Marching into Darkness: The Wehrmacht and the Holocaust in Belarus

Abstract

For decades after the end of the Second World War, the military of Adolf Hitler’s Germany was a myth, referred to using images of bravery, soldiering ability and personal honour. It was not until the 1990s that this concept was finally overthrown, as international research documented the participation of the Wehrmacht in a complex of ideologically motivated crimes against humanity. In the context of the war against the Soviet Union, the close cooperation of German military and paramilitary formations in the Holocaust, the mass starvation of Soviet prisoners of war and the brutal conduct of so-called ‘counterinsurgency’ are of key importance for the understanding of the genocidal policy of the Third Reich. In his work Marching into Darkness, Waitman Wade Beorn draws on the findings of authors such as Christopher Browning, Christian Gerlach and Father Patrick Desbois. He explores the contribution of German soldiers to the elimination of the Belarusian Jews and other crimes of Nazi occupation by establishing a unit-level perspective. Beorn aims to demonstrate the reasons for the complicity and the increasing involvement in mass violence during the second half of 1941. This approach is not limited to military history but also includes the perspective of the victims, the complex relations between military and civil authorities and impressions from the author’s own fieldwork at killing sites.