Omer Bartov, a leading scholar of the Wehrmacht and the Holocaust, provides a critical analysis of various recent ways to understand the genocidal policies of the Nazi regime and the reconstruction of German and Jewish identities in the wake of World War II. Germany's War and the Holocaust both deepens our understanding of a crucial period in history and serves as an invaluable introduction to the vast body of literature in the field of Holocaust studies.Drawing on his background as a military historian to probe the nature of German warfare, Bartov considers the postwar myth of army resistance to Hitler and investigates the image of Blitzkrieg as a means to glorify war, debilitate the enemy, and hide the realities of mass destruction. The author also addresses several new analyses of the roots and nature of Nazi extermination policies, including revisionist views of the concentration camps. Finally, Bartov examines some paradigmatic interpretations of the Nazi period and its aftermath: the changing American, European, and Israeli discourses on the Holocaust; Victor Klemperer's view of Nazi Germany from within; and Germany's perception of its own victimhood.
Omer Bartov is the John P. Birkelund Distinguished Professor of European History at Brown University. Among his many books is Mirrors of Destruction: War, Genocide, and Modern Identity.
Table of Contents
IntroductionPART ONE: War of Destruction1. Savage War: German Warfare and Moral Choices in World War II2. From Blitzkrieg to Total War: Image and HistoriographyPART TWO: Extermination Policies3. Killing Space: The Final Solution as Population Policy4. Ordering Horror: Conceptualizations of the Concentrationary Universe5. Ordinary Monsters: Perpetrator Motivation and Monocausal ExplanationsPART THREE: Interpretations6. Germans as Nazis: Goldhagen's Holocaust and the World7. Jews as Germans: Victor Klemperer Bears Witness8. Germans as Jews: Representations of Absence in Postwar GermanyAbbreviationsAcknowledgmentsIndex
What People are Saying About This
Sir Ian Kershaw
Omer Bartov is internationally recognized as a leading expert on the Holocaust. I greatly welcome this collection of his most important essays on this defining issue of the twentieth century.