The_Holokaust_-_origins,_implementation,_aftermath

7
GERMAN SOLDIERS AND THE
HOLOCAUST
Historiography, research and implications
Omer Bartov
For many years after 1945 the history of World War II was written with the
Holocaust left out. There were many reasons for this omission, some of which are
outlined in this chapter. But the result was that the genocide of the Jews, along
with the mass killing of other real or imaginary opponents of the Nazi regime,
even when they gradually entered the mainstream of the war’s historiography,
were rarely associated with the military context in which they occurred, or were
linked to it in distorted and apologetic ways. What is important to recognize is
that apart from the obvious reasons many Germans had to avoid associating the
Wehrmacht with the crimes of the Third Reich, many other nations were reluctant
to view the Holocaust as a central event in and of the war. It was one thing to
indict top officials of the Nazi regime with crimes against humanity, quite another
to identify the Wehrmacht as a criminal organization employed in mass murder.
To do so would have made the postwar Germanies into unacceptable allies for
both superpowers; it would have also greatly diminished the aura of having
fought an honorable and “clean” war from the victor nations’ perspective, and
would have raised questions regarding their failure to prevent genocide and
their lack of enthusiasm in recognizing its postwar effects. In other words,
identifying the Wehrmacht as a Nazi tool of genocide was tantamount to leveling
an accusation of collective guilt at Germany at a moment when both its successor
states were needed as allies in the Cold War, and would have highlighted the
old Allies’ anything but altruistic conduct in Word War II.
This chapter provides a critical overview of the development of research on
the Wehrmacht’s complicity in the crimes of the Nazi regime. It argues that since
the late 1960s there has been a progressive realization of the military’s close
links, on the level of both ideology and policy, with Nazism. This trend followed
the general development of research on the Third Reich, but always remained
several steps behind. The obvious defensiveness of older German scholars, who
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