WAR OF ANNIHILATION:Germany’s Collective Memory

of the Eastern Front

1. In Germany the best-selling picture book about the Second World War is Herbert Michaelis et al., Der 2. Weltkrieg. Bilder, Daten, Dokumente, Munich: Bertelsmann, 1983. It focuses on combat at the front, not occupation policy, and is based largely on German propaganda photos published during the war.

2. In the mid-1990s a group of radical German historians organized a traveling photographic exhibit on “Crimes of the Wehrmacht” in the USSR. We will examine their reconstruction of how the German 6th Army treated civilians as it marched toward Stalingrad.

The spectacular conquests of the German army,

June-September 1941

A German armored division rolls across Russia

Most German

divisions still relied on

horses for transport

and soldiers who

marched

German troops march past Lenin in the Ukraine

German troops greeted as liberators in the Baltic Republics

“Hitler: The Liberator”(German poster in occupied Ukraine, 1941/42)

Ukrainian Girls Provide Refreshments(propaganda photo)

Ukrainians celebrate May Day, 1942, with food provided by the Wehrmacht (propaganda photo)

In 1942 Hitler insisted on

simultaneous drives

eastward to Stalingrad

and southeast

toward Baku

Wehrmacht reconnaisance

vehicles advance

through the Donets River

basin, summer 1942

German troops hoist the Swastika over the

ruined streets of Stalingrad,

September 1942

German warplanes over the bombed-out ruins of

Stalingrad

Exhausted German infantrymen on the Eastern Front

The survivors of the German Sixth Army march into captivity, January/February 1943

(of the 91,000 captured, only 6,000 survived))

IN FACT, PLANS FOR OPERATION BARBAROSSAIMPLIED MASS MURDER ON A HORRIFIC SCALE

Hitler told his generals repeatedly that this campaign would ignore the Geneva Convention and laws of war. The SS was placed in charge of anti-partisan warfare, and the Waffen-SS & SS Einsatzgruppen were beefed up. The “Commissar Order” of May 1941 instructed all army units that captured political officers in the Red Army must be shot. Oral explanations added that all Jews should be assumed to be commissars. Five million invasion troops were ordered to live off the land and send all grain supplies they could back to Germany. Planners assumed that at least 20 million Russians would starve to death. Two million Soviet POWs died in German captivity in the winter of 1941/42.

The March of the German Sixth Army toward Stalingrad

The Pogrom in Tarnopol, July 1941: German soldiers killed hundreds of Jews after SS agents showed them mutilated corpses

A Soldier’s letter home from Tarnopol, July 6, 1941

I’ve just come from the burial of our comrades who were captured by the Russians. I can find no words to describe it. Our comrades were bound, and their ears, tongues, noses, and sex organs cut off, that’s how we found them in the cellar of the local courthouse, and we also found 2,000 Ukrainians and ethnic Germans butchered in the same way. That is Russia and Jewry, the paradise of the workers…. Revenge was taken immediately. We and the SS men were merciful yesterday, because we just shot every Jew we found. Today that has changed, because we found another 60 comrades mutilated. Now the Jews must carry the dead out of the cellar and lay them down neatly, and then we show them the shameful deeds. After they have seen the dead we beat them to death with clubs and shovels. So far we have helped 1,000 Jews pass on, but that is far too few to make up for what they have done. The Ukrainians say that the Jews had all the leading positions and had a real party with the Soviets as they executed Germans and Ukrainians. I ask you, dear parents, to make these facts known; Father should also tell the Party Local. If anyone has doubts, we will bring home photographs. Then there won’t be any more doubts. --Your son, Franzl.

The execution of two Communist

officials in Shitomir,7 August 1941

The 400 Jewish men of Shitomir, also in the town square:They were all shot by the SS soon thereafter

The executions at

Shitomir(testimony

by a Wehrmacht staff officer at a West

German war crimes trial in

1965)

Field Marshal Walter von Reichenau (1884-1942)

Soviet POWs fill in the ravine at Babi Yar outside Kiev after SS Einsatzgruppen shot over 33,000

Jews there on September 29/30, 1941

Von Reichenau’s “Order of the Day,” 10 October 1941

“The essential goal of the campaign against the Jewish-Bolshevik system is the complete destruction of its power and the extermination of Asiatic influence in the European cultural realm. The troops therefore must accept tasks that go beyond the traditional concept of soldiering. The soldier in the East is not just a warrior according to the rules of the art of war, but also the bearer of an uncompromising racial idea and the avenger of all the bestialities that have been inflicted on German and related peoples. The soldier must therefore understand the need for just punishment of Jewish sub-humans. Such punishment has the further aim of forestalling any uprisings behind our front lines, which experience shows are always fomented by Jews.” Von Reichenau concluded that soldiers must seek “the complete annihilation of the Bolshevik delusion, the Soviet state, and its army,” and “the pitiless extermination of all treachery and cruelty.”

The 1,800 Jewish men, women, and children of Lubny, southeast of Kiev, who were all shot in October 1941

The grain harvest, under German guard (summer 1941)

Grain being shipped to Berlin

A farm couple hanged in October 1941, after Wehrmacht

units were ordered to gather food reserves for the winter

German soldier, stealing chickens

(family album)

Civilians hanging from the balconies, Kharkov, October 1941

“The Jew: That is your

eternal enemy”(German poster

aimed at Ukrainians)