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(More customer reviews)Rossino believes that the Wehrmacht committed numerous atrocities against civilians and POWs during the German invasion of Poland. Rossino disagrees with Bartov's thesis that the war crimes committed by the Wehrmacht was due to the stresses of combat on the Eastern Front instead Rossino states that even before they saw significant combat either in Poland or later Russia, the German army executed large numbers of civilians in Poland. Rossino states that the climate of brutality of the German army can be traced backed to the German officer corps taking Clausewitz's people's war theory to an extreme by massacaring the enemey's civilian population as seen in their actions in Southeastern Africa in the late nineteenth century and Belgum during the opening phases of the First World War. Also the ideological indoctrination of German soldiers greatly added to their hositilty to Slavs and Jews.Rossino mentions that oppostiion by some German generals to the activities by the SS and the Wehrmacht in Poland had to due with worries about keeping discipline in the army and not any great concern with innocent civilians. I would reccomend this book to anyone interested in the roots of the Holocaust and the massacre of millions of Slavs by the Wehrmacht during the Second World War.
Click Here to see more reviews about: Hitler Strikes Poland: Blitzkrieg, Ideology, And Atrocity (Modern War Studies)
It was one of the most ruthlessly conceived and executed invasions in the annals of warfare. Hitler's Polish campaign unleashed a blitzkrieg in which SS troops, police squads, and the army itself waged an ethnic war of unprecedented brutality. Tens of thousands of Poles-roughly 80 percent of whom were Christian-were summarily executed in acts of collective punishment. After six weeks, a country was crushed and the world was at war.Usually given short shrift in most histories of World War II, the invasion of Poland was more than a series of opening salvos; it was a testing ground for German brutalities to come. In this first intensive study of the invasion, Alexander Rossino provides a comprehensive study of the Polish campaign, including disturbing new insights into its racist and ideological underpinnings.Rossino tells how this invasion melded the ideology of the Nazi party with Germany's military yearning for empire in the East. The Polish campaign was important as the first step in Hitler's drive for "living space" for Germans in Eastern Europe, and as the blitzkrieg decimated urban residential areas, civilians soon became indistinguishable from combatants. In addition to describing military operations, Rossino also provides a close analysis of SS plans to murder Polish leaders, German army reprisal policies, and the close collaboration of Wehrmacht and SS forces in the subjugation and execution of Polish citizens. Rossino considers both top-level decision making and the experiences of German soldiers as he explores the mentality of those who perpetrated crimes against civilians. He particularly investigates the links between Nazi racial-political policies and military action to show that Poland was merely the German army's dress rehearsal for the later slaughter of other Slavs and Jews during the Russian campaign. By providing a detailed examination of atrocities committed by both military and SS personnel, he shows that the Wehrmacht's criminality was clearly evident at the beginning of the war.Hitler Strikes Poland is a startling reconstruction of history that clearly reveals the extent to which Nazi philosophy drove the German war machine. It also helps us better understand the brutality of the years that followed and better appreciate the suffering of the Polish people.This book is part of the Modern War Studies series.
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