Customer Reviews

The Wehrmacht: History, Myth, Reality

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

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.)

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.

Hello 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 and determination.
I don't want to deny the crimes, which were commited by germans during WW2. I have to make clear that I'm talking about that 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 also soldiers of the Wehrmacht, who were commiting executions on their own account or who were participating in mass-executions of the SS. It was always crucial what kind of guy the leader of a unit was, if he was a Nazi or not (the majority of the Wehrmacht-officer-corps was no nazis!). But even among the no-Nazi-Wehrmacht-soldiers were existing some brutalized men, who were considering the executions of civilians as legitimate repressions in the context of a ruthless anti-partisan-war (like it was the view of Lt. Calley and his soldiers in My Lai). And there really was a threat from at least equally brutalized partisans. 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 executions or participating in mass executions were the exception rather than the rule. It is true that Hitler was discharging no-Nazi-officers from the general staff and replacing them with people like Wilhelm Keitel, who gave criminal and unsoldierly orders during the war, but although 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's a fact that the soldiers of the Wehrmacht themself were seriously undersupplied during the first year of the russian campaign. That 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 those people were "Untermenschen" in his racist worldview ("determination through hunger", like Himmler once said). So, the Wehrmacht had 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 had to defend their fatherland 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 intentions of the war were criminal and that the Nazi-leadership was absolutely fanatic. But the Nazi-leadership did not come to power because the german people were sharing these criminal and fanatic 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 other parties and their voters was already very strong at this time. 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. Even the voters of the other anti-democratic parties, for example those who wanted to re-install the monarchy or those who wanted to establish an authoritarianism, were most of the time no nazis (although they made the big mistake to form a coalition with Hitler). You have also to consider that not even every voter of the NSDAP was a real Nazi, which means that you are a convinced anti-Semite and racist. The real followers of the Nazis were always a minority. But (especially over the course of the following years) 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 (which was the wish of many Austrians, too), 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). Without any doubt, there was anti-Semitism in Germany, but no more than in other European countries or in the USA at this time. There was a discriminatory anti-Semitism, especially within the german middle class, but, in most of the cases, without any consequently demolishing character. De facto, the german Jews were much more integrated and emancipated than the jewish population in other countries. In fact there would have been no reason for the NS-regime to commit the Holocaust in secrecy, if most of the germans would have been Nazis and demolishing anti-Semites. In fact there were no spontanous encroachments against Jews (pogroms) from the ordinary german people, even when the Jews were effectively without rights after the Nuremberg Laws. There were much more spontanous encroachments from white US-americans against the black population in the South during 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 not Jews, but germans! Of course the german Jews were german citizens too, but I mean the thousands of "Aryan" social democrats, unionists, socialists, also conservative rivals or other opponents and also the disabled persons, who were murdered during the euthanasia-program. The deportations of the Jews began later and were seen as measures of resettlement by most of the ordinary 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 were thinking that 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 NS-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 (from a SS-man with the name Kurt Gerstein!). 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 ordinary 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 the circumstances of their thinking and their actions during the Third Reich. Most of them silenced forever. That silence has been interpreted as an admission of guilt by some virtuous parts of the following generation, until today. You can compare the shock of the german war generation (and also the germans in general) 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, Röntgen, Koch, Lilienthal, Schweitzer, Messerschmitt, von Braun... and so forth. A country that did make a big contribution to the western civilization. And also a country with several extraordinary military performances in war history: For example Richthofen with 80 air combat victories in WW1, or Hartmann with 352 air combat victories in WW2 (the most succesful fighter pilot ever), to name but two air combat accounts of the many german flying aces like Mölders, Galland, Marseille and so forth. Or the legendary U-boat commanders of the german navy, like Kretschmer, Prien, Schepke, Lüth etc. Or the invention of assault troops in WW1 (a very modern way of fighting), the german commandos "Die Brandenburger" in WW2 (the first modern special forces - before the british SAS!), the brilliant tank force, the mountain troops, or the Fallschirmjäger and their legendary operations in Eben Emael and Crete, or the Blitzkrieg-strategy in general...

... but, apart from that, in the view of the world the germans are also the most evil nation in human history (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).

Reputable historians do estimate the number of criminal perpetrators during the Third Reich at about 200.000. The problem was that the Holocaust was committed as a kind of modern industrial project. Many people were involved without ever seeing the victims being killed: Employees of the Reichsbahn for example, which was transporting the victims to the concentration camps. Or many bureaucrats. Those indirect perpetrators could feel themself as being innocent of the overall result, because their role did seem to be so unimportant. Because of the industrial organization the number of the victims could be very high, although there were not very much DIRECT perpetrators. Circa 200.000 perpetrators is still a large and frightening number, but the german population at this time was about 80 million people. That would mean the perpetrators did account 0,25 percent of the german population. But it is a fact that not every perpetrator was german. You may not forget the thousands of local supporters of the Holocaust in the occupied territories. Anti-bolshevist and anti-Semitic ukrainian or lithuanian militias for example played an active key role at the crimes. The same is true for the security forces of the Vichy-regime in the occupied France. The french Vichy-police was delivering the jewish population of it's own accord. In addition to that there were volunteers for the Waffen SS (and also fpr the Wehrmacht) from all european countries, who thought they had to be part of a crusade against the Bolshevism. Many of them were faithful Christians, who were encouraged by their churchs.

More than 20 million men did serve in the german Wehrmacht. They were part of one of the most effective Armies in history, but also part of one of the most evil incidents in history. Most of them were no criminals or murderers - they were just badass SOLDIERS, who thought that they were fighting for a beautiful country (and Germany IS beautiful indeed). I'm a member of the third generation after the war. My generation is the last generation who consciously experienced the war-generation. We experienced the Ex-Wehrmacht-soldiers as our grandfathers, we saw them becoming old and frail men, we heard their shocking and/or heroic stories (if they were telling anything), we saw their head-shaking about that what happened and which they were part of - and we saw them to die after becoming care-dependent at home or in our foster facilities. Within the next years they will be history like WW2.

On YouTube is a video with the name "Die Wehrmacht - Wir Waren Soldaten". This video is not mine, it was uploaded by a guy from the Netherlands, but I like it because it is in colour and the soldiers have got faces.

There are some german politicians, intellectuals and authors, who have a problematic relationship to the military in general. Their intention is to condemn the Wehrmacht in general to be political correct, riding the Zeitgeist. Such authors were even able to call the german invasion in france an ambush and an act of aggression, like it happened a few years ago in a german magazine (the first time in human history that a country was "ambushed" by another country after declaring war to the same country). Such people are most of the time left-wing and like it to place themself above the other "ugly germans".

Greetings from an UGLY GERMAN ;-)

The book is a polemic with carefully cherry-picked facts and contradictory evidence omitted to arrive at the author's conclusion that "... only those few resistance fighters in the Wehrmacht who protested against extermination (of the Jews) in one way or another deserve our respect." (page 296)

Many conclusions are drawn from very scanty evidence, and an indictment of all 17 million men in the German Wehrmacht as criminals in the whole is certainly not scholarship. The reader is confronted with many (untrue) editorial statements presented as fact: i.e. "They (the German military leaders) had failed to grasp the significance of the fact that the countries with democratic governments had been able to defeat Germany in World War I because they were better able to motivate and mobilize their populations." (p. 2); and "Hopes for a more democratic kind (of armed forces), once espoused by no less a figure than Friedrich Engels, proved again and again to be illusory." (p. 160) indicates both that the author looks favorably on Communism and that he understands that the German private soldier possessed little freedom for dissent (in contradiction to his arguments).

The Soviet Union is presented most sympathetically, and even the massacre of 14,000 Polish officers by the Soviets in 1940 at Katyn was reduced to a mere 4,000 (obviously an editorial mistake), and noted merely in passing. That upwards of 3 million German soldiers died in Russian captivity is not mentioned. Yes, the war on the Eastern Front was waged in an especially brutal and merciless fashion, but this book adds nothing to the literature on the subject.

This book is not recommended for the serious historian, and Harvard should be ashamed of publishing this title except as a table book at the holocaust center alleging that all Germans in the Wehrmacht were bad and guilty of crimes against the Jews and humanity.

At first I thought this book would be like previous others, mainly outlining what the Wehrmacht did, which SS or Einsatzgruppen they helped in the field, etc. But I was pleasantly surprised that this book is much more than that. It takes the history of the German Armed Forces and puts it into context with the development of the Weimar Republic and then through Hitler's rise to power from 1933-1939. The reader is presented with factual information from correspondences and speeches, etc, that show the anti-semitic attitude of the higher up echelons of the Armed Forces, eventually both the OKW and OKH. Men such as Manstein might have protested at some point against the fact that Jews (including half and quarter Jews) were being thrown out of the armed forces, but that was more so due to the fact that he had a Jew in his lineage rather than the idea that this was somehow wrong. All in all I was surprised to personally learn about Ludendorff's and Hindenburg's anti-semitism and how that helped with the 'stab in the back' myth after WWI which blamed the Jews, Communists, among others. Later on the book does dive into the criminal actions that the Wehrmacht perpetrated such as helping with the massacres at Belaya Tserkova and Babi Yar outside of Kiev. After the war itself has been gone over the author delves into the subject of how the myth and legend of the Wehrmacht's 'clean hands' came about. All in all a very useful addition to WWII history and it presents even more topics that at one point or another need to be covered, something to definitely think about. Well worth the money, the book definitely includes excellent research and well drawn out conclusions based on that research.

I consider myself being a reasonably well-informed man, with good knowledge about European history and the Second World War. I have a university degree, and for a few years now I've read extensively about Hitler and his ideas and the global conflict that followed after the national socialists had risen to power. Throughout my studies I've read hundreds upon hundreds of pages discussing SS and their struggle to eliminate Jews and Judaism. That the German army, at the time known as Wehrmacht, never had such great dedication or more or less ignored this aspect of Nazi ideology was something that I took for granted. After all, this was what I'd been taught in school and learned from all the books now standing in my bookshelf.

But after having read Wolfram Wette's brilliant investigation of the history of the Wehrmacht I know must accept that I was wrong all along. And that my teachers either lied or chose not to tell the whole truth. Because what he succeeds in doing is showing how not only SS but the regular German army as well tried their best in eliminating everyone and everything that didn't fit into the Nazi worldview.

Which turns out to be a quite mindboggling realization, since my personal conviction (along with everyone else from my generation) has always been that it was "only" the SS and the most dedicated of the Nazis who found mass murder to be a necessity; something that simply had to be done. And with honor, too. But this was not the case, according to Wette, and after having read through his investigation it's very hard not to accept his ideas. It's not, however, the first time my views about the Second World War has changed drastically. It wasn't until I was in my twenties that I learned how Nazi-friendly Sweden had truly been. Neutral? I don't think so.

And so it's easy to understand the public outcry in Germany in the 1990s over the revelations about the true face of the Wehrmacht. It's not a pleasant picture painted by Wette, not pleasant at all, but it's the picture of reality, and reality very rarely makes a beautiful canvas. The book is without a doubt one of the most important ones about the Second World War I've had the pleasure of reading the last few years, and it should definitely be required reading for any course about European history.

The only reason for it not receiving the highest grade is because of the demanding, yet brilliant and impressive, academic language it's written in. Readers not accustomed to this type of book might find it to be quite a difficult read.

But hopefully people will read it nonetheless. Because it's just too important to miss.

I definitely think this book is worth purchasing. It does an overall good job of dispelling the myth of the "clean Wehrmacht". However, you should bear in mind that the author is doing a "hatchet job" on the Wehrmacht. He will present information that confirms that the Wehrmacht did murder civilains. He will then do a "they are all guitly" paragaph. After this he presents information stating how these horrible actions might be explained.

I quite vehemently disagree with his thesis that the Wehrmacht as an organization and everyone who served in it are criminals.

First as to the murder of Jews, which the author can't seem to figure out the reasons for. All christians of that era were taught about the "blood guit" of the Jews. In one of the synoptic gospils the jews say someting like "His blood by on us and all of our children" in taking about the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. If you were taught that your central religious figure that you venerated, was murdered by a cetain group of people, I really don't think you'd hesitate to punish them, even killing them.

Secondly, as the author points out orders to commit murder of civilians came from the head of the army. Failure to carry out an order would most likely result in your exceution. Personally, not being a saint, if I were a Landser I would carry the order and at least be alive for now rather than be dead.

As far as the author's once again incomprehesion of why the seinor officers of the Wehrmacht would issue these criminal orders, let's start with the idea that if you want to keep your job you'd better do what the political leadership says.

To conclude, this is about what one would expect from an academic. I really think that the good gentleman needs to come out of his ivory tower and get into the real world once in a while.

For some time now German historians have been hard at work writing the true history of the German Wehrmacht (Armed Forces) in World War Two. Almost 20 million young Germans served in the armed forces during the war and author Wolfram Wette shows that these young men were thoroughy involved in the Holocaust and the massive ethnic cleansing of the Soviet Union and Eastern Russia during the war.

This extremely extremely well written, translated and organized book shows how all this was possible. It begins with German perceptions of Russia, the Soviet Union and Bolshevism throughout their history and then proceeds to an examination of anti-Semitism in the German military. From there it was but a short and not too difficult step to large-scale Wehrmacht complicity in the murder of Jews and Slavs.

Wette also shows how the surviving officers of the Wehrmacht succeeded in creating and promulgating a myth that placed the blame for the mass murders on the SS. It was a myth the West was all too willing to accept in order to incorporate the new West Germany back into the collective defense of Europe following the war.

But in the 1990s the taboo was finally shattered as a result of an exhibit which toured thirty-three cities in Germany and Austria. The photographs and documents, which left no doubt as to the involvement of the Wehrmacht in mass genocide, touched a raw nerve among the population and opened a debate in Germany which continues to this day.

"This book is an awful indictment of soldiers who are mostly dead now," writes Wette, "but it is also a powerful statement of how Germany today acknowledges the crimes of the Wehrmacht."

Don't be fooled by the title and cover of this book: you are not buying one of the many thousands of books readily available on the market today analyzing and reanalyzing the German military, or Wehrmacht, and its World War II exploits.

This is hands-down one of the most important books to grace bookshelves since Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's "Hitler's Willing Executioners" was published in 1996 and started a brushfire in the debate on German involvement in the Holocaust.

"The Wehrmacht" contains a well organized foray into the German military's participation in the Holocaust, especially its organized mass murder of Jewish and other minority populations in eastern Europe. This is everything a normal synopsis will tell you. But the author, Professor Wolfram Wette, also puts the killings in context: he looks at the broader anti-Semitic, anti-Russian, and anti-Communist views of German society in the context of imperial and Nazi Germany. Wette goes on the destroy the myth, held in common by countless Germans and non-Germans alike, that a separation can be made, primarily within the military, between "good" and "bad" Germans.

Incredible research and passion have collaborated to bring this work into existence. Some readers may find the analysis of German sentiments towards eastern Europeans incredibly dry, and the myth of the good Wehrmacht, in essence the separation of German army from SS in popular collective memory, either obvious or completely unbelievable. An open mind and willingness to explore the endnotes for further study into facts or theories that may be too shocking to initially accept are recommended for this book. This is more than just military history.

The SS was indicted as a criminal organization responsible for genocide at Nüremburg. Less attention was paid to other services (Luftwaffe, Kriegsmarine, Wehrmacht) potentially involved in the same activities. Major defendants (Dönitz) received light sentences (10 years) based on the presumption of honorable (`clean') conduct. Geopolitical pressures in the nascent Cold War ultimately favored limited trial inquiry. The Wehrmacht's institutional honor survived, and grew into a legend of noble, heroic service innocent of crime. If anything, the myth said, the Wehrmacht was a victim of the same outlaws (Hitler, Göbbels, Himmler, etc) responsible for the war and Holocaust.

This book ends that myth. Ubiquitous service racism from WW1 is skillfully documented, as are terrorist German veteran organizations dedicated to crushing Weimar democracy to return to authoritarian rule (justified by incendiary bigotry). Hitler merely built on conditions that existed throughout many parts of society.

Wette exposes a Wehrmacht not only acquainted with criminal activity, but also a willing participant in a war of extermination (justified by racism at each level). Criminality in conquered Poland (killing the intelligentsia) grew into a demonic agenda for the destruction of whole peoples (Jews, Bolsheviks, Slavs, etc). The Wehrmacht not only knew about it, they were a willing partner and participant in the enterprise.

Highly recommended.