World aniquilation front6/30/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() In short, most generals were predisposed to working with the Führer and at times more radical than Hitler himself. They also agreed with Hitler's goal of molding a racially pure national community bent on conquest and domination. The generals shared the Nazi movement's hatred of Jews, communists, Slavs, and the Treaty of Versailles. German war crimes in Germany's colonies in southwest and east Africa and in World War I also reveal a military leadership without regard for international law and willing to resort to mass murder to achieve its goals. The concept of total war emerged long before Goebbels publicly called for its implementation in February 1943. Since at least 1870 the German military had a tradition of advocating and practicing ruthlessness in the treatment of enemy civilians and the confiscation of the enemy's resources. Such connections, Megargee shows, predated the Third Reich. Moreover, during the past decade several historians have presented irrefutable evidence of the interconnectedness of military developments and the evolution of the Germans' various mass murder initiatives in the U.S.S.R. ![]() Indeed, the emergence of "critical military history" in West Germany in the late 1960s successfully challenged the view of the apolitical and "clean" Wehrmacht. xii): (1) the white-washing of the German army by its generals and postwar historians who have relied on their accounts, and (2) the existence of a gulf separating historians who write almost exclusively on military planning and operations from researchers who focus on Nazi criminality. Somewhat less convincing are his claims that the literature "has suffered from two fundamental weaknesses" (p. He succeeds admirably in this respect and demonstrates his superb command of the existing research. Published less than a decade after Müller's and Ueberschär's excellent survey of the historical literature on Hitler's war against the U.S.S.R., Megargee faces the daunting task of writing a readable synthesis of the massive historiography on the campaign's military and genocidal aspects for the nonspecialist. As part of the publisher's series Total War: New Perspectives on World War II, this book is aimed primarily at a general readership. ![]()
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