Hitler Strikes Poland: Blitzfrieg, Idelogy, and Atrocity (Alexander B. Rossino)

 

In Hitler Strikes Poland: Blitzkrieg, Ideology, and Atrocity, Alexander Rossino argues that the war in Poland was in fact the first shots in a war of ethnic annihilation that resumed against the Soviet Union once Adolf Hitler believed that the western powers were no longer a threat to his ultimate goals. In addition to describing the ethnic cleansing carried out by the SS death squads, the  Einsatzgruppen, he does a good job criticizing the myth that the regular Germany Army, the Wehrmacht, was generally opposed to the atrocities for humane reasons and that the soldiers refused to participate or flat-out resisted the killings. He furthermore argues that many of the soldiers committed them quite willingly, with no repercussions for dissent.

The officer class is often romanticized as reluctant victims of Hitler’s control. This was thanks to their post-war memoirs, where they distanced themselves from the Nazis. They also portrayed themselves as competent victims of the Fuhrer’s regime, forced to do Hitler’s bidding. These men do not escape Rossino’s critical eye. When German and generals lower-ranking officers protested the looting and killings carried out by SS men, they were not shocked by the ideological atrocity, but the manner in which it was carried out. They believed that such actions undermined discipline and distracted the troops from their more purely military goals. Many generals did not appreciate Poles and Jews being killed without their authority and without “the court-martial process and other formal procedures”. In other cases, officers in the Wehrmacht collaborated with the Einsatzgruppen in weeding out and disposing of undesirables and had no qualms doing so.

As Rossino shows, the army also encouraged violence against Polish and Jewish citizens, and in fact commanded it. Commanders of the “Fourth Army ordered that all military and police units in Bydgoszcz were to take and summarily execute hostages in response to civilian attacks”. Any civilian seen with a weapon was to be shot on sight. Lining up with Nazi racial ideology, General Walther von Brauchitsch declared, “Such an opponent [Poles] is capable of any lowly act and deserves no mercy”. Jews were especially targeted by SS and Wehrmacht alike. Even without the lens of racial ideology, the German military had a recent history of using harsh reprisals to deal with civilian resistance in its other modern wars.

In his final chapter, Rossino explains the average German soldier’s brutality against Jews and Poles. Even if most of them were not members of the Nazi Party, they still had racial and ethnic biases rooted in recent history. Furthermore, those who had grown up during the 30s would have been indoctrinated by the Nazi Party’s propaganda and its control of education. Certainly they had to know that ethnic cleansing would be committed. The Jews in pre-war Germany didn’t simply disappear.

Rossino doesn’t deny that there were exceptions to brutality among the Wehrmacht. In fact, he uses these examples to show that those who did commit atrocities were not forced to. He mentions one incident in which soldiers were about to gun down a line of hostages when an officer drove up and quickly stopped them. Thus, officers in the Wehrmacht had the ability to control their men and prevent further war crimes, and following that line of reasoning those that did not were guilty of participation. Several soldiers also refused to participate and received no discipline.

This is an easy to read (because it’s on the short side rather than pleasant) dispelling of the honorable Wehrmacht myth. The only criticism I have is of the title itself. Hitler Strikes Poland does not accurately describe the main thrust of Rossino’s study. His argument is that the Wehrmacht was willingly and sometimes enthusiastically culpable for war crimes, and also that the 1939 Polish Campaign was a dress rehearsal for the invasion of the Soviet Union. There’s a trend to make books more saleable by invoking Hitler’s name and even with the more descriptive subheading I can imagine some casual reader picking this up thinking he’s about to read a study of a military campaign rather than an analysis of war crimes.

Rating: Highly Recommend

Rating System

Must-Read: Definite read for history in general

Highly Recommend: Definite read within a certain subject

Recommend: Good for further information or info on a certain topic

Adequate: Useful if looking for further information certain topic

Pass: Awful, only useful for examining bad or ideologically-tainted history