Raid on the Soviet Union – Second World War: limitless inhumanity

The past is not dead; It hasn’t even passed. We separate from him and stand alien. » Who would have thought that the words in Christa Wolf’s famous novel “Childhood Pattern” are still 50 years after its appearance of such current explosiveness with regard to our view of the Second World War and the reception of the Nazi dictatorship. Jochen Hellbeck, professor of Eastern European history at the US Rutgers University, has written a book that-due to the contradictory tradition and different socializations-for which one reader offers a lot of new things and confirms a certainty for others: “A war like no other”.

After the publication of his spectacular “Stalingrad protocols”, I met Jochen Hellbeck 2018 at an event at the Federal Center for Political Education. I was amazed and pleased that a West German can write so sensitive, well -founded, understanding and critically about this important battle of the Second World War and, above all, her later reception. Hellbeck explained to me that this is related to the experience during his youth in the GDR. Without the activity of his father in the constant representation of the Federal Republic in Berlin (East), he would never have come into contact with many topics and above all perspectives and would probably not have studied Slavistics later.

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In the foreword of his new book, he now explicitly confesses that the topic was “personally important for him … When I was fourteen years old, we moved from Paris to East Berlin … Our garden almost bordered on the wall of a huge Soviet war memorial … many years later, after I learned the Soviet Union and specialized in its history as a historian, and I became clear to me, and I became clear to me, and I became clear to me, felt compassion for the Soviet men and women who are buried there at thousands. »

Hellbeck’s new book, which is equipped with numerous documents and richly illustrated, is characterized by a balanced, although always critical view of the war against the Soviet Union after the German attack on June 22, 1941, as can be found in historiography. Ideological prejudices, interpretations or arguments to be ripped off due to pre -elected documents there are no. The author endeavors to the whole picture. This collides with many western perspectives, but also with some from Soviet or GDR publications. The events here are not equated as in many (West) German history books as the struggle of two dictators. Hellbeck’s point of view offers nothing less than an important reassessment of the Second World War, especially against new myths today.

The peculiarity of the German attack on the Soviet Union and the brutality that has never been seen so far grew out of the fact that anti -communism in the form of antiboles had shaped the NSDAP since its foundation, as well as anti -Semitism and anti -Slavism. These ideological positions have been mixed up, equated or changed by the Nazi propaganda several times. There were also shifts in meaning with regard to the European Jews. What you currently understood under “Jews”, “Communist” or “Commissioners”, as you deal with prisoners of war or “gang members” (partisans), was derived from the ruthless German warfare and occupation policy. The opponent was also referred to as “pest”, which had an annihilation with chemical agents, i.e. gas, associated as adequate. This had an impact throughout Europe.

It was precisely this brutal action in Germany and, not to forget, also that of its regional henchmen, which produced a feeling of togetherness in the Soviet Union, beyond the state propaganda. The impending fate that the entire population should be enslaved by the Germans welded together. Hellbeck quotes a well -known, bitter joke from Ukraine from 1942: «What has Stalin not achieved in twenty -four years, but Hitler in one? – that we know how to appreciate the Soviet rule. »

The author explains: «According to Hitler’s view, the history of mankind was largely a natural history: a relentless struggle between the breeds, which was about survival or annihilation. Due to their innate properties, the Germans, the Aryans, were intended as a “highest breed as a men’s people”. » Despite all the cruelty, the Polish campaign was only the prelude to Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union. There the mass killings quickly got a new, previously unknown dimension and quality, such as the massacre of over 33,000 Jews, men, women, children, in Babyn Jar on 29/30. September 1941 testified. The murderous delusion of the aggressors concerned both the soldiers of the Red Army and the population. The number of civilians murdered in “retribution measures” accepted increasing increases.

Antic communism, anti -Semitism and anti -Lavism caused the special brutality of the German War against the Soviet Union.

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Hellbeck also goes into the role of the partisans and, for example, and reconstructs the biography of Soymodemjanskaja, which is well known to many former GDR students.

The war was also one of the propaganda and words. It is well known how much Goebbels the “truth” bog. With regard to the USSR, Hellbeck emphasizes: “The care is remarkable with which many war rapporteurs, above all Ehrenburg, quoted their sources.” The writer forbade himself to “edit” German texts in order to make them more propaganda. «Propagandists on German and on the Soviet side accused each other of inhumanity. But there was an important difference: According to the Soviet citizens, the Germans had seen their racial policy as subhumans from the start. The Soviet citizens, on the other hand, only doubted their humanity because of the atrocities of the invaders. » Hellbeck writes: “The extent and cruelty of the German violent acts in the Soviet Union were shocking – even for Ehrenburg, who had believed to know everything about Germans and fascism.”

If you want to know why the German War against the Soviet Union was “a war like no other”, you have to read this book.

Jochen Hellbeck: A war like no other. The German war of extermination against the Soviet Union. A revision. S. Fischer, 688 pages, born, € 36.