Beorn, Waitman Wade. Marching into Darkness: The Wehrmacht and the Holocaust in Belarus (review)

Abstract

SEER, 93, 3, JULY 2015 580 Voionmaa was not quite expecting an exploitation of the full trip, however, in the confusion of the Kalotti and Northern Russia in 1918 he published two tracts advising his fellow-countrymen to look carefully at the Northern shores, its islands and its seas. Most curiously, this stalwart Social Democrat asked Mannerheim in one of the tracts to forget the victory parades of the civil war and to get up North and seize a piece of the Varanger Fjord so as to bolster the position of Finland in these hitherto neglected lands. Was he before his time? University of Turku George Maude Beorn, Waitman Wade. Marching into Darkness: The Wehrmacht and the Holocaust in Belarus. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA and London, 2014. iii + 314 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Graphs. Notes. Index. $39.95: £29.95: €35.95. Eastern Europe was where Nazi Germany went from persecuting Jews to killing them, first by mass shootings, then by industrialized mass murder in gas chambers. While Hitler’s ideological soldiers in the SS were the foremost perpetrators of the mass shootings, many regular army men also became accomplices. Waitman Wade Beorn’s book deepens our knowledge of this phenomenon by studying how German Wehrmacht soldiers became active participants in the mass murder of Jews in occupied Belarus. Wehrmacht collaboration in Nazi crimes has long been documented, but Beorn’s well-written book is among the first to explore its concrete manifestations on the ground. Based on German sources, mostly soldiers’ post-war testimony and wartime military documents, the book takes a micro-historical approach, concentrating on a handful of individual Wehrmacht units and their evolving entanglement with Nazi genocidal policy. Beorn makes three principal arguments. First, unit culture and leadership largely decided who became a perpetrator. Second, the identification of Jews with partisans and Bolsheviks justified Wehrmacht participation in the murder of Jews. Finally, such participation in itself had a radicalizing effect and led to ever deeper complicity in the Holocaust. How do the main contentions in the book hold up? Let us begin with Beorn’s third, chronological argument, which structures the main chapters of the book. In the beginning, Beorn finds, complicity was improvised and mostly limited to guard duties rather than direct participation in the killings. Many men were reluctant and hesitant to participate. Yet most did what was ordered or expected of them when push came to shove. They pulled victims from their homes and stood guard around killing sites. During the next stage, complicity became less complicated: ‘in less than a month, army units in Belarus had gone from somewhat hesitant collaborators to clumsy but brutal killers’ (p. 134). Next, REVIEWS 581 genocide became ‘routine’. Soldiers now participated extensively in large-scale killing operations, including plunder and sexual exploitation, which reflected a deepening and more routinized form of collaboration. Finally, by the end of 1941, ‘most soldiers and units appear to have internalized the necessity of their role in assisting in the murder of Jews’ (p. 183). Beorn refers to a particular Wehrmacht unit which engaged, on its own initiative, in sadistic ‘Jew hunts’ toward the end of 1941 and into 1942. While the detailed narrative is well-crafted and valuable in its own right, the argument that Wehrmacht complicity evolved in stages leaves something to be desired. To prove it, one would have to demonstrate that most Wehrmacht units involved in the Holocaust followed this same path over time. Beorn, however, looks at different units at different points in time. Since we do not get to follow the units from beginning to end (and into the second and third year of the war), we do not know whether they became more or less radical in the longer run. The book’s second main argument — that the conflation of Jews with partisans and Bolsheviks justified Wehrmacht participation in genocide — is well backed up by the evidence. Beorn concentrates in particular on the Mogilev Conference, convened in late September 1941, where Wehrmacht personnel met with chief SS killers, ostensibly to discuss experiences relating to anti-partisan warfare. Beorn convincingly argues that the conference served to ‘more fully incorporate the army in killings of Jews...