Reluctant Accomplice: A Wehrmacht Soldier's Letters from the Eastern Front - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0691140421 ISBN 13: 9780691140421

Verlag: Princeton University Press, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

An ordinary German soldier’s letters home from Poland and Russia during World War II

Reluctant Accomplice is a volume of the wartime letters of Dr. Konrad Jarausch, a German high-school teacher of religion and history who served in a reserve battalion of Hitler's army in Poland and Russia, where he died of typhoid in 1942. He wrote most of these letters to his wife, Elisabeth. His son, acclaimed German historian Konrad H. Jarausch, brings them together here to tell the gripping story of a patriotic soldier of the Third Reich who, through witnessing its atrocities in the East, begins to doubt the war's moral legitimacy. These letters grow increasingly critical, and their vivid descriptions of the mass deaths of Russian POWs are chilling. They reveal the inner conflicts of ordinary Germans who became reluctant accomplices in Hitler's merciless war of annihilation, yet sometimes managed to discover a shared humanity with its suffering victims, a bond that could transcend race, nationalism, and the enmity of war.

Reluctant Accomplice is also the powerful story of the son, who for decades refused to come to grips with these letters because he abhorred his father's nationalist politics. Only now, late in his life, is he able to cope with their contents—and he is by no means alone. This book provides rare insight into the so-called children of the war, an entire generation of postwar Germans who grew up resenting their past, but who today must finally face the painful legacy of their parents' complicity in National Socialism.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Konrad H. Jarausch is the Lurcy Professor of European Civilization at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His many books include Out of Ashes: A New History of Europe in the Twentieth Century and Broken Lives: How Ordinary Germans Experienced the 20th Century (both Princeton). He lives in Chapel Hill and Berlin.

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"There were German soldiers in World War II who went to war with open eyes. Many condoned what they saw or did not care. Others were shaken, and even they hesitated to write it all down. Their flickers of conscience, the way they struggled to articulate their doubts, their sense of futility in the face of degrading circumstances, and their knowledge of the incommensurability of good deeds in a barbarous war--all this makes the letters of Konrad Jarausch an important and challenging document."--Michael Geyer, University of Chicago

"This is a fascinating and moving collection of letters from the German side of World War II. The esteemed historian Konrad H. Jarausch has edited the letters of his father, a reserve officer on the eastern front, who died of typhoid fever in 1942. With unblinking honesty, Jarausch presents the father he never knew--a deeply religious, well-educated, conservative nationalist, a man sympathetic to the Nazis. Yet amid the brutalities perpetrated by the Third Reich, Jarausch Senior found his common humanity with Nazism's victims. Jarausch Junior's sensitive and intelligent introduction, which masterfully captures the complicated meaning of German history in the twentieth century, only adds to the value of the book."--Eric D. Weitz, author ofWeimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy

"This is a moving collection of letters by Jarausch's father, who served as a soldier in World War II and died in Russia in 1942. Here is the evolution of a patriotic supporter of Hitler's regime into a man so horrified by the reality of German war making, war crimes, and genocide that he gradually loses faith in everything he believed in."--Omer Bartov, author ofHitler's Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich

"A very intriguing book. These letters provide a valuable portrait of a middle-class German at war. His letters are worth reading for his seriousness of purpose, his wonderful eye for detail, and his persistent humaneness in the face of the awful conditions around him. There is poignancy knowing Jarausch looked for and found his own father, whom he never knew, through these letters."--Norman M. Naimark, author ofFires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe

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"There were German soldiers in World War II who went to war with open eyes. Many condoned what they saw or did not care. Others were shaken, and even they hesitated to write it all down. Their flickers of conscience, the way they struggled to articulate their doubts, their sense of futility in the face of degrading circumstances, and their knowledge of the incommensurability of good deeds in a barbarous war--all this makes the letters of Konrad Jarausch an important and challenging document."--Michael Geyer, University of Chicago

"This is a fascinating and moving collection of letters from the German side of World War II. The esteemed historian Konrad H. Jarausch has edited the letters of his father, a reserve officer on the eastern front, who died of typhoid fever in 1942. With unblinking honesty, Jarausch presents the father he never knew--a deeply religious, well-educated, conservative nationalist, a man sympathetic to the Nazis. Yet amid the brutalities perpetrated by the Third Reich, Jarausch Senior found his common humanity with Nazism's victims. Jarausch Junior's sensitive and intelligent introduction, which masterfully captures the complicated meaning of German history in the twentieth century, only adds to the value of the book."--Eric D. Weitz, author ofWeimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy

"This is a moving collection of letters by Jarausch's father, who served as a soldier in World War II and died in Russia in 1942. Here is the evolution of a patriotic supporter of Hitler's regime into a man so horrified by the reality of German war making, war crimes, and genocide that he gradually loses faith in everything he believed in."--Omer Bartov, author ofHitler's Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich

"A very intriguing book. These letters provide a valuable portrait of a middle-class German at war. His letters are worth reading for his seriousness of purpose, his wonderful eye for detail, and his persistent humaneness in the face of the awful conditions around him. There is poignancy knowing Jarausch looked for and found his own father, whom he never knew, through these letters."--Norman M. Naimark, author ofFires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe

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Reluctant Accomplice

A Wehrmacht Soldier's Letters from the Eastern Front

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2011 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-14042-1

Contents

Preface...............................................................................viiForeword by Richard Kohn..............................................................xiiiIn Search of a Father: Dealing with the Legacy of Nazi Complicity.....................1The Polish Campaign...................................................................45Letters from Poland, September 1939 to January 1940...................................53Training Recruits.....................................................................139Letters from Poland and Germany, January..............................................1940to August 1941........................................................................146War of Annihilation in Russia.........................................................237Letters from Russia, August 1941 to January 1942......................................246Acknowledgments.......................................................................367Notes to "In Search of a Father"......................................................369Selected Suggestions for Further Reading..............................................381Index.................................................................................383

Chapter One

The Polish Campaign

The outbreak of the Second World War disrupted millions of lives and plunged Europe once again into a bloody conflict. Hitler's attack on Poland had been long in coming, since the Right never accepted Germany's defeat and the Nazi movement made reversing the "shame of Versailles" into one of its chief propaganda themes. In spite of protestations of peacefulness in order to mislead domestic and international opinion, the Third Reich systematically rearmed, preparing for a second conflict to be waged more ruthlessly and successfully. Hitler cleverly used the reluctance of the victors to grant Germans rights of ethnic self-determination as cover to conquer Austria, annex the Sudetenland, dismantle Czechoslovakia, and demand a transportation corridor to East Prussia. When the West failed to reach an agreement with the Soviet Union and he succeeded in buying Stalin's neutrality on August 23, 1939, war became inevitable. Because German civilians remembered the privation of the First World War, many of them were notably unenthusiastic about another struggle.

Konrad Jarausch was mobilized and sworn in on September 1, 1939, since he was still young enough to serve and not essential enough to the home front to be exempted. Although he had been drafted in June 1918 and trained for the field artillery, he had been saved from going to the front by the armistice in November. Because he had been transferred to the reserves after his thirty-eighth birthday in February 1938, he was called up as a member of battalion V/XI of the Landesschützen (territorial defense forces) from Magdeburg. As an academic he was anything but military in physique or bearing, yet he complied out of a Prussian sense of duty and also because he wished to participate in a historic event that he had missed the first time around. Surprisingly enough, he was quickly promoted to the rank of Obergefreiter (private first class) on October 1, 1939, and to Unteroffizier (noncommissioned officer) on January 1, 1940. This initial advancement was a result of the Wehrmacht's need for competent personnel as well as of his superiors' recognition of his leadership abilities.

Like many other soldiers, my father observed the rapid victory over Poland with amazement and gratitude. On paper, both sides fielded almost equal numbers of troops, tanks, and airplanes, but in practice the fighting quickly turned into a rout. Britain and France failed to mount a relief attack in the West, while on September 17 the Soviet Union occupied the Eastern Polish territories according to the provisions of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, taking advantage of Poland's focus on the West. The Poles fought gallantly, but the Wehrmacht had better equipment and a superior strategic position, invading from three sides at once: in the north from East Prussia, in the middle from Brandenburg, and in the south from Silesia. With giant pincer movements the German army bottled up the Polish forces around Warsaw and eventually defeated the remnants around Lublin. During the fierce fighting not only the SS but also the regular army began to commit atrocities against Jews and Polish civilians, prefiguring what would become the Holocaust. When on October 6 the Polish army capitulated, Hitler had won his first, perhaps all too easy, blitzkrieg victory, cementing his popularity.

As a member of the reserves, Konrad Jarausch was assigned to security duties during the Polish campaign and its aftermath. Due to reports of guerrilla activity, the Landesschützen were used to secure significant objects like train stations and search the woods for snipers behind the Army Group South in the former Prussian province of Posen. His own unit was ordered to guard POWs, who continued to be captured in large numbers due to the rapid advance. This responsibility involved selecting ethnic Germans who could be sent home quickly, picking out Poles who had to be controlled until the fighting was over, and identifying Jews, increasingly subject to anti-Semitic persecution. Because of his intellectual training Jarausch tended to be assigned to writing reports, giving background lectures, or leading small groups of guards. Repelled by the often rough and alcohol-centered comradeship of army life, he nonetheless strove for a degree of acceptance in his troop. Although these tasks kept him away from the fighting, they brought Jarausch close enough to the front to witness the war's devastating effects.

Unlike many of his comrades, he developed a keen interest in the conquered country and people, wondering how Germans and Poles might be able to live together in the future. To begin with, Konrad Jarausch was fascinated by the east central European landscape in which he discovered many similarities to his native Brandenburg. At the same time, he was appalled by the poverty of many rural towns where he detected architectural traces of earlier aristocratic rule, subsequent Prussian administration, and the new national Polish state. As a practicing Protestant, he was also interested in his own denomination's conflation with German nationality and in the Catholic piety of the Poles, which he saw as one of the sources of their patience in suffering and pride in their own culture. In order to bridge the gap between occupier and occupied, he also tried to learn a bit of the Polish language. While welcoming the return of former Prussian provinces, he was less sure about the success of ethnic resettlement schemes and of harsh Germanization policies. As a historian he sensed that a new order had to rest on more than force and would need to leave space for a degree of Polish identity.

Konrad Jarausch saw the suffering of the war through the lens of the nationalities' struggle, somewhat tempered by a sense of Christian humanism. His credulity regarding tales of German victimization and gladness over the "liberation" of lost territories show that he shared some of the prejudices that justified harsh occupation measures as necessary retaliation. But his descriptions of the streams of refugees and of the plight of the defeated Poles evince a considerable amount of sympathy for the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Princeton University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2011
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0691140421
• ISBN 13: 9780691140421
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 392
• Herausgeber: Jarausch Konrad H.
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchbär; info@buchbaer.de; ; Weberstr. 67; Osnabrück; 49084; Deutschland