When Alexander Rossino published his seminal work, Hitler Strikes Poland: Blitzkrieg, Ideology, and Atrocity (2003), a fundamental flaw in the highly influential barbarization thesis of Omer Bartov was revealed. Bartov had argued (in Hitler's Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich [1991]) that the ultraviolent conditions of Operation Barbarossa so traumatized the German soldiers on the eastern front from June 1941 that their behavior toward civilians in the wake of the invasion could be explained as the result of this barbarization. It was these supposed conditions of the eastern front that turned soldiers into war criminals. Rossino's work problematized this theory as he detailed the Wehrmacht's systematic and monstrous behavior toward Polish civilians already in the opening weeks of September 1939. These fresh-faced, never-battle-tested German recruits appeared to have had the same disposition toward Slavs that the battle-hardened veterans of late summer 1941 displayed on the Ukrainian steppe. Bryce Sait now helps us better understand the behavior of those nonbrutalized soldiers in 1939, as well as the overall ideological training of the Wehrmacht as a whole, from its inception in 1933 to its final destruction in 1945.

Sait is convincing in his argument that it was the ideological training within the Wehrmacht itself that was the most significant in developing the worldview of these men and not larger social systems built to create Nazis, such as the Hitler Youth and the Reich Labour Service. Sait points out that most soldiers fighting in 1939 were too old to have participated in the first of these two institutions (most having been born in 1915 and 1916), whereas the second was only mandatory from 1935 and only for those ages eighteen to twenty-five, who were not already in the military. Thus, Sait's explanation of how the Wehrmacht was formed in 1933–1934 (chapter 3), when the first batch of new recruits arrived mainly from the SA and other Nazi organizations, is key to his thesis. This initial group created a deeply nazified institution, and Sait walks us through the ideological instruction that was fundamental to every subsequent recruit's training. This analysis provides a solid foundation for Sait's intriguing theory (chapter 4) that the famous Auftragstaktik (lower-level decision making) of the German military was key to what unfolded, first in Poland and later in Serbia (early 1941). For these invasions predating Operation Barbarossa, there were no direct orders to commit war crimes, such as the directives to shoot commissars and partisans that later accompanied Operation Barbarossa. Small units of Wehrmacht soldiers in Poland took it upon themselves to murder civilians. Sait's reasonable argument is that it was the ideological training of junior officers from 1933 to 1939 that created a mindset that allowed them to convert the vaguest of orders from on high into atrocities on the ground. The junior officers and the men under their command intuited what the regime wanted done to Slavs and Jews.

But what about France? Sait is aware that his argument about Wehrmacht training alone is not enough to help us understand why a twenty-something German man, who had never been a member of the Nazi Party, nor participated in the Hitler Youth, shot Polish but not French civilians. Sait therefore goes way beyond ideological training and the caesura of 1933 to help us understand why German men who had been “formed” in Weimar had a fundamentally different understanding of the East in contrast to the West. Sait invokes the seminal work of Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius (War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity, and German Occupation in World War 1 [2000]) as well as Ben Shepherd (Terror in the Balkans: German Armies and Partisan Warfare [2012]) to describe the impact that the experience of the First World War on the eastern front had on German veterans, as well as how they then imparted important ideas about the East to the cultural and political milieu of Weimar Germany. This is a good start. Much remains to be done in order to better understand the origins of the mindset of the soldiers of September 1939. Simply put, the parents of those German soldiers of 1939 already believed, before 1914, that a Pole was “less than” a French person. This was a deeply entrenched idea within Germany that was only then radicalized on the eastern front from 1914 to 1918 and became an open wound with the creation of Poland in 1919 out of “German” land. Pseudo-racialized understandings of “eastern peoples” were well in place before the Wehrmacht-classroom lectures on Slavic Untermenschen were ever written.