Language:
German
Year of publication:
2001
Titel der Quelle:
Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft
Angaben zur Quelle:
49,10 (2001) 905-926
Keywords:
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)
;
National socialism Philosophy
;
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)
Abstract:
Assigns responsibility for the massacres of Jews and suspected partisans, and of the general population in the USSR and the Balkans, to the German military commanders. These were part of the conservative elite which shared an ideology very close to that of the Nazis: the hegemony of Germany and its mission to impose a new order in Europe, wiping out the Jewish-Bolshevist arch-enemy, the foe of all that is cultured, pure, and noble. Historians propagated this ideology, and jurists backed it asserting that in this conflict Germany had the right to be a law unto itself. Soldiers, already infused with this ideology by Nazi education, were further indoctrinated by their commanders. Thus the commanders issued, and the soldiers obeyed without question, orders to cooperate with the SD in massacres, or (especially in the Balkans) themselves to take and shoot hostages, first and foremost Jews. Gives many examples, up to the very end of the war, with only a few instances of commanders who tried to protest.
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