UBC: Hitler's Army--and an accounting of books read this year

[truepenny]

Bartov, Omer. Hitler's Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

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This book is obviously influenced by the Historikerstreit (as Dr. Bartov is the first to point out), as it is in large part a refutation of the German-soldiers-as-Hitler's-noble-and-innocent-victims thesis, that thesis being what started the argument in the first place. Bartov disproves this thesis with primary source evidence, particularly the letters of the soldiers on the Eastern front, and his evidence is horribly convincing. Bartov also offers something I have been longing for without knowing it, a nuanced non-binary model of the relationship between the individual and an ideology. He's modifying the "primary group" theory of military success:

[...] some insight into the relationship between the people and the regime may be derived from the notion that while real "primary groups" do not fully explain combat motivation due to their unfortunate tendency to disintegrate just when they are most needed, the idea of attachment to an ideal "primary group," composed of a certain category of human beings, clearly does have a powerful integrating potential. This kind of "primary group," however, is in some respects the precise opposite of the one presented in the original theory, for it is very much the product not merely of social ties, but of ideological internalization, whereby humanity is divided into opposing groups of "us" and "them." Indeed, the sense of identification with one group, and the abhorrence of the other, are in both cases dependent on an abstraction; personal familiarity may only weaken the individual's commitment by revealing the less than ideal aspects of his own side, and the human face of his opponents (which is why armies dislike fraternization). This kind of categorization is of course just as applicable to civilians, and in both cases does not necessitate any profound understanding of whatever world-view one believes oneself to be fighting or working for. Instead, it calls for internalizing only those aspects of the regime's ideology based on previously prevalent prejudices, and most needed to legitimize one's sufferings, elevate one's own status, and denigrate one's enemies, be they real or imaginary.
(Bartov 6)

This formulation dovetails nicely with Kershaw's work on the "Hitler myth," for Bartov shows that fanatical devotion to the Führer was one of the pieces of the Nazi world-view most readily internalized by soldiers on the Eastern front, just as Kershaw showed its operations in the civilian populace. They didn't have to understand what Hitler wanted in order to unite in worship of him.

Bartov also shows the soldiers' belief in their own innate and immense superiority as Germans, and their belief that--as Hitler told them--the Jews had started the war; that if Germany hadn't attacked Russia, Russia would have attacked Germany; that the terrible slaughter of Jews and "commissars" and "partisans" was necessary and deserved; and that Germany was, in fact, heroically defending THE ENTIRE WORLD from the Judeo-Bolshevik menace which would otherwise destroy them all. The polar reversal characteristic of the Nazi worldview was in full operation on the Eastern front.

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Books Read in 2009*
(as close as I'm going to come to a year-in-review type post)

• Allert, Tillman. The Hitler Salute: On the Meaning of a Gesture. 2005. Transl. Jefferson Chase. New York: Picador-Henry Holt & Co., 2008. (06/27)
  
• Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. 1963. 1965. New York: Penguin Books, 1994. (03/03)
  
• Bartov, Omer. Hitler's Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. (12/31)
  
• Berkhoff, Karel C. Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine Under Nazi Rule. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2004. (03/25)
  
• Browning, Christopher R. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. New York: HarperPerennial, 1993. (01/24)
  
• Craig, William. Enemy at the Gates: The Battle for Stalingrad. 1973. New York: Penguin Books, 2001. (08/01)
  
• Demos, John. The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995. (02/21)
  
• Downum, Amanda. The Drowning City. New York: Orbit Books, 2009. (03/11)
  
• Fox, Daniel. Dragon in Chains. New York: Del Rey-Ballantine, 2009. (03/11)
  
• Furet, Francçois, ed. Unanswered Questions: Nazi Germany and the Genocide of the Jews. [L'allemagne nazie et le génocide juif, 1985.] New York: Schocken Books, 1989. (01/05)
  
• Godbeer, Richard. Escaping Salem: The Other Witch Hunt of 1692. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. (12/17)
  
• Green, Anna Katharine. The Leavenworth Case. 1878. Teddington: Echo Library, 2008. (08/10)
  
• Heyer, Georgette. The Black Moth. 1929. N.p: HQN, n.d. (05/14)
  
• Heyer, Georgette. The Black Sheep 1966. Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks Casablanca-Sourcebooks Inc., 2008. (05/14)
  
• Johnson, Alaya. Moonshine (in press). (05/30)
  
• Kershaw, Ian. The 'Hitler Myth': Image and Reality in the Third Reich. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. (12/22)
  
• Koch, H. W. The Hitler Youth: Origins and Development 1922-1945. New York: Dorset Press, 1975. (12/27)
  
• Kogon, Eugen. The Theory and Practice of Hell: The German Concentration Camps and the System Behind Them. [Der SS-Staat, 1946.] Transl. Heinz Norden. 1950. Introd. Nikolaus Wachsmann. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. (01/28)
  
• Lifton, Robert Jay. The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide. New York: Basic Books, 1986. (01/22)
  
• Miéville, China. The City & the City. New York: Del Rey-Ballantine Books, 2009. (07/16)
  
• Maier, Charles S. The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988. (02/04)
  
• Morgan, Edmund S. The Puritan Family: Religion and Domestic Relations in Seventeenth-Century New England. 1944. Revised and expanded. New York: Harper Torchbooks-Harper & Row, 1966. (06/27)
  
• Onions, Oliver. "The Beckoning Fair One." The Collected Ghost Stories of Oliver Onions. 1935. New York: Dover Publications, 1971. 3-70. (03/28)
  
• Reitlinger, Gerald. The SS: Alibi of a Nation, 1922-1945. 1956. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: 1981. (07/09)
  
• Stargardt, Nicholas. Witnesses of War: Children's Lives Under the Nazis. New York: Vintage Books: 2007. (01/16)
  
• Starkey, Marion L. The Devil in Massachusetts: A Modern Enquiry into the Salem Witch Trials. 1949. New York: Anchor Books-Doubleday, 1989. (06/27)
  
• Vinogradov, V. K., Pogonyi, J. F., and N. V. Teptzov. Hitler's Death: Russia's Last Great Secret from the Files of the KGB. London: Chaucer Press, 2005. (06/27)
  
• Waite, Robert G. L. The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler. 1977. New York: Da Capo Press, 1993. (06/27)
  
• Weiner, J. S. The Piltdown Forgery. 1953. Introd. Chris Stringer. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. (09/20)
  
• Wistrich, Robert S. Hitler and the Holocaust: How and Why the Holocaust Happened. London: Phoenix Press, 2002. (02/05)
  
• Yoe, Craig. Secret Identity: The Fetish Art of Superman's Co-Creator Joe Shuster. New York: Abrams ComicArts, 2009. (06/27)
  

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*Not counting the two (three?) binge rereads of Heyer.