Hitler's Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich

by Omer Bartov

Harvard University Junior Fellow Omer Bartov delivers a detailed account of how Nazism penetrated the German Army during World War II. Bartov focuses on the barbaric struggle between Germany and the Soviet Union--where the vast majority of German troops fought--to show how the savagery of war reshaped the army into Hitler's image.

Genres: History, World War II, Military History, Nonfiction, Germany, Holocaust, War

256 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 1991

About the author

Omer Bartov is an Israeli-born historian. He is the Samuel Pisar Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University, where he has taught since 2000. Bartov is a noted historian of the Holocaust and is considered one of the world's leading authorities on the subject of genocide.

Reviews

[Katherine Addison · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is obviously influenced by the Historikerstreit (as Dr. Bartov is the first to point out), as it is in large part a refutation of the German-soldiers-as-Hitler's-noble-and-innocent-victims thesis, that thesis being what started the argument in the first place. Bartov disproves this thesis with primary source evidence, particularly the letters of the soldiers on the Eastern front, and his evidence is horribly convincing. Bartov also offers something I have been longing for without knowing it, a nuanced non-binary model of the relationship between the individual and an ideology. He's modifying the "primary group" theory of military success:

[...] some insight into the relationship between the people and the regime may be derived from the notion that while real "primary groups" do not fully explain combat motivation due to their unfortunate tendency to disintegrate just when they are most needed, the idea of attachment to an ideal "primary group," composed of a certain category of human beings, clearly does have a powerful integrating potential. This kind of "primary group," however, is in some respects the precise opposite of the one presented in the original theory, for it is very much the product not merely of social ties, but of ideological internalization, whereby humanity is divided into opposing groups of "us" and "them." Indeed, the sense of identification with one group, and the abhorrence of the other, are in both cases dependent on an abstraction; personal familiarity may only weaken the individual's commitment by revealing the less than ideal aspects of his own side, and the human face of his opponents (which is why armies dislike fraternization). This kind of categorization is of course just as applicable to civilians, and in both cases does not necessitate any profound understanding of whatever world-view one believes oneself to be fighting or working for. Instead, it calls for internalizing only those aspects of the regime's ideology based on previously prevalent prejudices, and most needed to legitimize one's sufferings, elevate one's own status, and denigrate one's enemies, be they real or imaginary.
(Bartov 6)

This formulation dovetails nicely with Ian Kershaw's work on the "Hitler myth," for Bartov shows that fanatical devotion to the Führer was one of the pieces of the Nazi world-view most readily internalized by soldiers on the Eastern front, just as Kershaw showed its operations in the civilian populace. They didn't have to understand what Hitler wanted in order to unite in worship of him.

Bartov also shows the soldiers' belief in their own innate and immense superiority as Germans, and their belief that--as Hitler told them--the Jews had started the war; that if Germany hadn't attacked Russia, Russia would have attacked Germany; that the terrible slaughter of Jews and "commissars" and "partisans" was necessary and deserved; and that Germany was, in fact, heroically defending THE ENTIRE WORLD from the Judeo-Bolshevik menace which would otherwise destroy them all. The polar reversal characteristic of the Nazi worldview was in full operation on the Eastern front.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Damning work of scholarship on the German Army's psychological state in World War 2. The author shows how the German Army (not just the notorious SS units) was molded by Hitler's vision, and that the average soldier's faith in their leader enabled them to fight on when defeat was inevitable. This is one of the first books to re-examine the established picture of the German soldier as an apolitical warrior, painted by ex-German generals and cold warriors who wanted the Germans on their side during the post-war struggle with the Soviet Union. Rather, after the defeats and brutality the army experienced in the invasion of Russia, propaganda and its twisting of reality motivated the German Army to continue fighting. This is one of the starting points of the new scholarship about the conduct of the German Army in World War 2 and you can see the author's influence in many recent works.

[Sean Chick · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book shattered my perception of World War II. I grew up with the idea of the German army as victim, as an organization that unwittingly served an evil cause and was destroyed in the process. Bartov destroyed that illusion, pointing towards an army that, given heavy losses in 1941 and infrequent purges by Hitler, became a willing tool of Nazism by war's end. Of course more could be said and has been said since this book came out. As for myself, in the last 20 years I have become an adherent to the Fritz Fischer thesis of German history and foreign policy.

[Benjamin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Very weak from a historical point of view, filled with the author subjective opinions, coloured by the fact that he is an israeli jew. Terms like barbarism, demonization, and similar are threw around.

So instead of an in depth and impartial analysis of the Wehrmacht, what we have is a backwards narrative to why things happened the way they did. Any sane person know that history is written by the victorious, and that such moral and ethical judgements are subjective.

[C. B. · Rating 4 out of 5]

A tremendous study. Military history at its finest, examining the psychological and ideological aspects of warfare. After Bartov, nobody can confidently argue that the Wehrmacht was free of blame in the atrocities of the war (I was rather astounded to discover that anyone believed this in the first place).

[Bobby Petricini · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great look into how the army on the Eastern front remained loyal to Hitler even while staring defeat in the face.

[Lion]

Not sure why I got this. I suppose I like tank talk. It might have shown up in a search relating to something else. So far it seems reasonable. It's a mainstream narrative, of course.

Operation Barbarossa never actually went well. Running ahead with the tanks worked on the western front, but when they tried it in the east, they got swallowed by the scale of the land and the enemy. The Wehrmacht didn't really have a general high level of armament. A few motorized showcase divisions had received most of the funding, but that came at the expense of the vast majority of divisions, which were decidedly antique and had to walk in on foot. In the soviet union there was no english channel to pin the enemy against, so it was like punching water. The infantry couldn't keep up and the entire strategy failed. Also the French were more civilized and surrendered when it made sense, the soviets did not.
Mainstream history always presents early Barbarossa months as going well for the axis with there being some point where luck turned around. But even in the early days, while they were winning the engagements, losses were so high that everyone could tell that they were bleeding themselves dry before they could get the job done.
Even the initial personnel losses they never really replaced. The army shrank from 3.5 to 2.7 million men. When good officers were killed, they did not have any new ones. When it turned winter and their quick campaign had failed, they had a situation they hadn't planned for. The only thing they could do was to leave worn out formerly mobile divisions, whose tanks had been destroyed, stuck in trench warfare. Conditions on the front became unbelievably wretched. Dig yourself into the mud in some swamp without having building materials or winter clothing at 40 C below zero, while constantly being bombed and shot at. The army demodernized, both in the sense of destruction of machinery, living conditions and morality.

Many units were ground down to fractions of their initial strength. Divisions became battalions, companies became squads. Some divisions had losses that amounted to a three times removal and replacement of the entire personnel. Losses were too high for much familiarity to be maintained among constantly chaining faces, so Bartov disagrees that the practice of sending soldiers to familiar units, as opposed to the organizationally easier practice of just sending them anywhere, explains their fighting spirit.

The hopeless situation increased military discipline and ruthless punishments for infractions. Soldiers were squeezed between the brutality of the enemy and the punishments by their superiors. They became incredibly brutalized, hopeless and despondent. Bartov says this is what caused them to act out against the civilian population in occupied areas. It was a cycle of brutality, where everything degenerated into a state of uncivilization.

Bartov weaves a page-turning narrative. The content is a bit dark, definitely not a mood lifter, but I'm beginning to grasp what went wrong back then. This in a sense explains how humanity functions. I'm glad I stumbled across it.

Europe was starving (due to the british blockade), so the the army had to feed itself off the land. That might sound like a good idea in theory, but requisitions turned the population against the occupiers. Soon they had a partisan war on their hands. That led to reprisals, which in turn incentivized more people to become partisans. After the soviet scorched earth policy, food production in occupied areas was at best half of pre-invasion levels. Later the Germans reversed the policy of ruthless exploitation and invested into rebuilding occupied farming areas to get more production, just in time to have to scorch them in retreat again.

The war was really harsh on the local population. They were repeatedly brutalized by one armies scorched earth retreat, then used as a supply base for the other. As winter approached, the european food situation became ever more dire. Faced with a war that they had planned on having won by now, they had not set up the logistics of supplying continued warfare. Ever more cruel requisitions of the local population took place by hungry soldiers, which destroyed the productive capacity of the area and turned the population against the occupiers. Bartov claims that people were forced to work and those who could not work were driven out into the icy wilderness. If one considers the hopeless situation the axis army was faced with, it is difficult to say at what point decisions could have been made differently in order to avoid this cycle of things turning more and more nasty, when admitting that such a brutal enemy had massively overarmed to invade them, and a preventive strike was necessary but not winnable.

Bartov goes on to conclude that only the axis were baddies and claims of atrocities by soviets were made up as an "inversion" to rationalize their own crimes. In that sense this and Hoffmanns book, which I happened to read just before, are compliments of each other. Eeach reports only the guilt of one side and dismissing that of the other as a reaction. Here Hoffmanns narrative seems more convincing, because the population further away from the industrial revolution would have been less modernized and hence more barbaric. Civilization decreased as you moved away from the warm glow of modernity, and it tended to be the eastern neighbor who was more warlike. (As exemplified by the surrendering french above.) The soviet union used to be evil before the war and kept being evil after the war, whereas the Germans returned to civil society outside of wartime. Now they are often the poster child of democratic socialist governance and environmentalist policy. It seems implausible that they were the ones from which this bad behavior originated.
The red army was supposedly more successful at preventing 'unauthorized' violence against civilians. That is only accurate in the sense that their atrocities were the official policy of the soviet government and hence not a breach of rules. As such there would be no paper trail of court martials to detect, as in the German case.
Rationalizing the atrocities of the more evil regime as "just a reaction" is an odd perspective in the light of the many soviet atrocities we know about, for instance the rape of two million women, the deliberate starvation of Ukrainians (holodomor) and Stalins random terror to get the population to subject to being enslaved in tank factories. The soviets kept doing officially sanctioned Mengele-style medical experiments on alive humans well into the 50's. Those are your "good guys" who just "reacted"? Sounds like an american who tries to rationalize his sides historic choices.

Bartov cites a lot of letters from German soldiers that describe the eastern population as filthy and demented, and presents this as evidence that they would have had disregard for their lives. But when accounting for the language of their time (they conceived of every human trait as a consequence of ethnicity, similar to what you hear from contemporary proponents of critical race theory), such an impression makes sense considering that the eastern population was enslaved in Stalins factories to produce all those tanks that somehow magically appeared at the front without any historian being interested in why they had such immense armaments production. The population were made to live like animals, badly clothed and fed to put all available resources into weapons production, and it would have made sense that they seemed filthy to someone from a non-communist country, which still had civilian production. The people were pretty much starving by the time the Germans arrived, which made it a lot harder to keep them alive once they were captured. They also hadn't planned on having to house and feed that many soldiers, because they didn't know the soviet union had that many soldiers.

I read about a third of it, until he makes it too much of a winners narrative. Bartov mentions that many German soldiers were young and indoctrinated (the same segment of society that delivers the most convinced climate hysterics today), and even wonders what their Hitler Youth indoctrination caused them to be later in life. Luckily we lived through that history, so we do have an answer: people born in Germany in those years, i.e. people in their forties in the 1960's were hippies and environmentalists.

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m old enough to remember when the “good Wehrmacht” myth still played with people who should know better. It was a Cold War myth, originally, a way to save face while rearming West Germany, but it got mixed up with all kinds of other ideas about war, memory, etc., that seem to make less and less sense the further we get from it. I imagine some chuds out there still hold to the myth, but you gotta figure they hold the harder the more we understand what the Wehrmacht actually was, both because they like to trigger libs (i.e. anyone who knows anything) and because they like what the Wehrmacht actually did, and pretending it was noble is a good way to have your cake and eat it too.

Because it’s pretty clear, now: the Wehrmacht was, as Omer Bartov put it, “Hitler’s army.” Bartov, an Israeli historian who’s currently at Brown, emerged from a variety of tedious fights in the history of the Third Reich — the debate of “intentionalism” (it was all Hitler’s idea) versus “structuralism” (it was all them reacting to/interacting with structures), the “Historikerstreit” where Nazi apologists like Ernst Nolte burnt their fingers by saying the quiet parts loud — waving a simple, undeniable thesis, backed by archival research and affirmed by where more abstract theorizing was going. Namely, if you hate your boss so much, you usually don’t fight the biggest war in human history and kill tens of millions of people when he tells you to, like the Wehrmacht did in Eastern Europe. The war against the Soviet Union was understood as something other than a normal war, even the wars the Nazis unleashed to swallow up countries like France. It was an ideological and racial crusade, extreme violence — even by the standards of an epoch of bloody wars — was always a part of it, and the Wehrmacht embraced it from the beginning.

There’s a lot of historiographical hedging here — Bartov beats the shit out of rival theories of what kept the Wehrmacht together, most of them obvious Cold War snowjobs, at somewhat tedious length — and the meat of the book comes towards the end. This is where you get the letters and the diaries, and the exposition of the totalizing world that the Nazis made in the killing zone in the East. By 1941, most of the men going into the Wehrmacht had lived under the Nazi regime most of their lives. Many of them had been through the Hitler Youth and they all mainlined propaganda. Above and beyond the specific politics, this propaganda insisted that fighting, suffering, obeying, and above all, killing, is what will make the Reich. In many respects, what Nazism aimed at was creating a sphere where that would be a reality, and they only came close in the East. However bad they were to the French or whoever, whatever they had in mind for the Atlantic powers once they got grips on them (rather unlikely), it was the East where the action was.

Probably the most compelling part to me was Bartov’s explications of a peculiar mental operation that a lot of German soldiers did. You can see this operation attested to over and over again in the literature, and you see other conquerors do it too- British, Americans, I don’t want to say it’s universal but it’s common. And that operation is, treating the human condition that these soldiers see as a result of their army’s actions as an indictment on the people they are conquering, and a justification for further violence.

Germans saw inhabitants of the Soviet Union after said inhabitants were subjected to extreme violence. The Soviets they encountered were scared, hungry, hurt, bewildered, dirty, and often far from home. People in that position don’t usually look or act their best. And it seems that more or less the official position of the Germans out there, as revealed in letters home as well as in official orders and dispatches, is that’s just how Slavs, Jews, Roma, etc. are. They don’t even really bother to say “well, we Germans wouldn’t be like that if we got invaded.” They didn’t seem to need that extra mental armature. They saw hungry, ragged wretches, who they had done most of the work to make wretched, and decided that what they saw meant that the people they were conquering were just wretches who deserve what they get (you’d figure the next step would then be “why are we bothering with them” but nobody seems to have gotten there, either, in any meaningful sense). We know what the consequences of that kind of dehumanization look like.

I’m used to stupidity and to cruelty, but that kind of motivated, but seemingly not quite intentional, divorce between cause and effect… That, I don’t really understand. I think it might be important to understand but ultimately not something you can think your way into. This mental habit was in no way confined to Germans between 1941 and 1945. I had to read “American Sniper” for a project a few years back, and that was Chris Kyle’s basic impression of Iraqis. That’s the logic behind the “shithole countries” remark. That’s how the British saw Indians, Africans, and often enough the Irish. That’s how a lot of American cops look at black, brown, and poor people.

It does seem that “official” first world culture encourages that little voice that says “they’re still people/how do you think they got so wretched, dummy?” And it seems that first world fascists can be reasonably defined as the kids who are mad that that voice got installed in their heads and want to kill it, and kill it in everyone else, joined sometimes by those who lack it entirely and are mad that people say they should have it. And, no, “leftists aren’t just as bad.” A lot of the worst leftists atrocities took place precisely when leftists didn’t do the thing they’re supposed to do, and think seriously about the lives of those in front of them. And it just doesn’t happen as often, or as severely, as crimes motivated by this sort of master-wretch dichotomy that seemingly defines the mental landscape of a lot of people in positions of relative power.

This attitude has to be institutional to get the sort of effect you saw on the eastern front, not just “bad apples” or just the SS. Ultimately, it was the logic behind the whole war. It’s one of, maybe the main, or the only, non-logic behind the concept of race in general. It defined the goals of the war in the east and its conduct. It’s why the Germans couldn’t try to move slow, couldn’t try to meaningfully ally with minority nationalities in the USSR or just Russians who hated Stalin and communism, even as, in many cases, such people greeted the Nazis, went to great lengths to join them. All that dried up pretty soon after the initial invasion, with the way the Germans treated the entire population of the USSR. Assholes like Bandera stuck with it out of a mixture of ideological fanaticism and the knowledge that there was no going back. The SS did some of their major killing actions because the Wehrmacht asked them to, after general Nazi policy so badly alienated the (previously grievously oppressed!) people of the USSR that they were willing to risk the worst retribution possible to strike back.

They were all in it together. The attempt on Hitler’s life by a small clique of Wehrmacht officers was a poorly-organized, half-hearted attempt for a few of them to save their own skins, get the Anglos on side to stop the Soviets from coming for them. The Soviets took terrible vengeance on Germany, but you’ll notice Germany still exists, which is more than would have happened to Russia or anywhere else east of Prussia had the Nazis won. Maybe because the logic of dehumanization was so prevalent in the power centers of the world no one really knew what to make of it when they saw what it all led to. Then the Cold War came along, so official historians and social scientists had a new script, and a new motivation to explain away what we saw, to redeem the Wehrmacht and so on. Well. Pretty much anyone who takes history seriously anymore gets that that’s bullshit, in no small part to Omer Bartov here, but who’s to say whether we’ve closed the barn door after the horse got out? ****’

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Extremely well written, informative, and important in WWII/Nazi Germany studies. It provides some psychoanalytical analysis on the behavior and actions of the soldiers and takes a look at military strategy and training, the bond formed between soldiers, and government propaganda and the effect it has on perceptions of reality. A tough and interesting read.

[Clarke Wood · Rating 5 out of 5]

For many years, histories of the German Army in World War 2 maintained that it was largely apolitical, and performed well in battle due to its fostering of primary groups. This book really destroys this point of view. The reality was that National Socialism thinking and its philosophy
and world view permeated the institution at all levels, and many German soldiers were true believers who kept faith with Hitler long after a lot of the civilian population had lost hope.

The primary group theory of effectiveness has been popular in miltary history for a while, but Bartov points out that in light of the massive and ongoing casualties on the Eastern Front, any primary groups formed usually would not last very long. Units often had a new commander every week, and 100% turnover over a few months due to attrition was not unusual.

The book also at length discusses how the Wehrmacht also adopted a perverse system of military justice, where harsh punishments were meted out for failing to perform in combat, but criminal conduct towards civilians and soldiers was tolerated and even encouraged. While there has been considerable work on the deplorable behavior of Russian troops in Germany in 1945, the author points out that German soldiers in the east behaved worse as a matter of routine. Crimes against POWs or civilians were simply not punished, and there were often orders that soldiers should increase levels of violence towards the civilian population. Anti-partisan operations usually involved high body counts but few German casualties or weapons recovered. German forces in Russia were supposed to live off the land, and this invariably involved widespread looting of foodstuffs, clothing, livestock, and shelter from the civilian population. Official reports mention how entire regions are emptied of provisions, and civilians are either killed, forced into labor units, or sent into the countryside often in the middle of winter.

This is well researched and is a great addition to any library of world war 2 books.

[Christian · Rating 4 out of 5]

A series of essays that were written in the context of the battle regarding the historiography of the Wehrmacht. Bartov sets out to prove in 4 essays that the Wehrmacht was Hitler's Army above all, littered with letters correspondence, diary entries, military orders, speeches etc. Bartov builds a very compelling case that both interrogates and explicates. At times, it can be repetitive but that is a conscious decision to bolster the argument with endless evidence that the soldiers were ideologically committed to carrying out the Final Solution, they were not simply dupes or unwitting accomplices.

[William · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting examination of indoctrination playing a role in military behavior. I wish it had been a more thorough statistical analysis to make sure the effect is real rather than anecdotal, but the author is convincing.

[Maggie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well written book detailing how the Eastern Front made the Wehrmacht into "Hitler's Army" through four factors: the primitive conditions, the dissolution of primary group identity, the perversion of discipline and the distortion of reality.

[Santiago Diez]

4.5

[Ryan Wulfsohn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Completely explodes the myth of the “ good “ German army as opposed to the “ bad “ Waffen SS.

[John E · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent study of the "Nazi-fication" of the Germany Army during World War II. A bit difficult to read because of the style (very long paragraphs) it is well worth the effort.

[Jochen Träm · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probably one of the best single-volume analyses of the Wehrmacht, and its relation to and function in the Third Reich.

[Michael Ross · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of the first books I've owned that I felt like I wanted more from it. Good points and decent end notes but wished it had more.

[The Busta · Rating 4 out of 5]

Essential reading for anyone interested in the World War II European front

[Joseph Stieb · Rating 4 out of 5]

A dark and disturbing book about the Wehrmacht's complicity in the crimes and ideology of the 3rd Reich. Bartov argues that their upbringing in Nazi society made the young men of the Wehrmacht predisposed to buy into Nazi ideology. On the Eastern Front, they experienced the "demodernization" of warfare as the high-tech, highly mobile warfare of the blitzkrieg bogged down by the fall of 1941 into trench and urban warfare. These soldiers experienced horrendous conditions and casualty rates that tore apart their primary groups, which are usually considered to be a key part of an Army's ability to function. As the primary group collapsed, soldiers came under stricter discipline and more ideological bombardment from the regime. They became more fanatically attached to Nazism and Hitler in particular, adopting more of the regime's worldview than the average German at the time. They also experienced a bizarre reversal of discipline in which they were subject to extreme discipline for infractions (especially desertion) but ordered and encouraged to take out their hatred and frustration on the sub-human Slavic and Jewish populations. Bartov details the horrific abuses the Wehrmacht took part it, demolishing the myth that they were apolitical and separate from Nazism. The soldiers seemed to genuinely believe that they were in an absolute racial war against the subhuman races, and that if they didn't destroy these enemies Germany and all of civilization would be destroyed. The Nazis' unleashing of their soldiers' anger and constant ideological indoctrination brutalized the soldiers to the point where it became impossible for the regime to rein in their atrocities, even when those atrocities became counterproductive by either destroying the economy of the places the Germans occupied or inspiring further resistance from Soviet soldiers and partisans. Bartov argues that these soldiers held onto their perverse, distorted, violent worldview until the bitter end. He is highly skeptical of their latter testimonies of skepticism towards Nazism and distance from war crimes, arguing that these were mainly self-serving reminiscences that don't match the historical record.

The myth of the good Wehrmacht went a long way in postwar Germany. It convinced many Germans that the war against the USSR was partially justified as a sort of preventative attack against Eastern barbarism and communism. It also facilitated the rebuilding of the Bundeswehr by distancing the German military from Nazism. It's good that Bartov has struck down this usable past. This book is also a great argument against universal soldier type arguments, especially the buddy theory of unit and army cohesion. It seems that the buddy theory relies heavily on a certain casualty rate and that soldiers can and will look elsewhere for meaning and motivation when that rate gets too high. This book also lends credence to the Goldhagen school of thought about the Holocaust that envisions ordinary Germans as willing supporters of the regime's crimes . The main caveat in this book was that the soldiers at the boundaries of the Nazi empire became some of the regime's biggest die-hards, although this was not just an expression of German culture but a process of brutalization deeply linked with the conditions of the front. I highly recommend this short, well-argued book to students of European history, the Holocaust, and human psychology in historical context.

[Schopfi · Rating 4 out of 5]

several preconceived notions about the german wehrmacht, born of a limited western perspective on military history infused with certain ideological continuities are being revised in this short study, bearing some interesting results. the idea of war pragmatism for instance, the image of a soldier on the front line, facing realities of war, immune to ideological and propagandist notions, is shown to be quite wrong. the horrors of war, the perversion of discipline through the criminal orders of a war of extermination, fear, guilt, aggression and frustration actually formed a fertile soil for indoctrination. the ideology of national socialism was actually most effective precisely where the darkest reality was most directly felt. ideology served a psychological need for the soldiers on the eastern front, and the more it became the dominant conceptual lens, it steered the actions of soldiers towards war crimes, brutalizing the war, which resulted in a self fulfilling prophecy and vicious circle.
bartovs study is focused very much on the inner workings of hitlers army, which makes mechanisms visible that have for long been overlooked, but results in a slightly mono-causal mode of explanation.

[Kathleen · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author contends that the army was brainwashed -- but what army isn't brainwashed? How else do soldiers participate in the horrors of war? He refutes the notion -- commonly held, he says -- that the army, especially the officers, were professional soldiers who were not swayed by Nazism. Bartov provides much interesting detail on the invasion of the USSR -- it was doomed from the start. The German losses, in terms of both manpower and equipment, could not be sustained for long. It's a dark read.

[I'Mdoggo · Rating 5 out of 5]

While book is important in its own right as a contribution to a about the nature of nazi Germany, should indicate that it also has implications for the study of armies and warfare beyond the period of the Third Reich.

[Kathryn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating.

[Chastonie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book. Answers to a degree how normal men ended up committing some of the WWII most heinous crimes.

[Lizzie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful insight on the psychological and other factors of the Nazi soldiers who followed Hitler's orders.

[Gerad Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Classic which revolutionized post-Cold War understandings of World War II and the Wehrmacht in particular