Evan Mawdsley - Thunder in the East: The Nazi-Soviet War 1941-1945

THUNDER IN THE EAST

Modern Wars

Series editor: Hew Strachan

Chichele Professor of the History of War, All Souls College, University of Oxford (UK)

Advisory editor: Michael Howard

Emeritus Fellow of All Souls College, University of Oxford (UK)

Covering the period from 1792 to the present day, the Modern Wars series explores the global development of modern war. Military history is increasingly an integrated part of total history, and yet this is not always reflected in the literature. The Modern Wars address this need, offering well-rounded and balanced synoptic accounts of the major conflicts of the modern period. Each volume recognizes not only the military, but also the diplomatic, political, social, economic and ideological contexts of these wars. The result is a series that ensures a genuine integration of the military history with history as a whole.

Published:

The South African War , Bill Nasson (1999)

The Crimean War , Winfried Baumgart (1999)

Allies in War , Mark A. Stoler (2005)

The First World War (Second Edition), Holger Herwig (2014)

Forthcoming :

New Order Diplomacy , Martin Folly (2016)

For Gillian, Michael and Robyn

THUNDER IN THE EAST: THE NAZISOVIET WAR 19411945

SECOND EDITION

Evan Mawdsley

Bloomsbury Academic

An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

CONTENTS

When, in 1970, Basil Liddell Harts History of the Second World War was published in Britain, it marked the end of an era. One reason was that it was published after the death of its author. More importantly, it represented an approach to its subject that even then looked dated. Liddell Harts war was one fought and won in the West; he paid more attention to the North African campaign, to which the Germans had allocated two divisions in 1941, than to Russia, to which they had devoted seventy-five times that number. This was a story of the war that travelled from Dunkirk to D-Day, by way of El Alamein.

In those days the English-speaking historians who did write about the war on the Eastern Front approached their subject from the perspective of the Germans, and especially that of the German generals. Liddell Hart himself had interviewed many of them after the war, and he and others had been midwives in the translation of their memoirs into English. Here was a Wehrmacht that was politically innocent, a supremely able but also honourable fighting force, unsullied by the worst excesses of Nazism, the professional competence of its officers constantly subverted by the interventions of Hitler, especially in the conduct of the defensive battles which the German Army was condemned to fight after 1943. The Cold War made the lessons the Germans had learnt in combating a Soviet invasion of Europe of greater moment than historical context. Atrocities were not a necessary part of this narrative, and if they were acknowledged, they were blamed on the Nazi Party and its military arm, the Waffen-SS, not the Wehrmacht: such a demarcation made life easier for everyone, for Germans anxious to draw a line under the past and for NATO needing the manpower of a new West German Army, the Bundeswehr .

The Wehrmacht was complicit in war crimes and particularly so on the Eastern Front. The massive ten-volume history of Germany in the Second World War, Das deutsche Reich und der zweite Weltkrieg , prepared by the Bundeswehr s own military history section, makes this clear, particularly in the contributions of Jrgen Frster. The German public has been confronted with the acts of its fathers and grandfathers in a deeply controversial and profoundly unsettling touring exhibition, originating in Hamburg, whose catalogue was published in 2002. Neither Heinz Guderian, the panzer general appointed chief of the General Staff in the wake of the bomb plot against Hitler in July 1944, nor Erich von Manstein, who devised the plan that led to the breakthrough against France in May 1940, and who commanded, first, an army and, then, an army group in Russia, look as innocent now as they managed to do in the 1950s. Both of them were generals whose reputations were refurbished by Liddell Hart, and yet Guderian was a committed Nazi and Manstein ordered the extermination of Jews and Bolsheviks.

Today our picture of the German Army of the Second World War is therefore very different from that which was shaped by Rommels Afrika Korps and the notion of a war without hate (to use Rommels own description of the North African campaign). The war in the East was fought with a bestiality and ferocity by both sides that raise questions about its links to totalitarianism and its methods. As Evan Mawdsley makes clear in his conclusion, this was a deeply politicized war, even if it was not a rational one: politics and reason are, unfortunately, not synonymous. Professor Mawdsley does not let himself get drawn into the Holocaust itself, but he points out that the solution to the Jewish question proposed by the Nazis in 1941 was the forced resettlement of European Jewry in Asiatic Russia. This proposal was undermined by Germanys failure to defeat the Soviet Union in short order, and thus the path was opened to another more final and even more awful solution. Moreover, whether violence begets more violence is a moot but highly relevant point. The vocabulary used to motivate the soldiers of the Wehrmacht in battle could be transferred to those policemen as well as soldiers tasked with extermination. War legitimizes behaviour in the individual that is beyond the pale in peacetime. Did the extraordinary losses inflicted on the Eastern Front make it easier to carry out murder in the death camps?

The Soviet Union was also a totalitarian regime. Moreover, before the invasion of 1941, it had shown itself even readier than Germany to inflict massive losses on its own peoples in the name of progress and political conformity. It was Russias war about which Liddell Hart was particularly ill-informed. By 1970 the combination of linguistic ignorance, tainted historical writing and deep distrust had erected an impenetrable barrier between the peoples of the West and their appreciation of the achievements of the Red Army. In 1975, John Erickson began to tear down these obstacles with the publication of The Road to Stalingrad , followed in 1983 by The Road to Berlin . Since then, other scholars, notably Earl Ziemke and David Glantz, have written prolifically on the subject, and Antony Beevor has shown that it is one which appeals to an English-speaking readership on a massive scale.