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Germany's War and the Holocaust: Disputed Histories. By Omer Bartov. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2003. xxi + 248 pages.
Omer Bartov originally made his reputation as a historian of the German Wehrmacht. Two seminal studies, The Eastern Front, 1941-45: German Troops and the Barbarisation of Warfare (1986) and Hitler's Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich (1991), departed from the well-tilled furrows of high-level military policy and unearthed the experience, behavior, and actions of ordinary soldiers. Above all, they explored how it was that rank-and-file German soldiers came to be so deeply implicated in atrocities and genocide. Since then, Bartov's increasingly wide-ranging interests in the Holocaust have resulted in a wealth of articles, review articles, and chapters, republished in three significant collections, Murder in Our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation (1996), Mirrors of Destruction: War, Genocide, and Modern Identity (2000), and now the present volume. Complementing this single-authored research, Bartov has also brought leading scholars together in a number of edited works: The Holocaust: Origins, Implementation, Aftermath (2000); (with Phyllis Mack) In God's Name: Genocide and Religion in the Twentieth Century (2001); and (with Atina Grossmann and Mary Nolan) The Crimes of War: Guilt and Denial in the Twentieth Century (2002). Together this body of work has established Bartov's place as one of the most productive contemporary scholars of the Holocaust.
Germany's War and the Holocaust offers insights into a number of interlocking debates, all of which are connected to the Holocaust, and some of which concern the Second World War. The opening section ("War of Destruction") asks how intrinsically genocidal and barbaric was Hitler's war in the East and how that war and the Wehrmacht were connected to the Holocaust. The second section ("Extermination Policies") pursues another major question posed by historians in recent years, namely, how we should understand participation in Nazi genocide, how self-willed it was, and how consensual was this singular project. Questions about both the Wehrmacht and more generally about German perpetrators assumed explosive force in the last decade not least because of the public impact of two simultaneous media phenomena. Opening in 1996, the German exhibition, "Crimes of the Wehrmacht," depicted to great public controversy in Germany the army's deep implication in the...