Bibliographical Essay

While the Eastern Front now commonly figures as the epicentre of violence during World War II, scholars disagree on the nature and cause of this violence. In Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010), Timothy Snyder casts the German and the Soviet dictator as rival evils, jointly responsible for the suffering of millions.

Michael Burleigh refers to the USSR and Nazi Germany as “brotherly enemies', each the common foe of decent humankind (Moral Combat: A History of World War II [London: Harper, 2010], p. 76). Mark Edele and Michael Geyer's co-authored piece oscillates between such neo-totalitarian framings and an insistence on the singularity of Nazi violence - a re flection perhaps of disagreements among the two contributing authors: Mark Edele and Michael Geyer, “States of Exception: The Nazi-Soviet War as a System of Violence, 1939-1945', in Michael Geyer and Sheila Fitzpatrick (eds.), Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 345-95. On the other edge of the spectrum, Christian Streit, in ‘Keine Kameraden': Die Wehrmacht und die sowjetischen Kriegsgefangenen 1941-194} (Paderborn: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1978), and the Hamburg Institute for Social Research, in Hannes Heer and Klaus Naumann (eds.), War of Extermination: The German Military in World War II (New York: Berghahn, 2000), have spearheaded research that explains Germany's war of annihilation in terms of colonial imperialism, anti-Semitism and anti-communism. For an excellent synthesis, see Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939-March 1942 (New York: HarperCollins, 2007). Paul Hanebrink's A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth ofJudeo-Bolshevism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018) makes a more pointed contribution by showing how in the wake of World War I anti-communist fears became fused with a longstanding history of antiSemitism to spark a new, genocidal war.

Klaus-Michael Mallmann makes the important point that Soviet Jews in the Nazi imagination, as instigators and carriers of a “Jewish Bolshevik terror regime', differed from Jews elsewhere in Europe. The war against the Soviet Union, he points out, began with designs for a “final solution of Bolshevism'. “Only with the conflation of two central images of the enemy - Jews and communism - and their mutual imbrication and reinforcement did a genocidal dynamic arise.' Klaus-Michael Mallmann, “Die Türoffner der "Endlosung”. Zur Genesis des Genozids', in Gerhard Paul and Klaus-Michael Mallmann (eds.), Die Gestapo im Zweiten Weltkrieg: Die ‘Heimatfront’ und besetztes Europa (Darmstadt: Primus, 2000), pp. 437-63, at 443-4.

Earlier histories of the Holocaust insisted on a rigid distinction between war and genocide and imagined the Holocaust apart from other horrors perpetrated during World War II. By contrast, recent studies are sensitive to the intricate dynamic between ethnic prejudice and war, and they embed the mass murder of Jews into the history of the Second World War; see, for instance, Omer Bartov's locally grounded study, Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018). Several recent studies have called attention to the Soviet victims of the Holocaust; see Yitzhak Arad, The Holocaust in the Soviet Union (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009); and Yad Vashem's online platform, “The Untold Stories: The Murder Sites of the Jews in the Occupied Territories of the Former USSR', www.yadvashem.org/untoldstor ies/homepage.html.

Nazi violence rested in good measure on the elaboration of a distinct Nazi morality - one sanctifying German culture, and necessitating the eradication of “Jewish' universality; see Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), Eric Michaud, The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004) and Raphael Gross, Anständig geblieben: Nationalsozialistische Moral (Frankfurt: Fischer Verlag, 2010). For the Soviet side, historians have barely begun to historicise Stalinist wartime morality.

Many studies favour liberal projection over historical understanding: Richard Overy, author of Why the Allies Won (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), writes that the Anti-Hitler Alliance functioned as a moral coalition ‘only to the extent that the West was able to suppress or at least lighten their [Soviet] ally's dark image' (p. 296). In line with this view, scholars understand Soviet wartime documentations of Nazi violence predominantly as politically motivated atrocity propaganda; see Marina I. Sorokina, ‘People and Procedures: Toward a History of the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in the USSR', Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 6.4 (2005), 797-831, and Karel Berkhoff, Motherland in Danger: Soviet Propaganda during World War II (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). However, when placed into the wider context of wartime documentation across Nazi-occupied Europe, Soviet documentary efforts no longer appear unique. Everywhere in Europe, Nazi violence prompted initiatives among occupied populations to record acts of violence in order to solicit support in the struggle against Nazism. Everywhere records of German violence were created for the purposes of mobilising readers into action. See Laura Jockusch, Collect and Record! Jewish Holocaust Documentation in Early Postwar Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) and Sarah Bennett Farmer, Martyred Village: Commemorating the 1944 Massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

By May 1943, 80 per cent of the Red Army's personnel had reportedly participated in at least one of more than a thousand ritualised Meetings of Vengeance, held on sites where Germans had tortured and killed Soviet civilians (Brandon Schechter, The Stuff of Soldiers: A History of the Red Army in World War II through Objects (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019), p. 112). Mark Edele makes a strong case for the revenge thesis, by pointing out that all Allied soldiers were more likely to rape German women than those of other nationalities, and that the Red Army was particularly fierce among the occupiers of Germany.

Mark Edele, ‘Soviet Liberations and Occupations, 1939-1949', in Richard J. B. Bosworth and Joseph A. Maiolo (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Second World War, vol. ii (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 487-508, at 492-4. Even those historians who support the revenge thesis do so mostly on political grounds; they portray the soldiers as stirred up by a propaganda of hatred and skirt the issue of personal experience. Oleg Budnitskii tries to discount the revenge thesis by arguing that some Jewish Soviet officers whose families had been killed by Nazis practised restraint, while many soldiers who did not suffer personal losses raped German women; see Oleg Budnitskii, ‘The Intelligentsia Meets the Enemy: Educated Soviet Officers in Defeated Germany, 1945', Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 10.3 (2009), 629-82. And yet his study reads as a sustained demonstration of the workings of a Soviet morality shaped by the experience of Nazi violence and summed up in the dictum, ‘We're not Germans.'

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Source: Edwards Louise, Penn Nigel, Winter Jay (eds.). The Cambridge World History of Violence. Volume 4: 1800 to the Present. Cambridge University Press,2020. — 676 p.. 2020

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