This is a most impressive book. Very well written and massively documented, it more than delivers on Stephen Fritz's purpose of filling a void in the acceptable literature on the eastern front in World War II. His study does a remarkable job of demonstrating, as Fritz intends, “the inherent connection” on that enormous front “between military events and Nazi criminality” (p. xxi). In an opening chapter, the author examines how, for Hitler, Germany's future destiny depended on capturing Lebensraum (living space) and solving the “Jewish question,” both goals that hinged on the Nazis destroying the Soviet Union. Also Fritz, presenting extensive data throughout the volume, reminds the reader that the eastern front formed the pivotal theater of the war, in which roughly eight of every ten German soldiers who died in the entire war were killed there.
The book is organized chronologically and based both on printed original sources and on exhaustive research of other scholars. Fritz explains how, from the beginning of planning for Operation Barbarossa during 1940 and early 1941 to the war's end in the east, the German military leadership acquiesced almost completely in Hitler's murderous policies there. Even as Nazi military and civilian planners envisaged the impending war in Russia as one of annihilation of the enemy, according to the author “a similar radicalizing process was occurring among those responsible for solving the Jewish problem.” Although no decision had yet been made regarding the “Final Solution,” the extermination of the Jews of Europe, Fritz notes, “Hitler was clearly thinking in terms of a destructive racial war” (p. 65).
In Hitler's pushing forward his decision to attack Russia before Germany had defeated Britain, the United States played a significant role in the Nazi leader's calculations. As for Stalin, the author considers from nearly every angle the motives for the Soviet dictator's behavior at the start of the Ostkrieg. Fritz makes the case that, in contrast to most historiography on the subject, Stalin acted from confidence rather than weakness. Also the author believes that the execution of German plans for the occupied east resembled “the last act in the bloody history of European colonialism,” but “in inspiration Nazi ideas actually had more in common with American Manifest Destiny” (p. 93). The Generalplan Ost of the SS in mid-1941, which assumed mass death would result from slave labor and the physical destruction of certain groups in the east (Bolsheviks, communist bureaucrats, Jews, the urban population of Russia) to make room there for German settlement, both “anticipated and was directly linked to the so-called Final Solution” (p. 94).
Throughout Operation Barbarossa, the German army provided crucial assistance to the SS and police death squads in the killing of Soviet Jews. The army provided equipment, supplies, ammunition, transport, and housing; at times, army units even helped to set up ghettos, identify and guard the victims, and participate in the shootings. By late summer 1941, army, SS, and police officials agreed on the inseparable link between Jews and partisans, which meant that intensified pacification measures fell most harshly on Jews. But, Fritz concludes, “relatively few of the active perpetrators were front troops” (p. 481).
Hitler's meeting on July 16, 1941, represented a crucial event on the path to genocide. The dictator met with several of the highest-ranking Nazi civilian and military leaders to discuss guidelines for the administration and exploitation of the occupied areas. His vision discussed there fell to SS leader Heinrich Himmler to make it a reality, and the consequences were immediate in the mass killing of Soviet Jews, partisans, and anyone else deemed a threat to German rule.
But if Hitler and his generals agreed almost completely on racial policies, they quarreled endlessly in the eastern war over military strategy and tactics. Each side remained influenced in the disagreements by analogies to World War I—first the Battle of the Marne in 1914 and then Verdun in 1916. As early as July 1941, fierce Soviet resistance began seriously to erode the fighting strength of the German Eastern Army. Massive casualties (especially deaths), with replacements lacking and the significant decline in the materiel strength of the German armored units, were the worst until late 1942, when the savage struggle in Stalingrad reached its peak. Meanwhile, Soviet POWs were among the first to feel the full brunt of Nazi racial policy; of the 3.3 million Red Army soldiers captured by the Germans during 1941, barely a million remained alive by year's end.
By mid-September 1941, Germany's military situation in Russia had changed substantially—albeit briefly—for the better. Hitler, for this reason and for longtime ideological and more immediate practical reasons, made the decision to begin deporting German Jews to the east, which “set in motion a process that would culminate in genocide” (p. 175). Trains sequestered by the SS for the deportations resulted in a severe shortage of railcars for the army, helping to undermine the German advance toward Moscow. The commander of German Army Group Center protested the continuing presence of “Jew trains” (p. 176). By this time, the SS began to explore the use of poison gas to kill Jews—a procedure already used in the euthanasia program against handicapped Germans and others. And in the former Poland and at Auschwitz, preliminary work began in the eventual construction of the death camps.
Moreover, during the final months of 1941, the steady weakening of the German military campaign in the east, especially noticeable in the advance toward Moscow, only seemed to intensify the onset of the Final Solution. Operation Barbarossa “had now become a war of annihilation in the fullest sense” (p. 182). In part because of the resulting military crisis in the winter of 1941–42 and the growing recognition that Germany now faced a long war in the east, “the process of radicalization of Nazi racial policy accelerated” (p. 217). During the spring and summer of 1942, large-scale deportations from western Europe began. By 1944, the huge deficiencies in workers in the German armaments industry and elsewhere led Hitler—paradoxically not long after he ordered Germany made Judenrein (free of Jews)—to decide “to bring Jewish workers back to Germany” from Hungary, “albeit under draconian circumstances” (p. 364). Some 120,000 Jews survived the war as forced laborers.
The book is a masterful achievement. It is enhanced with excellent maps, photos, appendices (providing data on casualties, raw materials, and industrial and weapons production), and index.
