WAR OF ANNIHILATION: Germany’s Collective Memory of the Eastern Front vs. Historical Scholarship

1. WAR OF ANNIHILATION:Germany’s Collective Memory of the Eastern Front vs. Historical Scholarship • In Germany the best-selling picture book about the Second World War is Herbert Michaelis et al., Der 2. Weltkrieg. Bilder, Daten, Dokumente, Munich: Bertelsmann, 1983. It focuses on combat at the front, not occupation policy, and is based largely on German propaganda photos published during the war. • In the mid-1990s a group of radical German historians organized a traveling photographic exhibit on “Crimes of the Wehrmacht” in the USSR. We will examine their reconstruction of how the German 6th Army treated civilians as it marched toward Stalingrad, based largely on photographs sent by German soldiers home to their families (plus some published by the Soviets).

2. “The German Counter-Attack against the English Flanking Attack in the North, April 1940” Hitler sacrificed his surface fleet to gain air bases in Norway (destroyed German ships in Narvik Fjord)

3. “Case Yellow,” May 10, 1940: Germany lured the British Army into Belgium, then attacked through the Argonne Forest

4. Hitler arrives at Compiégne on June 21, 1940, to accept French surrender in the same railway car in which the armistice of November 11, 1918, had been signed.

5. Occupied France, following the armistice (“Vichy France” in white)

6. Springtime for Hitler (June 23/24, 1940):The “Greatest General of All Time” visits Paris

7. Germany’s first major assault on London, on September 7, 1940, involved 625 bombers, including the Henkel 111’s shown here

8. Coventry Cathedral after the city was destroyed in the night of November 14/15, 1940.But the Luftwaffe was losing twice as many planes each week as the RAF, and British weekly aircraft production had surged ahead of German.

9. Hitler and his generals study a map of Russia, June 1941 German press photo republished by Bertelsmann (General Friedrich von Paulus with back to wall)

10. Operation Barbarossa(June-December 1941) captures two million Red Army troops

11. A German armored division rolls across Russia Most German divisions still relied on horses for transport and soldiers who marched

12. German troops march past Lenin in the Ukraine

13. German troops greeted as liberators in the Baltic Republics

14. Ukrainian Girls Provide Refreshments(propaganda photo)

15. “Hitler: The Liberator”(German poster in occupied Ukraine, 1941/42)

16. Ukrainians fed by the Wehrmacht, after being promised the return of their land (propaganda photo)

17. Red Army troops counter-attack outside Moscow, December 1941

18. Remains of a destroyed German convoy, 1941/42 (in German popular memory, only the Winter defeated their troops)

19. In 1942 Hitler insisted on simultaneous drives eastward to Stalingrad and southeast toward Baku

20. Wehrmacht reconnaisance vehicles advance through the Donets River basin, summer 1942

21. Russian map of Stalingrad, on the Volga River

22. German troops hoist the Swastika over the ruined streets of Stalingrad, September 1942

23. German warplanes over the bombed-out ruins of Stalingrad

24. Exhausted German infantrymen on the Eastern Front

25. The survivors of the German Sixth Army march into captivity, January/February 1943(of the 200,000 German troops in Stalingrad, about 60,000 died, and 100,000 surrendered)

26. IN FACT, PLANS FOR OPERATION BARBAROSSAIMPLIED MASS MURDER ON A HORRIFIC SCALE • Hitler told his generals repeatedly that this campaign would ignore the Geneva Convention and laws of war. The SS was placed in charge of anti-partisan warfare, and the Waffen-SS & SS Einsatzgruppen were beefed up. • The “Commissar Order” of May 1941 instructed all army units that captured political officers in the Red Army must be shot. Oral explanations added that all Jews should be assumed to be commissars. • Five million invasion troops were ordered to live off the land and send all grain supplies they could back to Germany. Planners assumed that at least 20 million Russians would starve to death. • Two million Soviet POWs died in German captivity in the winter of 1941/42.

27. The March of the German Sixth Army toward Stalingrad

28. The Pogrom in Tarnopol, July 1941: German soldiers killed hundreds of Jews after SS agents showed them mutilated corpses

29. The Wehrmacht executes two Communist officials in Shitomir,7 August 1941(photograph from family album)

30. The 400 Jewish men of Shitomir, also in the town square:They were all shot by the SS soon thereafter.

31. “The Jew: That is your eternal enemy”(German poster aimed at the Ukrainian populace)

32. Field Marshal Walter von Reichenau (1884-1942)

33. Soviet POWs fill in the ravine at Babi Yar outside Kiev after SS Einsatzgruppen shot over 33,000 Jews there on September 29/30, 1941 (using army trucks for transport)

34. Von Reichenau’s “Order of the Day,” 10 October 1941 “There are still many unclear ideas regarding the attitude of our troops toward the Bolshevik system. The essential goal of the campaign against the Jewish-Bolshevik system is the complete destruction of its power and the extermination of Asiatic influence in the European cultural realm. The troops therefore must accept tasks that go beyond the traditional concept of soldiering. The soldier in the East is not just a warrior according to the rules of the art of war, but also the bearer of an uncompromising racial idea and the avenger of all the bestialities that have been inflicted on German and related peoples. The soldier must therefore understand the need for just punishment of Jewish sub-humans. Such punishment has the further aim of forestalling any uprisings behind our front lines, which experience shows are always fomented by Jews.” Von Reichenau concluded that soldiers must seek “the complete annihilation of the Bolshevik delusion, the Soviet state, and its army,” and “the pitiless extermination of all treachery and cruelty.” Hitler praised this order as exemplary and urged all other generals in Russia to follow von Reichenau’s example.

35. The 1,800 Jewish men, women, and children of Lubny, southeast of Kiev, who were all shot in October 1941

36. The grain harvest, under German guard (summer 1941)

37. Grain being shipped to Berlin (propaganda photo)

38. In October 1941 German troops were ordered to gather stockpiles of food for the coming winter; here an uncooperative farm couple has been hanged

39. German soldier, stealing chickens(family album)

40. Civilians hanging from the balconies, Kharkov, October 1941: Anyone caught scavenging for food was executed

41. In just the first three months of the campaign, Germany captured two million Soviet soldiers. Most of them died of neglect in the winter of 1941/42….

42. GERMAN OCCUPATION POLICY SPARKED A GENUINE POPULAR UPRISING “OUR HOPE IS IN YOU, RED WARRIOR!” “The Enemy Shall not Escape the People’s Revenge!”