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.
