Germany's War and the Holocaust

Omer Bartov is the John P. Birkelund Distinguished Professor of European History at Brown University. Among his many books is Mirrors of Destruction: War, Genocide, and Modern Identity.

Bartov has been in the forefront of historians who have debunked the myth of the innocent, professional, correct German Wehrmacht. He demonstrates that the German army in Russia violated all norms governing the rules of war.(International History Review) Bartov is wise when wisdom is required, hard-hitting when scholarship is inaccurate or inadequate to truly understand the Holocaust, and open to learning from each discipline. He is firmly rooted in history, but not held back by it. He is open to new ideas and new means of presenting the Holocaust—open, but certainly not uncritical. These essays solidify his growing reputation.(The Forward) Bartov's arguments are always interesting, sometimes brilliant. His writing is elegant. He never forgets the moral implications of the scholarly arguments he dissects with such clarity and verve.- H-German (H-Net Reviews) Bartov's book... is among the most accessible books for the layman hoping to understand the contours of the current historiography on the Holocaust.... Bartov draws nuanced but crucial distinctions between wartime atrocities generally (including those of the other combatant states of the Second World War) and those that Germany committed, especially on the Eastern Front, which were, as he shows with precision, uniquely terrible. Although Bartov is an innovative military historian, in his essay on the diaries of the great German conservative, patriot, and Jew, Victor Klemperer, he also displays a subtle grasp of social and cultural developments, especially the growing, and in the end nearly total, Nazification of German society under the Third Reich.(The Atlantic Monthly)

• IntroductionPART ONE: War of Destruction1. Savage War: German Warfare and Moral Choices in World War II2. From Blitzkrieg to Total War: Image and HistoriographyPART TWO: Extermination Policies3. Killing Space: The Final Solution as Population Policy4. Ordering Horror: Conceptualizations of the Concentrationary Universe5. Ordinary Monsters: Perpetrator Motivation and Monocausal ExplanationsPART THREE: Interpretations6. Germans as Nazis: Goldhagen's Holocaust and the World7. Jews as Germans: Victor Klemperer Bears Witness8. Germans as Jews: Representations of Absence in Postwar GermanyAbbreviationsAcknowledgmentsIndex