Content area
Full Text
Nazi Policy on the Eastern Front, 1941: Total War, Genocide, and Radicalization . Edited by Alex J. Kay, Jeff Rutherford, and David Stahel. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2012. Pp. x + 359. Cloth $85.00. ISBN 978-1580464079.
As the subtitle indicates, the editors and authors of this collection of eleven essays set out to analyze Nazi policy on the Eastern Front in 1941 within the framework of three concepts: total war, genocide, and radicalization. There is no conceptual discussion of genocide, however, no attempt to distinguish which Nazi programs of mass killing passed that definitional threshold, and no discussion about whether such a distinction is even useful in the context of Operation Barbarossa. In effect, the term is taken for granted. "Total war" is mentioned primarily in the introduction, where the editors usefully note that its origins lay not in Josef Goebbels' infamous speech of February 1943 but rather in German military thinking emerging from World War I. The concept was most succinctly articulated in Erich von Ludendorf's Der totale Krieg (Munich, 1935), which proclaimed the goal of warfare to be the destruction not only of the enemy army but also the enemy nation and society.
The attempted conceptual unity of the book, as opposed to its self-evident topical unity, revolves around the idea of "radicalization." Here the editors invoke both Hans Mommsen's notion of "cumulative radicalization" and...