The Wehrmacht History, myth, reality

In the history of WW II, the German army too often has been regarded as an unwilling tool of Adolf Hitler. Wette (Univ. of Freiburg) destroys that myth in his book, an indictment of the German army for its involvement in atrocities against Jews and people in eastern Europe. Destroying the legends about the Wehrmacht having "clean hands," Wette finds the Wehrmacht officers as well as soldiers as guilty as Hitler, whom they willingly obeyed. Tragically, very few officers and soldiers had the courage to resist the campaign against "Jewish bolshevism." The myth of a "good Wehrmacht" that had kept its hands clean was concocted and disseminated in the final phase of the war and in the immediate postwar era. The aim was to limit the responsibility for WW II and the crimes of the Nazi regime to Hitler and a small clique of war criminals. It was not until at least 50 years after the end of WW II that scholars began to analyze these myths and their effects on the history of the conflict. Every WW II collection. ^BSumming Up: Strongly recommended. All levels/libraries. K. Eubank emeritus, CUNY Queens College

The conventional wisdom that the German army in WWII fought a relatively clean fight, unsullied by the atrocities committed by the Nazi SS, has recently been challenged-and largely demolished. This probing study explores the rise and fall of that myth in the light of scholarship debunking it. Focusing on the Eastern Front, the author contends that the Nazi vision of a racial-ideological death struggle against Slavic hordes and their Jewish-Bolshevik commissars resonated with German officers steeped in traditional anti-Semitic and racist dogmas. Nazi propaganda also swayed millions of soldiers, inuring them to the brutality they would witness and (with a few honorable exceptions, duly noted) participate in. Wette, a historian at the University of Freiburg, notes that the Wehrmacht assisted the SS extermination program, conducted its own mass killings of civilians and castigated the Italian army for refusing to persecute Jews. He goes on to trace the postwar development, fostered by Cold War imperatives and self-serving ex-Wehrmacht generals, of a sanitized legend of Wehrmacht conduct and the controversies that finally undermined it in Germany. More restrained than Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners, Wette's hard-hitting indictment also emphasizes the broad culpability of German society for the crimes of the Third Reich. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved