Ostkrieg: Hitler's War of Extermination in the East

Superb study of World War Two's decisive front

This is a splendid study of the Second World War’s crucial eastern front, where the Red Army inflicted 78.5 per cent of German military deaths. Hitler threatened on 30 January 1939, “if the international finance Jewry within Europe and abroad should succeed once more in plunging the peoples into a world war, then the consequence will not be the Bolshevization of the world and a victory of Jewry, but on the contrary, the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.” Hitler projected onto the Jews his own exterminationist intent. The head of the Wehrmacht, Field Marshal Keitel, signed the final version of the infamous ‘Commissar Order’ on 6 June 1941, “2. Political commissars are the originators of barbaric, Asiatic methods of fighting. Thus, they have to be dealt with immediately and … with the utmost severity. As a matter of principle, therefore, they will be shot at once.” Fritz sums up that Barbarossa “was not only the most massive military campaign in history, but it also unleashed an unprecedented campaign of genocidal violence, of which the Holocaust remains the best-known example.” In October 1941, Hitler said, “It’s good when the horror precedes us that we are exterminating Jewry.” He also said, “We are getting rid of the destructive Jews entirely.” And “When we exterminate this plague, then we perform a deed for humanity …” In January 1942, he said, “I see only one thing: total extermination. … Why should I look at a Jew any differently from a Russian prisoner?” Fritz observes, “in 1942 the Soviet Union alone, even without the contributions of Great Britain and the United States, would once again outproduce the Reich in virtually every weapons category. In the key areas of small arms and artillery, the advantage was three to one, while, in tanks, it was a staggering four to one, accentuated by the higher quality of the Soviet T-34.” Fritz often praises Stalin’s role. He notes that Stalin’s iron will saved the Soviet Union from collapse in the autumn of 1941, and points out, “Stalin, too, feared that his namesake city might fall at any time but in his usual fashion averted a nascent crisis by quick and firm action.” Fritz notes, “As far back as the autumn of 1943, Hitler had planned to stabilize the eastern front in order to transfer troops west to defeat the Allied invasion of France. …The Soviets, however, had refused to cooperate and play their assigned role. Instead of sitting passively through the winter, the Red Army had launched a series of continuous offensives that had drained German resources and brought the Ostheer to the breaking point.” He points out, “The blow to Army Group Center, however, had been as spectacular as it had been swift. In a bit more than two months, it had lost almost 400,000 men killed, wounded and missing, making Operation Bagration a far worse disaster for the Wehrmacht than the comparable one at Stalingrad or even that of Verdun in the previous war.” Of the Vistula-Oder offensive of January 1945, Fritz writes, “in three weeks, the Red Army had won perhaps its most spectacular victory of the war.” Nazi Germany fought a war of choice, the USSR a war of necessity, which determined its strategy and tactics, which largely explains its huge losses. Fritz sums up, “Hitler also grossly underestimated the political and economic strength and resilience of the Stalinist system as well as the resources that would be necessary to win in the Soviet Union.”