It would be hard to imagine a better, and certainly a more up-to-date, introduction to the Jewish holocaust and the scholarly controversies it has engendered. Omer Bartov, whose research on the role of the Wehrmacht (German army) in Nazi crimes has helped to shatter many comfortable myths about that key institution, here presents a selection of the best and most searching writings on the holocaust. The selections range from Raul Hilberg's analysis of European anti-Semitism (a reminder that many scholars had isolated this as key to the Nazis' policies long before Daniel Goldhagen made his "discoveries" in "Hitler's Willing Executioners"), to a meditation by Alan Finkielkraut on the Klaus Barbie trial and the notion of "crimes against humanity." Sandwiched in between is a fine overview of the functionalist/intentionalist controversy in holocaust scholarship (the debate over whether the holocaust was primarily the willed result of Hitler and other Nazi ideologues' hatred of the Jews, or an unplanned consequence of war, demographic policy, internecine rivalries, and bureaucratic momentum). Bartov has selected the essays with great sensitivity, and provided brief introductions to place them in scholarly, historical, and human context. A bonus is the inclusion of Primo Levi's unforgettable essay "The Gray Zone," which explores the politically-charged issue of Jews' coerced collaboration with the forces of mass murder. This book is ideal for introductory classes on the holocaust or genocide in general, and as a primer for those who want to find their feet in the scholarly debate, which shows no signs of waning.

I came across a review of this book by Tom Munro. The book does have a certain value in that it shows the plight of the individual German soldier in Russia. It is a well written account of combat conditions on the eastern front. Where I must make a stand is in the fact that we get blamed for all the evils brought about by the war in the east. What we were facing in Russia were no angels. Th russian soldiers and above all the partisans were capable of extreme cruelty (pick up a copy of Grenadiers by Kurt Meyer or Campaign in the East by Leon DeGrelle) to see what I mean. It is irreverent to write about and judge men who (as the book very well specifies) were in combat for weeks at a time. The effect of the constant strain of combat(both physical and mental, not to mention spiritually) is overwhelming, add to this the fact that in Russia anybody could be your enemy and you became a living time bomb. Seeing the body of a dead comrade is beyond anything I can put into words; but to know that he was tortured and butchered like some sort of animal awakens a distant dormant and primitive feeling in you.
All you seek is revenge, this fact is not conveyed in this book nor any other, for no matter how good a writer you are you had to experience it first hand. The book conveys quite a few facts about "life" on the eastern front and it gives the reader a glimpse of the hell we had. What it can't do is justify one side and blame the other as all evil. Writers in general should expose matters from an objective point of view and allow readers to use their intelligence to sort things out. The book has quite a well rounded and interesting format and seems to have been well researched. I give it 3 stars.

This book should be on the shelf of every student of WW II history. Bartov is one of the first historians to detail in English the real truth behind the shameful conduct of the German army on the Eastern front and dispel the myth of the "honorable" German army that was propogated during the years after the war. Bartov also wonderfully details the horrible conditions experienced by the German soldiers that he asserts helped lead to their barbarous conduct as well as the criminal orders by Hitler. In addition to dispelling the myth of the "honorable German army" he also does a wonderful job of dispelling any myth that the fighting on the Eastern front was mechanized and that the German army wasn't as fully mechanized as is commonly believed, they mostly relied on horses. This is another important part of his study. All in all, a wonderful book and deserves to be an important part of any WW II Eastern front collection.

This book dispels any myths of the German soldiers as any other soldiers. It shows how their racist Nazi theories influenced them. Don't listen to former Nazi soldiers,..., for the facts. What the Germans did in Russia is beyond civilized conduct.

No one who views this book can any longer doubt the complicity and cooperation of the general German armed forces, or Wehrmacht, in the murderous acts of Germany's ignominious Third Reich. Literally hundreds of graphic and horrific photographs show average German soldiers shooting, hanging, bludgeoning, or otherwise mistreating, torturing, and murdering helpless civilian men, women and children during operations on the eastern front. This is a grim but necessary book.

Most surprising is the fact that the photographs were originally part of a German exhibition held in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the end of World War Two, and constitute a damning condemnation of the role of the average German soldier (as opposed to other specialized Waffen SS or Einsatzgruppe SS units) in visiting the whole panoply of horrors of egregious war crimes on the native populations of the subjugated countries during Operation Barbarossa. These were not crimes committed against opposing military forces, but were rather crimes committed against war prisoners, Jews, and other civilian segments of the subjugated regions.

This is, by its very nature, not an easy or pleasant book to view or read. One does so reluctantly and only in an effort to learn more about the demons that ultimately threaten each of us, as we face personal responsibility for all of our acts as individuals. The conclusion one reaches after viewing these photographs and reading the accompanying text is humbling, shocking, and intensely relevant, even though some fifty years have passed. With similar shocking events composing the headlines and bylines of contemporary news casts, the most shocking thing one realizes is that the world evidently has not yet learned from its past, as events in Bosnia, Rwanda, Kosovo, and Somalia make perfectly clear. Human life is still held in little regard, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned in the blood and hate of ethnic, tribal, or national pedigrees.

One problem with the book is that many of the photographs are small and difficult to appreciate in their full impact without a magnifying device. This, however, is a small quibble with a brave, terrible, and significant book such as this one. This is a book we should share with all those cynics who doubt that the Holocaust happened. Perhaps they can explain the hundreds of photos of ordinary German soldiers committing mayhem and murder in some clever fashion. Of course, the debate over what happened is not over. But this book and the documentation it constitutes makes understanding of the Holocaust and how it happened more possible.

Through declassification of wartime documents and research into archives newly made available after the dismemberment of the Soviet bloc, far more detailed analysis of German war crimes and genocide is possible, indeed is necessary. Most studies of mobile extermination squads, the Einsatzgruppen, and the death camps emphasize the principal role of various branches of the SS in mass murder. Studies of the war on the Eastern Front have tended to focus on the herculean battles waged and the stratregy and tactics employed from the inception of Operation Barbarossa in June 1941 to the 1945 fall of Berlin to the Red Army.

Generally, the German Army, the Wehrmacht, has escaped censure for the Holocaust in its earliest improvisational form and its later administratively controlled manifestation (the German Army wins no plaudits for treating Red Army prisoners according to the Geneva Convention but this seems to have greatly bothered relatively few Western historians).

This book explodes the myth that the German Army was not complicit in wholesale murder of Jews, Gypsies and anyone else targeted by the Nazi state. Comprised of very many damning photographs from a controversial exhibit in Germany and supplmented by an expert historian's analysis, "The German Army and Genocide" is not the last word on the subject but it will spur new research and force needed reappraisal of the conventional wisdom.

The controversy over the exhibit, and this book, is not over. Presentation of the exhibit in New York City has been delayed because of claims about the authenticitiy of some of the photographs and the accompanying legends. Nonetheless an increasing coterie of Holocaust and World War II scholars are finding ample evidence that the Wehrmacht not only aided the SS and the many reserve police battalions engaged in rounding up Jews and others for murder, its top field commanders knew full well what they were enabling and, in some cases, were enthusiastic albeit not very loud supporters.

The photos in this book are not easy to view. With their penchant for documentation, the Wehrmacht captured the sometimes agonised, occasionally amazed expressions of their victims just before they were murdered. This is, however, a chronicle that should be viewed by all interested in the reality of the Final Solution and the barbarity of the German onslaught into the East.

"In what way have we sinned, that we should be treated worse than animals? Hunted from place to place, cold, filthy and in rags, we wander about like gypsies and in the end are destroyed like vermin!"

The origin of this lamentation-- perhaps a victim of the Holocaust? No, rather an excerpt for a letter written by a German soldier on the Western Front in November of 1915. I found this book very interesting as far as it went. Omer Bartov sets the stage for the argument that the experience of the Great War set the paradigm which made the Holocaust possible. Personally I've suspected this for a long time and Bartov mentions many similarities between trench warfare and the death camps. Less pervasive is his description of the perpetrators as "frustrated pacifists". In addition Bartov has interesting comments concerning the way that industrial killing in general and the Holocaust in particular are commemorated. In the end however I thought he could have carried his main argument further, but all in all a worthwhile book and definitely needed in this field.

Bartov's book takes a slanted view of the expirence of the german soldier in ww2. Probably the best chapter deals with the demoderinzation of the german army through primitive field conditions, massive casualties etc. From that point on however, the book takes a dive. My main complaints are the fact that in many places his thesis dosen't tie together and he often repeats himself, but thats just a personal peeve. Much more important is the fact that he relies on a very small measure of early war correspondence to prop up his thesis. Common sense should tell you that when a army is winning (1941-42) that correspondence will reflect a great disdain for the enemy.Another dissapointment is the fact that Bartov chose only to examine the was in Russia versus a look at the German army on all fronts.Yet another gripe is that Bartov chose only 3 german units for his study,which I find inadequate for the subject at hand. I feel the book should have been much longer and indepth and should have examined a variety of conditions that played a vital role in the east, eg; the lack of desire on both sides to take prisoners,partisan activity,and propaganda. The lack of exploration on these subjects and their affects on the combat soldier's psyche left me feeling the presence of revisionism was near.

Bartov does a fine job revealing how the average German soldier thought, how the savagery of the combat combined with their own racialist attitudes towards their opponent to allow them to commit or tolerate the commission of atrocities. Bartov also describes how the vaunted mechanized Panzer army quickly bogged down into WWI-style infantry combat, and that the high rate of casualties destroyed German unit integrity. Bartov's description of German soldiers' "war tourism," including photographing mass executions of Jews, dispels myths about the "good" Germans. They may not have all been Nazis, and they were not all war criminals, but by and large they did share Hitler's racial attitudes. This accounts for their grim fanatical resistance as well as the atrocities. Highly recommended.

I had to read Bartov's book for a college class years ago and recently re-read this wonderful book. As historians, I like to believe that most of us want to know why things have happened vs what has happened. Bartov's "Hitler's Army" does just that. It is common for Americans 50 years later to want to believe that the whole of WWII Germany were good, patriotic people fighting for a cause that they were brainwashed into believing. Bartov's "Hitler's Army" explains how the average German male, growing up in Nazi Germany, joining the Hitler Youth, and being just as patriotic as GI Joe was, came to be the tool of Nazi ideology, especially on the Eastern front. Bartov's comparisons of "average" soldiers on the Eastern front vs "average" soldiers on the Western front gives a prime example of how Nazi ideology had influenced the minds of German youth. Given the psychological and physical impact of such intense combat under the gruesome conditions the Eastern front soldier had to deal with, it is common for men to cling to beliefs in order to justify their actions. Beliefs instilled in them through years of conditioning, backed by severe punishment if they failed to follow such beliefs and actions forced upon them by their commanders. German soldiers were no different than Marines of the Pacific theater. Marines who collected Japanese ears and gold teeth as souvenirs. Bartov does a superb job of placing blame where it needed to be placed. At the same time, Bartov allows the reader to understand how the accused were breed into such positions of blame. An excellent read for anyone who wants to understand the mindset of the "average" German soldier during WWII.

This is a somewhat eccentric book. Bartov's most famous book, "Hitler's Army," was a devastating emprical study of the complicity of the German Army in Hitler's crimes. This is a somewhat more theoretical work, and its weaknesses show. Much of it is construed from essays Bartov has written over the past few years. The first chapter "Fields of Glory" deals essentially with Germany's path to the war and its subsequent self-pity. The second chapter, "Grand Illusions," does the same for France, while the third "Elusive Enemies," deals with elusive enemies as an element in the rise of Nazism. The fourth deals with "apocalyptic visions," which argues that the persistence of utopia and apocalypse was also crucial to the existence of modern genocide. A conclusion deals with the German novelist Bernhard Schlink's "The Reader" and a partial defnse of Binjamin Wilkomirski's controversial and probably fraudulent "Fragments."

As the sum of these parts "Mirrors of Destruction," leave much to be desired. It is somewhat repetitive, (parts of chapters one and two are recapitulated in chapter three), and more important it is often abstract and vague. Although it has excellent footnotes, with exhaustive references to the recent literature (oddly enough, only Peter Novick's The Holocaust in American Life, is missing) it is not clear that the books assist Bartov's argument. As an example, in chapter three Bartov seeks to discuss the utopian impulse, and discusses such phenomenon as nostalgia of the past, the expansion of European influence, imperialism, Darwinism, the inherently totalitarian nature of gardening (I'm only slightly joking--see page 151), apocalyptic thought, Soviet totalitarianism, population control, capitalist overconfidence, the mass media and the rise of musuems, colonial cruelty, modern warfare, the crisis in modern historiography, scientic rationality and many others. The main problem with this list is that it dilutes the concept of utopia and apocalypse to something so ubiquitous, that it has no more explanatory power than the weather. There are many questionable comments, such as on page 149 that "universal utopia assumes the ultimate eradication of boundaries, between sexes or races, classes or faiths, the present and the future." Now aside from the many utopian impulses who had no interest in doing any of those things, and confining ourselves to the Nazis who are the subject of this book, it is clear that they wished to reinforce boundaries between sexes, and their interest in removing class boundaries was substantly less in simply redefining them out of existence.

At one point Bartov argues that the special agony of the Holocaust is that most of the perpetrators got off very lightly, while the survivors suffered from guilt over their "good fortune." But clearly this does not distinguish the Holocaust from a large number of atrocities which have been inadequately dealt with. And survivors will feel guilty even after natural disasters where humanity could not be held responsible. There is at times a certain sententiousness in Bartov's work, such as that which lead Peter Novick to comment that "The problem with most of these lessons is not that they're wrong but that they're empty, and not very useful." "...what--short of moving to the woods--does one do with the `lesson' that the Holocaust is emblematic of modernity?" Likewise Bartov's account of German and French reactions to the Holocaust are not helped by his abstract and theoretical account. Although Bartov offers qualifications, he also speaks of "the Germans," and "the French" and speaks of complicity in such a way that the distinctions between anti-semitic thought and anti-semitic deed are conflated, as is anti-semitism and learning German and publishing under Vichy. There are risks about such a promiscuous notion of complicity: it could encourage an Anglo-American sense of superiority to the European continent. Such reflections on evil has encouraged fatuous Christian apologists of the ilk of C.S. Lewis that 6 million Jews died so to vindicate the Christian doctrime of original sin. Like most discussions of the horrors of the Twentieth century, Bartov does not really discuss the cruelties of the Showa Dictatorship (it gets a paragraph on page 138). This I believe is a mistake: Japan is not a minor country, Asia is not a minor continent, certainly not this century, and the millions of deaths attributable to the armies of the Rising Sun should not be ignored simply because their evil did not have the purity of essence of the Nazi or Armenian genocides.

What does give this book an importance larger than these flaws comes from Bartov's discussion of Israel's own tortured reaction to the Holocaust. Instead of the account of France's failure to confront Vichy, which has become almost commonplace in the last two decades, we meet interesting accounts of Hannah Arendt, Raul Hilberg, Tzvetan Todorov, Wolfgang Sofsky, and Christopher Browning. At the end of the fourth chapter we find a long discussion of the Israel writer Ka-Tzetnik. Ka-Tzetnik is a juvenile writer, pornographic, mentally disturbed. Yet his account provides a special knowledge of the atrocity not provided by any other writer. More so than much discussion, Bartov's discussion gives at least a partial truth to his statement "that when we look in the mirror of the Holocaust, we see our own reflection."

This book was an awful book it talked about really dumb things. He wants to let catapillers take over the world and i think that that is horrible he also thinks that we should be slaves to the catapillers because they are the smartest creatures known to man. He thinks that we shouls let the squirrels take over to.

This book is such a [bad] book... Imean this book made me want to puke... He sais squirrels are the smartest creatures and that we should give them a chance to rule us. He wants us to slaves to the catapillers too because he thinks that catapillers are the greatest creature in the world. If you are thinking of buying this book, dont because you will regret it for the rest of your life, so please do not because you will be left stupider than when you read it.