Reddit reviews Hitler's Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich (Oxford Paperbacks)
We found 7 Reddit comments about Hitler's Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich (Oxford Paperbacks). Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
It's hard to pin down exactly and by what standard you want to judge "Nazi Ideology".
Were most German soldiers patriotic and nationalistic. Most certainly yes. In Hitler's Army, the author makes strong arguments, using everything from rank and file soldiers diaries to communications between high levels of the Wehrmacht, that the average German believed in the rightness of their cause. That being the restoration of German pride, revenge for Versailles, defense against perceived threats to their way of life (Bolshevism), and defense of their homeland. As the war dragged on, defeatism, anti-Nazi sentiment, and war exhaustion did increase exponentially to where it was openly spoken of, at least by German civilians, their disdain for the Nazi's and Adolph Hitler.
In Ordinary Men, the author zeroes in on a particular police unit in Poland that actively participated in the Ethnic Cleansing of Poland of not only Jews, but Slavs, Poles, and other undesirables. While the book paints a largely dismal picture, showing that many went with the "following orders" principle, it was mixed, but definitely was a majority who participated in the Holocaust and Racist actions.
However, there are constant stories being cited, of German regular army, the Wehrmacht not dealing well with being tasked with taking on Holocaust related actions. There were reports of absenteeism, alcoholism, suicides, and even an occasional refusal of a direct order when these actions had to take place. While clearly these units did participate, it was not a mass action, but the large majority did participate. With what thoughts on their mind we can't say for sure across the board, but we do know that Nazi German soldiers overwhelmingly participated in these acts.
So on the whole, if you want to tie Nazism to the larger ideology of German Nationalism, then yes, the average soldier gladly followed the Nazi lead in this. While ascribing to their racist ideology and activities that related to the Holocaust, the numbers were smaller, but still a significant majority.
All I do is for the glory of the Volcano.
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While we have no idea what this guy in particular thought, most correspondence and diaries found on the bodies of German soldiers showed that the ordinary men of the wehrmacht tended to strongly endorse nazism, and to really believe that they were members of a master race fighting subhumans.
Hitler's ideology was very popular among the rank and file of the german army, hence why the orders to massacre so many soviet civilians were carried out.
Omer Bartov's work "Hitler's army" really does a good job laying this out.
http://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-Army-Soldiers-Oxford-Paperbacks/dp/0195079035
From primary and secondary sources, lol. It's not a fallacy. We have diaries and documents from German soldiers on the eastern front.
Edit: Here, I'll link a good book on the subject.
Part II:
For Stalingrad/Leningrad:
STALINGRAD: How the Red Army Survived the German Onslaught
Leningrad: State of Siege
Enemy at the Gates: The Battle for Stalingrad
To the Gates of Stalingrad: Soviet-German Combat Operations, April-August 1942
Armageddon in Stalingrad: September-November 1942
Stopped at Stalingrad: The Luftwaffe and Hitler's Defeat in the East, 1942-1943
The 900 Days: The Siege Of Leningrad
Kursk:
The Battle of Kursk
Demolishing the Myth: The Tank Battle at Prokhorovka, Kursk, July 1943: An Operational Narrative
Air War:
Barbarossa: The Air Battle July-December 1941
Stalingrad: The Air Battle: 1942-January 1943
Kursk: The Air Battle, July 1943
Bagration to Berlin: The Final Air Battles in the East 1944-1945
Black Cross/Red Star : Vol. 1, Operation Barbarossa 1941
Black Cross / Red Star: The Air War Over The Eastern Front, Vol. 2 - Resurgence: January - June 1942
Black Cross Red Star: The Air War Over the Eastern Front Volume 3
German Army:
War of Extermination: The German Military in World War II
Hitler's Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich
The Myth of the Eastern Front: The Nazi-Soviet War in American Popular Culture
The Wehrmacht: History, Myth, Reality
The Unknown Eastern Front: The Wehrmacht and Hitler's Foreign Soldiers
Death of the Wehrmacht: The German Campaigns of 1942
The Wehrmacht Retreats: Fighting a Lost War, 1943
Partisans:
Defiance
Stalin's Guerrillas: Soviet Partisans in World War II
Holocaust/Genocide:
Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine under Nazi Rule
Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine
Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-Day Ukraine
The Shoah in Ukraine: History, Testimony, Memorialization
The Holocaust in the Soviet Union
Have you read Hitler's Army? I assume if you haven't already then you would really like it. It's an in-depth analysis of the Ostheer and reasons why it devolved into such a brutal and barbaric army. But yes, I understand your point. I've learned enough to know that the Ostfront was a huge mess and is probably pretty exceptional in any case.
Here, required reading in Modern Military History.