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War of Annihilation: Combat and Genocide on the Eastern Front, 1941 (Total War: New Perspectives on World War II) | 
 enlarge | Author: Megargee Geoffrey
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Category: Book
List Price: $19.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  6 reviews
Sales Rank: 69929
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 208
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 8.8 x 6 x 0.7
ISBN: 0742544826
Dewey Decimal Number: 943
EAN: 9780742544826
ASIN: 0742544826
Publication Date: October 28, 2007
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Condition: Ships immediately! Perfect and New! 2007 Paperback.
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Product Description
On June 22, 1941, Hitler began what would be the most important campaign of the European theater. The war against the Soviet Union would leave tens of millions of Soviet citizens dead and large parts of the country in ruins. The death and destruction would result not just from military operations but also from the systematic killing and abuse that the German army, police and SS directed against Jews, Communists and ordinary citizens. In iWar of Annihilationi, noted military historian Geoffrey P. Megargee provides a concise history of the Germans' opening campaign of conquest and genocide in 1941.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 1 more reviews...
A fine introduction to an integrated approach to the Eastern Front June 14, 2008
This is the first book on the Russo-German war I have encountered that specifically synthesizes a serious if broad operational history of "Barbarossa" in 1941 and the perpetration of genocide that was one of its major goals. As the author points out, the history of the "Eastern Front" and the history of the Holocaust are usually treated as separate subjects, with military historians often ignoring the racial and ideological components of the war, and Holocaust historians being weak on sound analysis of the fighting. Megargee, who, by his own admission, is not introducing any new theses or scholarship, concisely integrates these two topics.
Readers familiar with the subjects under discussion will probably find nothing earth-shattering here, although as a general refresher to inspire further research it's well-worth the modest investment of time, but those who are well-versed in the strictly operational side of the Russo-German conflict but not the Holocaust and Nazi colonialism, or vice-versa, might find this an excellent starting point to a broader understanding of the war, and of how and why it was fought.
My only reservation would be that this new approach to such an important subject perhaps demands a more massive and densely-documented book, or books, but as far as it goes, it's a valuable contribution.
 War of annihilation? March 8, 2007
9 out of 16 found this review helpful
Megargee's book is a useful contribution to the growing volume of writing that is now (over half a century after the end of the Second World War)becoming available to the English-reading public about what the war was about. It counters the Cold War stories that monopolised writing by "military historians", by generals of the Nazi army and the de-politicised genre of "cowboy and Indians", also largely written by Nazi solders, that were/are popular as derring-do stuff.
This volume helps explain to a new generation (and to an older one that has forgotten much)why the Nuremburg Trials correctly condemned the Nazi Army itself for being a sine qua non, a willing participant, and intrinsic to the programme of Nazi conquest. Without the German Army (and it did not need purging to make it work for Fascism) there would not have been the barbarous war. That was not the work of a minority of bad SS people, a relatively small number of convinced Nazis which, somehow, controlled an unwilling and gentlemanly military machine. It also illustrates that the war was initiated by the Fascist government of Germany in the pursuit of plunder and the destruction of "Bolshevism."
Everything else was secondary to that, including the mass murder of European Jewry, the Rom and Sinta peoples and, by the way, the largest contingent of those on the Nazi list of "subhumans", the Slavs of Poland and the then Soviet Union, as racial perveyors of the virus of Bolshevism.
The author tells a little, also, of the economic requirements of the big employers like Krupp, that the brutal Nazi policies served. Placing the Nazi war aims and conduct before a new set of readers might counter the sort of stuff that is still being peddled, and is popular, such as the works by Anthony Beevor, Richard Overy and John Erickson, who would still have us see the Fascist war on the "East" as part of some unexplained "titanic" struggle that took place between two powerful machines. The only thing they leave out is what the war was about, and Geoffrey Megargee tells us a lot about that.
Good on the publishers - a book that makes a good present to a friend.
Michael Costello
 Poor history from carefully cherry-picked incidents with worse conclusions. February 17, 2007
22 out of 66 found this review helpful
The author, a young "scholar" at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, indicts the German Army on the Eastern Front in total as criminal for its actions against the Jews and its lack of action to prevent their elimination by other organizations. Much of the author's presentation is invalid being based on half-truths, misstatements, and distortion of facts. He overlooks the fact that Hitler was able to use the term "Jewish-Bolshevik" with some accuracy in Germany due to the over-representation of Jews in the Bolshevik leadership and the spearheading of Communist activity in Germany by German Jews. The research is poor, and I grew tired of noting "no!" and "no such evidence!" in the margin while reading. The author treats von Manstein very unfairly, to note one of many. He dismisses Goerlitz's work, "The German General Staff" as containing "a great deal of misleading material" and stating "but its author was himself a General Staff Officer". One is tempted to reply that Megargee is not to be trusted because he works for the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. Megargee also states: "Beware of the German memoir literature! Books by the likes of Guderian and von Manstein are still selling briskly in English and German, but much of what they contain is not to be trusted...." Having read those works and compared the operations described within with other primary sources, I cannot agree with Megargee's statement. Von Manstein specifically mentions his victories at Kerch and Sevastopol as true battles of annihilation in which 260,000 prisoners were taken. "Annihilation" does not always mean killing or murder. The author must surely know that the evidence against von Manstein was extremely contradictory, and that no less a person than Winston Churchill contributed to Manstein's defense (although political motives undoubtedly played a part.) I would have been more sympathetic to the author had he revealed that the Soviets massacred whole villeges of peasants they felt to be unreliable during their retreat in 1941 and 1942, but the author is only interested in damning the Germans. That the war on the Eastern Front was brutal and merciless in the extreme is beyond doubt, but like everything, there were two sides. This work does not present anything new or of interest to the serious historian and is not worth the purchase.
An introduction and overview September 4, 2006
11 out of 22 found this review helpful
This is an excellent, well-written, introduction and overview of the Eastern Front, 1941, with regard to German policies vis-a-vis the general populace. However, the author says upfront that the book is not intended as a work of great scholarship and, as indicated by the footnotes, it is not. Megargee wrote a great book in 2000 about the German General Staff (a WWII "must read"), and has a dream job at the U.S. Holocaust Museum. He is a top-notch military historian in the prime of his career, which is the reason I was so very disappointed with the book's bibliography. His book brings to mind scores of questions, and needs a good bibliography to lead the reader to appropriate literature. Instead, all we get is some lame "bibliographic essay". A definite flaw in the book.
An Outstanding Introduction to the War with Russia April 30, 2006
37 out of 44 found this review helpful
For far too long historians of the Russo German war focused on either the military operations or the abuses of the civilian population in Soviet Russia. The most notably of these were obviously the Jews, although the Slavs and others suffered terribly. Although, in some instances Wehrmacht rear service units and the general staff have been identified as contributing to the escalation of brutality, for the most part the work of murder and starvation has been attributed to the various civil administration authorities and most notably, the SS. It is to this lack of connection between the occupation policies in Soviet Russia and the actual prosecution of the war that Geoffrey P. Megargee addresses in his book. Before I get any further however, let me be clear as to what this book is and is not. As the author informs the reader in the introduction, this book is not a comprehensive history of the Russo German war told from both sides of the story. It is primarily told from the perspective of the German plans and actions. This book is also not a shocking piece of new scholarship. What it is though, is a refreshingly new look at all of the pieces of evidence that have been laid down by other researchers and not previously seen for their interconnected nature. This book is a concise history of both the Nazi war against the USSR and the occupation policies and how the two inevitably led to the defeat of the Germany.
Finally there is the issue of the author's style. Simply said, it is excellent and the book is laid out in a very readable way. Each chapter is divided into sections describing military operation and rear area operations in regards to partisan warfare, POWs and `Jewish actions'. Furthermore, having side by side histories allows the author to clearly demonstrate their interconnectedness. The author uses a good number of sources to make his arguments but does so with a good degree of control in regards to the additional information given in the endnotes. I never once caught myself in the constant back and forth flipping that occurs when a less skilled historian writes a separate book in the endnotes. This book was a quick read and certainly the type of book a person can get through in a single weekend.
In the initial two chapters, the author, in an expert manner lays out the military and social background to the war in the east. He clearly shows how the General Staff's own long held biases, racism, social Darwinism, adherence to the `Stab in the Back' myth of the end of the first World War, and the connection of Jews and communists who supposedly committed this betrayal, led to enthusiastic support of an eastern campaign. Furthermore he shows the complete disregard that the Wehrmacht's leadership had for the well-being, even the very survival of the civilian population and Soviet POWs.
The next three chapters, lay out the various phases of the military campaign against the USSR and describes the several instances in which one army group or another lacked strength to meet an objective and was forced to pare strength from other groups in order to do so. Megargee clearly lays out the failures of resupply and reinforcement that caused this. He does this as well as describing the ever increasing brutality in occupation policies and an equal increase in the strength of the partisan movement. He also goes on to describe both the resources dedicated to the brutal pacification of the rear area and the nonexistence of resources to care for Soviet POWs.
In the last chapter, Megargee shows how the ever increasing brutality against civilians and POWs, intelligence agencies neglected to the point of uselessness and a supply system strained to the point of failure culminated in the Wehrmacht's famous defeat at the very gates of Moscow and Leningrad. Moreover he asserts that it was the racist and elitist beliefs of the General Staff that caused the deliberate starvation and death by exposure of thousands of POWs daily at a time when the German leadership was already beginning to struggle to replace a workforce pulled away for military duty.
In his conclusion the author states, with the weight of the evidence cited to support him, that it was in the opening months of the eastern campaign that the Wehrmacht lost the war. Through their ruthlessness and racist policies from the opening of hostilities as well as their lack of concern for logistics and intelligence gathering, the General Staff threw away any chance that they had of defeating the Soviet Union.
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