The Wehrmacht History, myth, reality

Wolfram Wette, 1940-

Book - 2006

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Subjects
Published
Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press 2006.
Language
English
German
Main Author
Wolfram Wette, 1940- (-)
Item Description
Originally published as: Die wehrmacht: feindbilder, vernichtungskrieg, legenden. Frankfurt: S. Fischer, 2002.
Physical Description
xix, 372 p.
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN
9780674022133
  • Preface to the English-Language Edition by Peter Fritzsche
  • Foreword
  • List of Abbreviations
  • 1. Perceptions of Russia, the Soviet Union, and Bolshevism as Enemies
  • German Perceptions of Russia in the Twentieth Century
  • National Socialists' Perceptions of Russia: "Jewish Bolshevism"
  • Perceptions of Russia among the Wehrmacht Generals
  • 2. Anti-Semitism in the German Military
  • From Anti-Semitism to the Holocaust?
  • Germany under the Kaiser and the First World War
  • The Revolutionary Era of 1918-19
  • The Postwar Period: War Continued by Different Means
  • The Weimar Republic
  • The National Socialist Era up to 1939
  • 3. The Wehrmacht and the Murder of Jews
  • Issuing Orders and Propaganda in the Wehrmacht
  • Some Theaters of War
  • Anti-Semitism as a Soldier's Duty
  • 4. Generals and Enlisted Men
  • The Military Elites in the Grip of a War Ideology
  • Hitler and the Generals
  • The "Little Guy" in Uniform
  • Soldiers of the Wehrmacht in Light of Recent Research
  • The Will to Survive in the War's Final Phase
  • 5. The Legend of the Wehrmacht's "Clean Hands"
  • The Birth of a Legend
  • The War Crimes Trials
  • Writing History from the Wehrmacht's Point of View
  • The Cold War Begins
  • Wehrmacht Crimes, the Justice System, and the Statute of Limitations
  • 6. A Taboo Shatters
  • Historical Research
  • Perceptions of the Wehrmacht in the Bundeswehr
  • After Fifty Years a Taboo Is Broken
  • 7. Conclusion Notes
  • Index
Review by Choice Review

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

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

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

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved