The Virtuous Wehrmacht : : Crafting the Myth of the German Soldier on the Eastern Front, 1941-1944 / / David A. Harrisville.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Cornell University Press Complete eBook-Package 2021
• VerfasserIn: Harrisville, David A.,
• Place / Publishing House: Ithaca, NY : : Cornell University Press, , [2021]; ©2021
• Year of Publication: 2021
• Language: English
• Series: Battlegrounds: Cornell Studies in Military History
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (328 p.) :; 10 b&w halftones, 1 map

The Virtuous Wehrmacht explores the myth of the German armed forces' innocence by reconstructing the moral world of German soldiers on the Eastern Front of World War II. How did they avoid feelings of guilt for the many atrocities their side committed? David A. Harrisville compellingly demonstrates that this myth was created during the course of the war itself; it was not a postwar whitewashing of events. In 1941, three million Wehrmacht troops overran the border between German- and Soviet-occupied Poland, racing towards the USSR in the largest military operation in modern history. Over the next four years, they embarked on a campaign of wanton brutality, murdering countless civilians, systemically starving millions of Soviet POWs, and actively participating in the genocide of Eastern European Jews. After the war, however, German servicemen insisted that they had fought honorably and their institution had never involved itself in Nazi crimes. Drawing on over two thousand letters from German soldiers, contextualized by operational and home front documents, Harrisville shows that this myth was the culmination of a long-running efforts by the army to preserve an image of respectability in the midst of a criminal operation. Ordinary soldiers were the primary authors of this fabrication, cultivating a decent self-image and developing moral arguments to explain their behavior by drawing on a constellation of values that long preceded Nazism. The Virtuous Wehrmacht explains how the army encouraged troops to view themselves as honorable representatives of a civilized nation, not only racially but morally superior to others

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- List of Terms and Abbreviations -- Introduction: Toward a Moral History of the Wehrmacht in the War of Extermination -- 1. Honorable Self and Villainous Other: Value Systems in the Wehrmacht -- 2. Rationalizing Atrocities: Self-Exoneration in Soldiers’ Letters -- 3. The “Crusaders”: Religious Justifications for Barbarossa -- 4. The “Liberators”: Barbarossa as an Emancipatory Act -- 5. Death and Victimhood: Cultivating Moral Superiority through Burial Practices -- Conclusion: A Myth Is Bor n -- Appendix: Biographical Details on the Core Sample of Soldiers -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index