Book Recommendation
Ostkrieg: Hitler's War of Extermination in the East. By Stephen G. Fritz
This
terrific history was published in 2011, but I just came across it. At
almost 500 words. Reading it is a project not to be taken lightly.
But I expect this to be the history of the war between Nazi Germany
and Soviet Russia to be the standard for many years. It destroys the
myth created after the ware by German generals that the German army
fought a “clean” and that the crimes, murders and genocide were
the work of the SS and the einsatzgruppen behind the lines. The army
leaders were in it up to their necks, not only approving of the
cleansing of Jews and other “useless eaters,” as the Nazis called
them. But assisting in every way. Many individual soldiers
participated, and most, seeped in years of Nazi propaganda that the
Jews had stabbed Germany in the back in 19918 and, hard as it is to
believe now, started WWII. Fritz’s book details not only the horror
at the front in the largest war in history, but also the horror
behind the lines, as the population was murdered, deported to be
slave labors in Germany, or deliberately left to starve. Reports of
soldiers shooting hundreds of Jews at a time were commonplace. The
individual numbers are staggering. The author points out that while
Britain and the US lost less than a million people combined, Russia
and Germany combined lost 35 million. Eight of every ten German
soldiers killed in WWII were killed on the eastern front. They
inflicted four or five causalities on the Russians for every one they
suffered, but compared to Germany, Russia’s manpower was
functionally unlimited. In addition Russia outproduced the Germans in
war material. With lend lease vehicles from the US, they became much
more mobile than the Germans, who still depended largely on horse
drawn transport, especially as their oil shortage worsened. Nor does
the book neglect Russia\n crimes. It reports that something like 1.7
million German women were raped by Soviet soldiers, including 50% of
the women in Berlin. Breaking these numbers down into individual
human lives doesn’t bear contemplation.
WWII and military history buffs won’t want to miss this book.
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