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'Holocaust Versus Wehrmacht: How Hitler's "Final Solution" Undermined the German War Effort'

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'Holocaust Versus Wehrmacht: How Hitler's H-Genocide Westermann on Pasher, 'Holocaust versus Wehrmacht: How Hitler's "Final Solution" Undermined the German War Effort' Discussion published by H-Net Vice President of Networks on Friday, November 13, 2015 Here's an interesting review I cam across while reading This Week on H-Net. It was first published on H-War. Review published on Tuesday, November 10, 2015 Author: Yaron Pasher Reviewer: Edward Westermann Westermann on Pasher, 'Holocaust versus Wehrmacht: How Hitler's "Final Solution" Undermined the German War Effort' Yaron Pasher. Holocaust versus Wehrmacht: How Hitler's "Final Solution" Undermined the German War Effort. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2014. xiii + 364 pp. $34.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7006-2006-7. Reviewed by Edward Westermann (Texas A&M University, San Antonio)Published on H-War (November, 2015) Commissioned by Margaret Sankey Gerhard Weinberg, the dean of German diplomatic historians, has long argued that the German military campaigns of World War II and the events of the Holocaust cannot be separated and must be considered together as an integral whole.[1] Indeed, over the last two decades historians of the Holocaust and the German military have increasingly identified the linkages between military operations and Nazi plans for the racial restructuring of Europe, including the destruction of the European Jews.[2] Yaron Pasher’s Holocaust versus Wehrmacht provides an important addition to this literature in a study aimed at exposing “the impact the resources invested in annihilating European Jewry had on the Wehrmacht and its operational abilities” (p. 281). In this regard, Pasher’s work is a natural but innovative extension of previous studies that demonstrated the tension between ideology and economics within the Third Reich as SS planning for the implementation of the “Final Solution of the Jewish question” resulted in severe economic consequences for the overall German war effort. This earlier historiography revealed that Heinrich Himmler, Reich leader of the SS and chief of the German police, focused his SS and police empire on the annihilation of the European Jews even in the face of pragmatic (not moral) protests from the Wehrmacht and Nazi officials in the occupied East concerning the detrimental impact of these policies on wartime production. Pasher reframes this issue by examining the tension between ideology and military effectiveness. In his view, the political imperative driving the annihilation of the European Jews not only outweighed economic considerations, but even military and operational requirements at critical junctures in the war. He argues, “Hitler recognized an opportunity [for the annihilation of the Jews], and he was not about to let it slip away. This insight made him try and adjust his future foreign policy and military strategy to Citation: H-Net Vice President of Networks. Westermann on Pasher, 'Holocaust versus Wehrmacht: How Hitler's "Final Solution" Undermined the German War Effort'. H-Genocide. 11-13-2015. https://networks.h-net.org/node/3180/discussions/96211/westermann-pasher-holocaust-versus-wehrmacht-how-hitlers-final Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-Genocide fit these ideological opportunities” (p. 282). In approaching this topic, Pasher focuses on the organization, policies, and capabilities associated with the German military and civilian logistics infrastructure, specifically the Reichsbahn, or German Railway Service. He asserts, “Train allocation for transporting German Jews to the East had to be balanced with trains carrying ammunition, fuel, food, and other requisites. This is the key to understanding the symbiotic relationship between the Final Solution and the war effort” (p. 41). He perceptively argues that these transports, although a small percentage of theoverall daily German rail traffic, should not be judged in absolute numbers, but relative to the time and place of their movements. In his analysis, Pasher examines four major events in the European war that serve as case studies for evaluating the logistical consequences of the Nazi anti-Semitic mania on the successful prosecution of military operations, including (1) Operation Typhoon (i.e., the battle for Moscow) and German Jewish deportations to the East in 1941; (2) Operation Reinhard and the battle for Stalingrad in 1942-43; (3) the Battle of Kursk, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the Allied invasion of Sicily, and killing operations at the death camps in 1943; and (4) the extermination of the Hungarian Jews and the Allied invasion of Normandy in 1944. Pasher evaluates these events by looking at the opportunity costs incurred to military operations by the use of the Reichsbahn to transport Jews to their deaths instead of using this rail capacity to move supplies, equipment, and personnel to the combat fronts. The answers to be found in this line of inquiry have the potential to provide significant and original insights into debates surrounding Adolf Hitler’s role in the Final Solution, the acquiescence (if not participation) of the Wehrmacht in the process of annihilation, as well as the central role played by logistics in the ultimate defeat of Nazi Germany. The primary sources used in approaching this intriguing analysis are impressive and demonstrate wide research in German, British, Israeli, and American archives. In contrast, the omission of several recent and important secondary sources that have direct impact on Pasher’s conclusions weakens the work and raises questions about specific elements of the argument. For example, since the focus of Pasher’s argument involves logistics and the resupply of German forces, the absence of references to either Christian Gerlach’s or Alexander Kay’s work on the so-called Hunger Plan is perplexing. This plan proposed by German bureaucrats prior to the invasion of Russia demanded the ruthless confiscation of Soviet food resources in order to supply the Wehrmacht, with the explicit understanding that this would lead to the deaths of tens of millions of Soviet civilians due to starvation.[3] While Pasher does refer to the policy of the “main office of the Reich for food supply ... forcing the troops to survive on what they could find within the Soviet Union, mainly by looting the local population,” the absence of a specific and detailed discussion of the process and details of the Hunger Plan is an important omission, especially since this plan materially affected the entire logistical plan for German forces in the East. Similarly, the absence of any reference to Adam Tooze’s monumental work on the German war economy is puzzling. In fact, Tooze provides comprehensive information on key elements of the German economy, including the abysmal condition of the Reichsbahn prior to the war, as well as a strategic context for evaluating the state of Nazi economic power during the war. In the case of the former, Tooze’s argument about the serious shortage of German rolling stock and the “disastrous rail crisis of the winter of 1939-40” could have been used to support Pasher’s argument. In contrast, Tooze’s analysis of the strategic context of German and Soviet wartime production and his contention that “by July 1943 the war was obviously lost” offers a critical rejoinder to an assumption that lies at the heart of Pasher’s overall argument.[4] Citation: H-Net Vice President of Networks. Westermann on Pasher, 'Holocaust versus Wehrmacht: How Hitler's "Final Solution" Undermined the German War Effort'. H-Genocide. 11-13-2015. https://networks.h-net.org/node/3180/discussions/96211/westermann-pasher-holocaust-versus-wehrmacht-how-hitlers-final Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 2 H-Genocide One of the key assumptions undergirding Pasher’s entire argument relates to the belief that even as late as the summer of 1944, Hitler and the Nazi government still had a reasonable chance of either winning the war or gaining a negotiated peace. This assumption has several important implications for the specific case studies chosen in the work, from Operation Typhoon and the battle for Moscow in late 1941 to the invasion of Normandy and the breakout from the beaches in the summer of 1944. In the case of the first, Pasher cites David Stahel’s pathbreaking work,Operation Barbarossa and Germany’s Defeat in the East (2009), on two occasions, but he does not engage with Stahel’s thesis that the failure of the Wehrmacht to conquer the Soviet Union by the end of August 1941 essentially doomed their campaign in the East to failure, a thesis also found in three of Stahel’s subsequent works on the war in the East.[5] Certainly, Pasher can choose to agree or disagree with the findings of Tooze or Stahel in his own research, but it is the failure to engage with these seminal works that constitutes, in the mind of this reviewer, a critical oversight. To be sure, Pasher has a number of excellent secondary sources but the omission of those discussed above and others, including Raul Hilberg’s foundational work on the “Special Trains” to Auschwitz, detracts from his argument and at some points creates the appearance of an argument that has been stretched or overdrawn.[6] From a theoretical point of view, Pasher’s repeated assertions that “just one more division” might have turned the tide in a specific battle or campaign is certainly plausible. However, this assumes that this “extra” infantry or panzer division would have arrived with the necessary supplies and equipment at the right place, at the right time, with sufficient time to detrain at the rail head and move to battle positions. It also makes the assumption of ceteris paribus, that all other things remain the same, and that the adversary would have been unable to react by shifting his own forces or reserves or by changing his own operational plan.
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