themselves.”147 The scholarship agrees that Germany conducted a racial war of annihilation in the Soviet Union.

Linking German officers’ agency with the Haltbefehl and criminal orders is possible because the Wehrmacht treated them the same. Omer Bartov stated that the disappearance of machines on the Eastern Front in 1941 and 1942 “demodernized” the campaign. This

“demodernization” forced German soldiers into the “utmost primitiveness” and caused high losses. Therefore, to stave off the collapse, the army “ruthlessly implemented an extremely harsh disciplinary system, to which was given not merely a military, but also an ideological legitimation.” The army allowed German soldiers to direct their anger at enemy soldiers and civilians. Yet the Wehrmacht did not punish German soldiers for their crimes because it had legalized criminal orders for Operation Barbarossa. The Wehrmacht leadership’s legitimizing of criminal orders put them on equal standing with military orders. They expected its officers and soldiers to fulfill both.148

This thesis indirectly supports the scholarship that the Wehrmacht chose to follow

Hitler’s criminal orders, but it also argues against the commonly accepted historiography that Hitler’s 16 December Haltbefehl ended the Prussian-German concept of Auftragstaktik.

Scholars have supported this view by noting the multiple commanders whom Hitler and his German High Command removed from command because they withdrew their units in defiance of Hitler’s order. Scholars often reference the retreat of Generaloberst Heinz

147 Wolfram Wette, The Wehrmacht: History, Myth, Reality, trans. by Deborah Lucas Schneider (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2011), 195-196; 93; 122; 263; 1-2; 25; 93; Stephen Fritz, Frontsoldaten: The German Soldier in World War II (Lexington, Kentucky: The University Press of Kentucky, 1995), 237. 148 Omer Bartov Hitler’s Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 12; 17; 28; 69-70.

60