and does not even equal the number of German prisoners who died after surrendering at Stalingrad. I could go on.
Admittedly, the Wehrmacht's policies were racist, and the Wehrmacht participated in, and at times initiated, horrible acts. In addition, there was of course a coverup after the war by everyone who participated in such atrocities. Moreover, there was a reluctance by Germany after the war to come to grips with its past. Nonetheless, the author does not present a convincing argument why the acts of several hundred thousand, or even a million, men in either orchestrating or participating in wartime atrocities, should ipso facto condemn by association 19 million others.
While this book is useful to further discussion about the extent of the participation of the Wehrmacht in heinous acts and to what extent the blame for it should lie, it should not be viewed as the last word. That awaits a more thorough and probative examination, which may very well demonstrate that all 20 million members of the Wehrmacht are equally guilty for the crimes of any one member or group of members.
(This is an extremly well-written book, for which the translator, an historian in her own right, deserves special mention.)
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
On the origins, evolution and cover-up of the Wehrmacht's anti-Semitism, January 14, 2011
This review is from: The Wehrmacht: History, Myth, Reality (Paperback)
The English title "History, Myth, Reality" is rather misleading since this book does not cover the military history of the Wehrmacht but that of its "purported" anti-Semitism. So if you're looking for a history of for example the campaigns of the Wehrmacht, this book will disappoint you. The German title is accurate but it was poorly translated. My own translation reads "Perceptions of the Enemy, War of Annihilation, and Legends" which better reflects the organization and contents of the book.
The crimes of the Wehrmacht were already publicized some 15 years before this book (Hillgruber in 1984, Omer Bartov in 1991 in his Hitler's Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich, and the 1995 Wehrmacht exhibition "Vernichtungskrieg"). Wolfram Wette synthesizes those works but his better contribution centers on the cover-up of the Wehrmacht crimes after the war, and on the origins of, separately, anti-Semitism and anti-bolshevism, combined by the Nazis into their murderous "Judeo-Bolshevism" propaganda.
ORIGINS ("Perceptions of the Enemy"): Wette traces the origins of a more virulent anti-Semitism to the middle of WWI (the "Jewish head count" of 1916) when Germans needed a scapegoat for the economic hardships at home and the military stalemate at the front. Wette traces the origins of anti-bolshevism to the bolshevist revolution blamed for the retreat of a supposedly undefeated army which still occupied enemy territory (the "stab in the back" legend). Even before the Nazis, Ludendorff wrote that Germany must be made "judenfrei" before the next war.
EVOLUTION ("War of Annihilation"): Wette paints the canvas of exterminations conducted or at least assisted by the Wehrmacht using the examples of Serbia, Lithuania and especially the Ukraine. There some 30,000 Jews were murdered at Babi Yar in September 1941 with the assistance of the Wehrmacht.
Here, Wette's arguments are weak since he assigns the lack of Wehrmacht records to its official cover-up (rather than its innocence) supported by SS records documenting Wehrmacht participation. In other words Wette chooses which documents to trust based on the conclusion he wants to derive. The conclusion is valid (see for example the report "Bericht der Kommission zur Überprüfung der Ausstellung Vernichtungskrieg. Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941 bis 1944") but the proof is not.
COVER-UP ("Legends"): The legend of the "clean hands" Wehrmacht lasted some fifty years. It began with Doenitz's final Wehrmacht report of May 9 1945 ("In the end the Wehrmacht succumbed honorably", etc). It was consolidated by the "Generals' Memorandum", the decision of the IMT not to try the OKW/ OKH as criminal organizations, the results of the "High Command Trial", and numerous Wehrmacht officers' memoirs. By 1949, historical truth was sacrificed to the Cold War in order to win the Germans over to a North Atlantic Defense. A new West German army had to be created with veteran Wehrmacht officers which led to two exculpatory declarations in 1951 (Eisenhower and Adenauer).
In the 70s and 80s scholarly research findings contradicted the legend. A touring Wehrmacht exhibition started in 1995 and was the catalyst for a revision of the legend.
Finally, although there are copious notes on 61 pages, surprisingly and annoyingly, there is no bibliography. The reader has to write its own from the sources used in the notes.
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2.0 out of 5 stars
The ugly german Wehrmacht?, December 9, 2011
This review is from: The Wehrmacht: History, Myth, Reality (Paperback)
Hallo FROM GERMANY. Wette's simple conclusion in this book is: Most of the Wehrmacht-soldiers were guilty, because they were all participating in a criminal war of aggression.
I don't want to deny the awful and absolute inhuman crimes, which were commited by germans during WW2 (even if there were a lot of crimes, which were commited by other nations with more victims: 20 million deaths under Stalin, 45 million deaths under Mao and so forth). I have to make clear that I'm talking about the kind of crimes, which had to do with the national socialist ideology. I'm not talking about "normal" war crimes, which will be committed by every army in every war all over the world (taking into account that only the victors are able to investigate and to condemn these crimes). It is wrong to mix both things. I don't want to deny that the Wehrmacht indeed was playing a role in crimes, which had to do with the national socialist ideology. But this role was far away from being a central role. A few units of the Wehrmacht were sometimes supporting the SS-Einsatzgruppen with weapons, ammunition and other logistics, which was needed to conduct mass-executions. There were soldiers of the Wehrmacht, who were commiting executions on their own account or were participating in mass-executions of the SS. It was crucial what kind of guy the leader of the Wehrmacht-unit was, if he was a Nazi or not (the majority of the german officer corps were no nazis!). There were also some brutalized soldiers of the Wehrmacht, who were considering the executions of innocent civilians as legitimate repressions within the ruthless anti-partisan-war (like it was the view of Lt. Calley and his soldiers in My Lai). At this point did exist an overlap of interests between some Wehrmacht soldiers and the SS-Einsatzgruppen. But such cases of Wehrmacht-soldiers commiting mass murders or participating in mass murders were the exception rather than the rule. Even if Hitler was discharging non-Nazi officers from the general staff and replacing them with people like Wilhelm Keitel, who gave criminal orders during the war, you can't declare the overall organization of the Wehrmacht as a criminal organization. Here are just a few facts about the Wehrmacht, which are a little bit contrary to Wette's the-whole-Wehrmacht-was-evil-thesis:
1. The "Commissar Order" (the order to shoot every captured communist commissar of the soviet army) was taken back by Hitler because of the fact that in many cases the order was either ignored or even severely criticized by officers of the Wehrmacht.
2. The death of soviet POWs did happen under the legal responsibility of the Wehrmacht, BUT it is a fact that the soldiers of the Wehrmacht themself were seriously undersupplied during the first year of the russian campaign. This undersupply was part of Hitlers plan to "motivate" his troops to be in Moscow quickly before the winter. That's why the german soldiers were not getting any winter clothes in 1941, even when it grew terribly cold. The supply with food was insufficient too. Hitler wanted to force the soldiers to loot the civil population in the occupied territories, because these people were "Untermenschen" in his racist worldview ("determination through hunger", like Himmler once said). So, there were very little resources to supply the masses of russian POWs during the first months of the campaign.
3. Several officers of the Wehrmacht (Rommel is just one example) rigorously did ignore criminal orders, which could be considered as being unsoldierly.
4. The most dangerous resitance against Hitler came from officers of the Wehrmacht ("Operation Valkyrie" was not the only attempt by Wehrmacht-officers to kill Hitler and to make a coup d'etat). By the way: Not every campaign of the Wehrmacht was an aggression. It is true that Hitler was planning to invade Russia since his early years, but it is also true, that France and Great Britain were declaring war to Germany and that Stalin's (and already Lenin's) Bolsheviks were threatening Germany (the next objective of the Comintern after the October Revolution in 1917 was Germany). It is also a fact that Stalin was prosecuting a very aggressive policy too (in Finland and also in Poland) and that he had a lot of combat-ready troops operating close behind the border. That's why some historians do define the german invasion in Russia as a preventative-strike (I think that isn't correct, but if you define the Iraq War in 2003 as an US-preventative-strike, like it even the UN later did, then the invasion of Russia in 1941 was it more than ever). Most of the Wehrmacht-soldiers were not feeling themself as being aggressors. In no way. They were really believing that they were defending their home against a bolshevist threat, at threat to all Europe, which was unfortunately not recognized by the western allies, so that they were declaring war to germany and germany had to fight a hopeless two-front war. That was the general view, influenced and heated-up by the NS-propaganda. There is no question about the fact that the national socialist intention of the war was criminal and that the Nazi-leadership was absolutely insane. But the Nazi-leadership did not come to power because the german people were sharing these criminal intentions. The Nazis were able to destroy the german democracy of Weimar and able to install a totalitarian dictatorship in Germany for very special and different reasons, but not because most of the germans were Nazis. At the last free elections in 1932 the NSDAP received only 37 percent of the votes, although the political terror of the SS and the SA against the democratic parties and their voters was already very strong. Figured up, the democratic parties, who were loyal to the Republic of Weimar, received a higher percentage of the votes than the anti-democratic NSDAP. And you have to consider that not every voter of the NSDAP was a anti-Semite or a racist. The real followers of the Nazis were always a minority. Later, there were many germans who were no real Nazis, but who were impressed with the economic upturn, the decreasing number of unemployed, the building of the Autobahn, the nonviolent recapture of the Rhineland, the nonviolent foreclosure of the unfair Treaty of Versailles, the nonviolent Anschluss of Austria, the nonviolent occupation of the Sudetenland, and (in 1940) the unbelieveable quick victory over the archenemy France. Most of the germans never applauded to Hitler for being anti-Semitic or for being a racist. In fact anti-Semitism and racism were parts of Hitler's speeches just very rarely, pretty much never during the 1930s (in his early years Hitler quickly understood that he would be more succesful in Germany with other topics: see above). In fact there would have been no reason to commit the Holocaust in secrecy if most of the germans would have been Nazis and anti-Semites. In fact there were no spontanous encroachments against Jews (pogroms) from the normal german people, even when the Jews were effectively without rights after the Nuremberg Laws. There were much more spontanous encroachments from white americans against the black population in the South, namely until the 1960s. The violence against the Jews was almost invariably commited by organisations of the NS-state. And in fact the first victims of the NS-state were germans! Of course the german Jews were germans too, but I mean the thousands of social democrats, unionists, socialists, also conservative rivals or other opponents and also the disabled people, who were murdered during the euthanasia-program. The deportations of the jewish people, which began later, were seen as measures of resettlement by most of the normal german people. Such kind of measures were not unusual during a war at this time. Even the government of the United States were detaining a lot of japanese US-citizens after Pearl Harbor, without any legal basis. In Germany even the Jews themself thought they would be resettled and that's it. Because of that fallacy they never made a stand against the measures. It was very difficult to see through that what was really going on. Most of the people couldn't realize the general view before 1945/46. Don't forget that the press was completely under the control of the Nazi regime. Even the democratic foreign countries with their free press needed a long time to figure out the whole dimensions of the crimes. The Vatican got a message about the killing of the jews and other people. What did the Vatican to stop it? What did the allies to stop the Holocaust, when they realized what was going on? No single one bomb was dropped on the track to Auschwitz, but millions of bombs on german civilians. Did have the normal german population more power than the Vatican or the western allies? After 1945, when those germans who were no perpetrators, realized what had been done in their names, they suffered a shock. Likewise most of the Wehrmacht-soldiers, when they recognized what they had fought for. They suffered a shock from which they didn't recover completely until today. They were often unable to explain their childs or grandchilds what had happened. Most of them silenced forever. This silence has been interpreted as an admission of guilt by parts of the following generation, until today. But the surviving jews were keeping silence too (even if they were suffering from another kind of shock, which was much worse). You can compare the german shock a little bit with the Vietnam-trauma. Being a german will never be a normal thing, because Germany will never be considered as a normal country. In the view of the world the germans are good (or even the best) at this and this and this (philosophy, poetry, economy, science, engineering, cars, sports etc.). Germany is the country of Gutenberg, Kopernikus, Luther, Kant, Goethe, Schiller, Humboldt, Beethoven, Marx, Nietzsche, Diesel, Daimler,...
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