Hitler's Army

In Hitler's Army, Omer Bartov focuses on the titanic struggle between Germany and the Soviet Union—where the vast majority of German troops fought—to show how the savagery of war reshaped the army in Hitler's image. Both brutalized and brutalizing, these soldiers needed to see their bitter sacrifices as noble patriotism and to justify their own atrocities by seeing their victims as subhuman. In the unprecedented ferocity and catastrophic losses of the Eastern front, soldiers embraced the idea that the war was a defense of civilization against Jewish/Bolshevik barbarism, a war of racial survival to be waged at all costs. Bartov describes the incredible scale and destruction of the invasion of Russia in horrific detail. Even in the first months—often depicted as a time of easy victories—undermanned and ill-equipped German units were stretched to the breaking point by vast distances and bitter Soviet resistance. Bartov goes on to explore letters, diaries, military reports, and other sources, showing how widespread Hitler's views became among common fighting men—men who grew up, he reminds us, under the Nazi regime. In the end, they truly became Hitler's army. This book sheds new light on how deeply Nazi ideology penetrated the nation. Hitler's Army makes an important correction not merely to the historical record but to how we see the world today.