The Blindspot — The Eastern Front & Its Aftermath: six books

It is not our remembering the sins of the past that provokes hatred, but the way in which we remember them.

In wartime the worst atrocities do not generally occur in battle, but after the battle is over. A soldier might be able to avenge his fallen comrades by fighting ferociously, but he is in a much better position to do so once his enemy is defeated, disarmed and at his mercy.

Revenge was a fundamental part of the bedrock upon which postwar Europe was rebuilt. Everything that happened after the war, and everything that will be described in the rest of this book, bears its hallmark: to this day, individuals, communities and even whole nations still live with the bitterness born of this vengeance.

One important lesson is that one should be extremely wary of any generalization concerning the conduct of individuals. Extremes of human suffering and even degradation can bring out the best as well as the worst in human nature.

Goebbels’s propaganda did not simply dehumanize Jews, commissars and the whole Slav people, it made the German people fear and hate them.

Women queued for a handout of butter and dry sausage, while men emerged only to line up for an issue of schnapps. It seemed to be symbolic. Women were concerned with the immediacy of survival while men needed escape from the consequences of their war.

Soldiers had various ways of dealing with the real face of capitalism. Some were envious, some intrigued. Later, when they entered Germany, their main reaction would be rage. No one could understand why wealthy Germans had wanted to invade their neighbors to the east, why anyone who had this much would ever fight for more.

For all the rhetoric of unity, however, close friendships still aroused suspicion in police circles. The NKVD monitored soldiers’ conversations at the front, while the Special Section and its successor, SMERSh, whose name was an acronym for the Russian expression “death to spies,” pursued each rumor of dissension.

It was rage that gave the troops their energy. Everything, from the deaths of beloved friends to the burning of cities, from the hunger of the children back at home to the fear of facing yet another hail of shells, everything—even the wealth of bourgeois homes—was blamed on the Germans.

The horror of the twentieth century is thought to be located in the camps. But the concentration camps are not where most of the victims of National Socialism and Stalinism died. These misunderstandings regarding the sites and methods of mass killing prevent us from perceiving the horror of the twentieth century.

The true Nazi agricultural policy was the creation of an eastern frontier empire. The German agricultural question would be resolved not within Germany but abroad: by taking fertile land from Polish and Soviet peasants—who would be starved, assimilated, deported, or enslaved.

Of the fourteen million civilians and prisoners of war killed in the bloodlands between 1933 and 1945, more than half died because they were denied food.

The fundamental problem is to explain why ordinary men—shaped by a culture that had its own particularities but was nonetheless within the mainstream of western, Christian, and Enlightenment traditions—under specific circumstances willingly carried out the most extreme genocide in human history.

As important as the lack of time for reflection was the pressure for conformity—the basic identification of men in uniform with their comrades and the strong urge not to separate themselves from the group by stepping out.

Once the killing began, however, the men became increasingly brutalized. As in combat, the horrors of the initial encounter eventually became routine, and the killing became progressively easier. In this sense, brutalization was not the cause but the effect of these men’s behavior.