But Adolf Hitler and his generals were greatly stretching the notion of “decisive battle,” as had the Kaiser’s staff offi cers in 1914.. Hitler and the OKW and OKH spoke in 1941 not of a
Trang 1Vernichtungslager
Prussian military history But Adolf Hitler and his generals were greatly stretching
the notion of “decisive battle,” as had the Kaiser’s staff offi cers in 1914 Hitler and
the OKW and OKH spoke in 1941 not of a single decisive battle but of a
succes-sion of “Vernichtungsschlacht,” of interconnected and cascading decisive battles
constituting a determinative campaign and short “war of annihilation.” That was
essential to achieve because Germany simply did not have suffi cient resources to
wage protracted war, or any war on two main fronts Planning for
“Vernichtung-skrieg” in the west and then again in the east, without making provision even for
the possibility of protracted war, was the fatal fl aw in German strategic thinking
It may also have been a necessary psychological underpinning to making war at all,
given the geopolitical odds against fi nal success
When Hitler rolled the war dice a third time, against the Soviet Union in 1941,
the Wehrmacht’s military fortunes shattered on the hard realities of deep Russian
spaces, undetected reserves of manpower, economic resources that were
unavail-able to tsarist armies, and sheer determination of the defenders to resist invasion
All that disadvantage was exacerbated by the barbarous manner in which the
Weh-rmacht and Nazi occupation authorities behaved from the fi rst hours of the war
in the east in accordance with pre-invasion planning In a briefi ng for Wehrmacht
commanders leading into BARBAROSSA on March 30, 1941, Hitler attached a
heinous new meaning to “Vernichtungskrieg” by ordering mass murder of
com-missars and Jews No objections were raised by any of the German offi cers present,
and not a few later showed themselves to be enthusiastic enforcers of “harsh
mea-sures.” That turned the invasion of the Soviet Union into a primitive and primal
campaign of wanton destruction, expropriation, and genocide Among other evils
that such practices ultimately brought down on German heads, it became
impos-sible to portray the war to local populations as a struggle for liberation of the
subject peoples of the Soviet Union Yet, only by harnessing anti-Soviet minority
nationalisms could the Germans have hoped to overcome the inherent strength
of Stalin’s police state
Instead, there was rising resistance to Nazi occupation policies from early
1942 The incredible German miscalculation about the likelihood of a short
war against the Soviet Union thus gave rise to two of the most awful facts of the
20th century First, a great and protracted German–Soviet war of attrition killed
tens of millions by 1945, devastating whole peoples and countries Second, the
“fi nal solution” of genocide in the Holocaust was arrived at by the Nazis after a
proposed “territorial solution to the Jewish problem” became impossible Why?
Because the Soviet Union refused to collapse or submit That left no territory
open to early Nazi “resettlement” plans for any Jews Hitler and the Schutzstaffel
(SS) might have allowed to lived outside a victorious “Greater German Reich.”
See also Commissar order; Germany, conquest of; Materialschlacht; Phoney War;
Stel-lungskrieg; Verwüstungsschlacht
VERNICHTUNGSLAGER “annihilation camp.”
See death camps