Ostkrieg: Hitler's War of Extermination in the East
Stephen G. Fritz
Language: English
Pages: 664
ISBN: 0813134161
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
On June 22, 1941, Germany launched the greatest land assault in history on the Soviet Union, an attack that Adolf Hitler deemed crucial to ensure German economic and political survival. As the key theater of the war for the Germans, the eastern front consumed enormous levels of resources and accounted for 75 percent of all German casualties. Despite the significance of this campaign to Germany and to the war as a whole, few English-language publications of the last thirty-five years have addressed these pivotal events.
In Ostkrieg: Hitler's War of Extermination in the East, Stephen G. Fritz bridges the gap in scholarship by incorporating historical research from the last several decades into an accessible, comprehensive, and coherent narrative. His analysis of the Russo-German War from a German perspective covers all aspects of the eastern front, demonstrating the interrelation of military events, economic policy, resource exploitation, and racial policy that first motivated the invasion. This in-depth account challenges accepted notions about World War II and promotes greater understanding of a topic that has been neglected by historians.
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the fortress seemed pointless, especially since the threat to the Rumanian oil fields from the “permanent aircraft career” of the Crimea had been eliminated and access to the Caucasus secured. At the time, however, and despite the Soviet penetrations near Kharkov, there appeared to be little discussion of the issue between Hitler and the OKH. The Führer, in fact, seemed eager to keep the victorious momentum going, if only to restore the confidence and reputation of his shaken troops. The fighting
take the city from the east. Instead, he opted to strike past the Ukrainian metropolis on the west, thus threatening the enemy’s southern flank and forcing him to abandon the city. Favored by a renewed drop in temperatures that aided German mobility, Hoth ordered Hausser’s SS Panzer Corps (with the powerful Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler and Das Reich Divisions, along with parts of Totenkopf and Grossdeutschland) to seize Kharkov from the north, then advance on Belgorod. The former was reconquered on
little prompting, the Reichsführer-SS worked strenuously to complete the destruction of the Jews of Poland. By the autumn, with the conclusion of “Aktion Reinhard,” some 1.5 million Jews had been killed at Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor, while the remaining Jews in the Lublin district had been murdered as part of Operation Harvest Festival (Erntefest). In all, 3–3.5 million Jews had perished in the six death camps, with roughly 750,000 killed by various murder squads. Speaking frankly to SS
operation that appealed to German sensibilities. If the Soviets broke out at Kovel and raced to the northwest, they could, in a single bold stroke reminiscent of the brilliant German victory in France four years earlier, end the war by trapping Army Groups Center and North against the Baltic Sea. Not only were distances short and the eastern Polish countryside ideal for mobile warfare, but the exposed Soviet left flank would also be partly covered by the Vistula River. The irony, that spring, was
provided a seemingly plausible explanation for Germany’s current quandary and a prescription for action to save and renew the nation. Once established, the quest for Lebensraum and the final reckoning with Jewish-Bolshevism remained the cornerstone of Hitler’s life’s work: only the conquest of living space could make good the mistakes of the past, preserve the racial value of the German Volk, and provide the resources to lift Germany out of its economic misery. Just a few days after becoming
