Omer Bartov, a leading scholar of the Wehrmacht and the Holocaust, provides a critical analysis of various recent ways to understand the genocidal policies of the Nazi regime and the reconstruction of German and Jewish identities in the wake of World War II. Germany’s War and the Holocaust both deepens our understanding of a crucial period in history and serves as an invaluable introduction to the vast body of literature in the field of Holocaust studies.Drawing on his background as a military historian to probe the nature of German warfare, Bartov considers the postwar myth of army resistance to Hitler and investigates the image of Blitzkrieg as a means to glorify war, debilitate the enemy, and hide the realities of mass destruction. The author also addresses several new analyses of the roots and nature of Nazi extermination policies, including revisionist views of the concentration camps. Finally, Bartov examines some paradigmatic interpretations of the Nazi period and its aftermath: the changing American, European, and Israeli discourses on the Holocaust; Victor Klemperer’s view of Nazi Germany from within; and Germany’s perception of its own victimhood.
Table of Content
Introduction PART ONE: War of Destruction
1. Savage War: German Warfare and Moral Choices in World War II
2. From Blitzkrieg to Total War: Image and Historiography PART TWO: Extermination Policies
3. Killing Space: The Final Solution as Population Policy
4. Ordering Horror: Conceptualizations of the Concentrationary Universe
5. Ordinary Monsters: Perpetrator Motivation and Monocausal Explanations PART THREE: Interpretations
6. Germans as Nazis: Goldhagen’s Holocaust and the World
7. Jews as Germans: Victor Klemperer Bears Witness
8. Germans as Jews: Representations of Absence in Postwar Germany Abbreviations
Acknowledgments
Index
About the author
Omer Bartov is the John P. Birkelund Distinguished Professor of European History at Brown University. Among his many books is Mirrors of Destruction: War, Genocide, and Modern Identity.
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