The Allies And The Barbarisation Of Warfare By Bartov

By 1941, the Wehrmacht has pushed out of Germany and Poland, on its way east, to the front of the Soviet Union to battle the Stalin, the Red Army and the forces of Bolshevism. While on this journey to the Eastern front the job descriptions between special groups like the Einsatzgruppen and the Wehrmacht began to blur significantly. The purpose of groups like the Einsatzgruppen was to do the work of the Holocaust while the purpose of the Wehrmacht was to fight the war. The problem was the Wehrmacht had been assuming the duties of the SS and had been killing prisoners of war, civilians and deserters. Many scholars have debated the reasons as to why the German army soldiers had resulted to such barbaric cruelties on the Eastern front. Reasons

One of the key points that Bartov makes is that it is important to remember that the first phase of the war in the East was systematic extermination of Jewish-Bolshevism while attempting to create new Lebensraum. From the beginning political indoctrination was present with the idea of providing goods for themselves and the homeland of Germany by cleansing new space, regardless of who had been residing in these areas beforehand. The second key point is that the junior officers were the backbone of the German army, and served as the connecting link between the high command of the Wehrmacht and the political leadership of the Reich on the one hand, and the rank-and-file on the other. The junior officers could and most likely did use their own personal backgrounds, most likely Hitler Youth, and connections with political leadership to aid to the propaganda that was being spread and intensified on the war

One of the weaknesses of the book is although Bartov does his research by divisions, Grossdeutschland, 18th Panzer division, and 12th infantry, throughout the book, he fails to acknowledge the different ranks and how at each rank in the division different attitudes towards the actions of the Wehrmacht as a whole and the ideological propaganda surrounding them. Bartov uses many sources that were translated from German to English as both primary sources as well as secondary. He also has a secondary source by T. Abel, Why Hitler Came into Power, which was written in 1938, this is a relevant source because it gives a different feel for contextualization because of the time period that it was written in. As opposed to sources that are written after knowing that the Germans lose the war and the consequences to the Nazis. Bartov also uses Goebbels diaries as well as the secret conferences of Goebbels as primary sources to help prove the implementation and purposeful political indoctrination through the ranks as an attempt to form