Ostkrieg, Antibolschewismus und Endlösung

Eastern War, anti-Bolshevism and the Final Solution. The Holocaust was not the result of a definite Hitler order, but of a complex process, to which Unternehmen Barbarossa added a singular dynamism. Nazi and Wehrmacht leaders saw the liquidation of all communist functionaries - the original task of the Einsatzgruppen, not the murder of all Jews - as a guarantee for victory. The Commissar Order and related orders inured the Wehrmacht to unprecedented mass murders. Wehrmacht generals, believing the Einsatzgruppen fiction that the Jews were “partisans and their supporters”, enabled them to increase the number of victims within weeks in geometric progression, turning reprisal shootings into genocide. The transformation of the Auschwitz concentration camp into a center of extermination was triggered by the mass murder of Soviet POWs selected for extermination as communist functionaries or Jews. Anti-Bolshevism was a decisive catalyst in the process that led to the Holocaust.

Geography · German legal, social, and political studies · Globalization, Historical Perspectives, and International Relations · Religion, Theology, History, Judaism, Christianity