Hitler's Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich

In Hitler's Army, Omer Bartov focuses on the titanic struggle between Germany and the Soviet Union-where the vast majority of German troops fought-to show how the savagery of war reshaped the army in Hitler's image. Both brutalized and brutalizing, these soldiers needed to see their bitter sacrifices as noble patriotism and to justify their own atrocities by seeing their victims as subhuman. In the unprecedented ferocity and catastrophic losses of the Eastern front, soldiers embraced the id...