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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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."
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