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Marching into Darkness: The Wehrmacht and the Holocaust in Belarus
On October 10, 1941, the Jewish population of the Belarusian village of Krucha was rounded up and shot. This atrocity was not the routine work of the SS but was committed by a regular German army unit acting on its own initiative. Marching into Darkness is a bone-chilling exposé of the ordinary footsoldiers who participated in the Final Solution on a daily basis.Although scholars have exploded the myth that the Wehrmacht played no significant part in the Holocaust, a concrete picture of its involvement has been lacking. Marching into Darkness reveals in detail how the army willingly fulfilled its role as an agent of murder on a massive scale. Waitman Wade Beorn unearths forced labor, sexual violence, and grave robbing, though a few soldiers refused to participate and even helped Jews. Improvised extermination progressively became methodical, with some army units going so far as to organize "Jew hunts." The Wehrmacht also used the pretense of Jewish anti-partisan warfare as a subterfuge by reporting murdered Jews as partisans. Through military and legal records, survivor testimonies, and eyewitness interviews, Beorn paints a searing portrait of an army's descent into ever more intimate participation in genocide.
333 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 6, 2014
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January 19, 2014I must begin with an unusual sort of disclosure: I have at least some stake in the success of this book, as it was my first professional indexing job (I don’t get royalties; however the better it does, the better I look to potential clients). In addition to being the indexer, I’m friends with the writer. I’ve reviewed my friends� books on goodreads before, but never, as it were, when I had “skin in the game� to any degree. Therefore, although my enthusiasm for this book is genuine, readers will want to consider my possible biases in making their own decisions. In fairness,I will not rate this book in “stars,� or any others which I have indexed. One of the benefits of being an indexer, however, is that I give the books I work on very close readings, so I can discuss the book in considerable detail. That’s what I prefer to do anyway, as those familiar with my reviews will know.
This book is, as its subtitle states, a study of the German regular army and its involvement/complicity with the Nazi genocidal project in the area today called Belarus, and at the time known alternately as the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic, Generalbezirk Weissruthenien, “White Russia,� or “Eastern Poland� depending on which authority one referred to. The slipperiness of the region probably explains in part why little scholarship has been done on the occupation of this area, which is now no doubt facilitated by Belarus� current status as a sovereign nation. Beorn successfully navigates the difficulty of identifying a “borderlands� region with little national identity or history, and the movement of borders is documented by two helpful maps at the beginning of the volume.
As a scholarly monograph, this work jumps into current Holocaust debate with both feet. Particularly, Beorn stakes a claim within the ongoing discussion between “intentionalists� and “functionalists� among Holocaust historians. The “intentionalist� camp, which includes Harvard professor Daniel Goldhagen, argues that the genocide of the Final Solution was the intended result of Nazi rule from the beginning, while “functionalists,� which include Christopher Browning from the University of North Carolina, argue that the policy developed over time in response to external factors and decisions made by the leadership at various levels. Beorn was Browning’s advisee in graduate school (I suppose a further disclaimer, that I’ve had a beer or two with Browning myself, is in order), so there’s no particular surprise where in this debate he positions himself, however he makes every effort to analyze the evidence without preconceptions, and is interested in more than defending the functionalist argument.
Rather, Beorn is more interested in examining the involvement of “ordinary men� as “Hitler’s willing executioners� in a project that was far greater than most participants perceived or understood. Since the Second World War, Germany as a nation has repeatedly been taken to task for failing to confront the moral crisis of the Holocaust, and the responsibility of average Germans for supporting and participating in it. The “Nazis� (by which is often meant only high-ranking, strongly ideological Party members) and especially the SS have become, in one historian’s words “the alibi of a nation.� By contrast, the Wehrmacht, or regular army, is supposed to have remained “clean,� as they served only as decent soldiers in an indecent war, and therefore are not accountable for atrocities or excesses.
Beorn blows apart this “myth of the clean Wehrmacht� in the course of this book, demonstrating clearly that regular army soldiers assisted Einsatzkommandos by rounding up, guarding, burying, and even shooting Jews, and that as the war progressed, Wehrmacht units increasingly took on anti-Jewish “actions� on their own initiative. Unsatisfied with monocausal explanations of soldier complicity, Beorn combines research into psychological factors (including the so-called “authoritarian personality�), organizational culture, unit cohesion, masculinity, and leadership in search of a more nuanced answer. His ultimate explanations may not satisfy all readers, but the mass of evidence he presents for the range of choices available to and taken by Wehrmacht soldiers will inform future attempts to understand the horror of genocide.
For his case studies, Beorn has focused on killings in a few towns (Slonim, Novogrudok, Krucha, and Krupki) and on a conference of leading Wehrmacht and Einsatzgruppen occupiers in the city of Mogilev, at which some smaller “actions� also took place. He uses a careful timeline to demonstrate the movement of men and units through four “stages� of complicity � from dutiful but grudging assistance to fully internalized acceptance of the Nazi genocidal project. It is this argument, that soldiers did not arrive at the Front fully prepared to begin mass exterminations, but had to be moved in that direction by propaganda, leadership, and circumstances, that will be identified as most fully “functionalist� about the overall text, and in this sense Beorn makes a compelling case, based on his evidence. The question one might ask is how selective he has been in choosing case studies that chronologically confirm his “stages,� or, more fairly, whether these cases, which simply happen to be the best documented, suggest a progression that could be disproven if a wider range of evidence were available. These questions may well lie at the heart of future “intentionalist� challenges to this work.
Nevertheless, what emerges is a fascinating story that is bound to have its impact, particularly among those wanting to preserve a “myth of the clean Wehrmacht� or a sense that most of the men on the Eastern Front were unaware of genocidal efforts. Beorn has documented the involvement of ordinary occupation troops at every level of the killing process, and also as profiteers and exploiters of the situation for sexual benefits. This is not to say, however, that he demonizes his soldiers, or deprives them of agency. Beorn also documents rare instances in which soldiers rescued or assisted Jews, or refused outright to participate in murder. In one instance, a simple “no� from a commanding officer got an entire Company off the hook, without any repercussions or punishment. Indeed, what Beorn has found confirms previous findings that individuals who refused participation in the Holocaust were not under immanent threat of death to themselves or their families, as has sometimes been claimed, but that the Nazi authorities simply found it easier to reassign them rather than confront their refusal. Even within the Hell of the Holocaust, individuals did have personal responsibility for their actions, it would seem.
Unfortunately, such refusal was demonstrably too rare and too feeble to end the killing project entirely. For that reason, the Holocaust will never make cheerful reading, but it remains vital that it, and other instances of extreme human inhumanity be studied. Waitman Beorn has applied thoughtful and original analysis to one part of it, which hopefully will stir further research that may one day help us to prevent its recurrence.
This book is, as its subtitle states, a study of the German regular army and its involvement/complicity with the Nazi genocidal project in the area today called Belarus, and at the time known alternately as the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic, Generalbezirk Weissruthenien, “White Russia,� or “Eastern Poland� depending on which authority one referred to. The slipperiness of the region probably explains in part why little scholarship has been done on the occupation of this area, which is now no doubt facilitated by Belarus� current status as a sovereign nation. Beorn successfully navigates the difficulty of identifying a “borderlands� region with little national identity or history, and the movement of borders is documented by two helpful maps at the beginning of the volume.
As a scholarly monograph, this work jumps into current Holocaust debate with both feet. Particularly, Beorn stakes a claim within the ongoing discussion between “intentionalists� and “functionalists� among Holocaust historians. The “intentionalist� camp, which includes Harvard professor Daniel Goldhagen, argues that the genocide of the Final Solution was the intended result of Nazi rule from the beginning, while “functionalists,� which include Christopher Browning from the University of North Carolina, argue that the policy developed over time in response to external factors and decisions made by the leadership at various levels. Beorn was Browning’s advisee in graduate school (I suppose a further disclaimer, that I’ve had a beer or two with Browning myself, is in order), so there’s no particular surprise where in this debate he positions himself, however he makes every effort to analyze the evidence without preconceptions, and is interested in more than defending the functionalist argument.
Rather, Beorn is more interested in examining the involvement of “ordinary men� as “Hitler’s willing executioners� in a project that was far greater than most participants perceived or understood. Since the Second World War, Germany as a nation has repeatedly been taken to task for failing to confront the moral crisis of the Holocaust, and the responsibility of average Germans for supporting and participating in it. The “Nazis� (by which is often meant only high-ranking, strongly ideological Party members) and especially the SS have become, in one historian’s words “the alibi of a nation.� By contrast, the Wehrmacht, or regular army, is supposed to have remained “clean,� as they served only as decent soldiers in an indecent war, and therefore are not accountable for atrocities or excesses.
Beorn blows apart this “myth of the clean Wehrmacht� in the course of this book, demonstrating clearly that regular army soldiers assisted Einsatzkommandos by rounding up, guarding, burying, and even shooting Jews, and that as the war progressed, Wehrmacht units increasingly took on anti-Jewish “actions� on their own initiative. Unsatisfied with monocausal explanations of soldier complicity, Beorn combines research into psychological factors (including the so-called “authoritarian personality�), organizational culture, unit cohesion, masculinity, and leadership in search of a more nuanced answer. His ultimate explanations may not satisfy all readers, but the mass of evidence he presents for the range of choices available to and taken by Wehrmacht soldiers will inform future attempts to understand the horror of genocide.
For his case studies, Beorn has focused on killings in a few towns (Slonim, Novogrudok, Krucha, and Krupki) and on a conference of leading Wehrmacht and Einsatzgruppen occupiers in the city of Mogilev, at which some smaller “actions� also took place. He uses a careful timeline to demonstrate the movement of men and units through four “stages� of complicity � from dutiful but grudging assistance to fully internalized acceptance of the Nazi genocidal project. It is this argument, that soldiers did not arrive at the Front fully prepared to begin mass exterminations, but had to be moved in that direction by propaganda, leadership, and circumstances, that will be identified as most fully “functionalist� about the overall text, and in this sense Beorn makes a compelling case, based on his evidence. The question one might ask is how selective he has been in choosing case studies that chronologically confirm his “stages,� or, more fairly, whether these cases, which simply happen to be the best documented, suggest a progression that could be disproven if a wider range of evidence were available. These questions may well lie at the heart of future “intentionalist� challenges to this work.
Nevertheless, what emerges is a fascinating story that is bound to have its impact, particularly among those wanting to preserve a “myth of the clean Wehrmacht� or a sense that most of the men on the Eastern Front were unaware of genocidal efforts. Beorn has documented the involvement of ordinary occupation troops at every level of the killing process, and also as profiteers and exploiters of the situation for sexual benefits. This is not to say, however, that he demonizes his soldiers, or deprives them of agency. Beorn also documents rare instances in which soldiers rescued or assisted Jews, or refused outright to participate in murder. In one instance, a simple “no� from a commanding officer got an entire Company off the hook, without any repercussions or punishment. Indeed, what Beorn has found confirms previous findings that individuals who refused participation in the Holocaust were not under immanent threat of death to themselves or their families, as has sometimes been claimed, but that the Nazi authorities simply found it easier to reassign them rather than confront their refusal. Even within the Hell of the Holocaust, individuals did have personal responsibility for their actions, it would seem.
Unfortunately, such refusal was demonstrably too rare and too feeble to end the killing project entirely. For that reason, the Holocaust will never make cheerful reading, but it remains vital that it, and other instances of extreme human inhumanity be studied. Waitman Beorn has applied thoughtful and original analysis to one part of it, which hopefully will stir further research that may one day help us to prevent its recurrence.
November 5, 2017
A detailed account of the Wehrmacht's complicity in the Holocaust in Belarus. Not for the casual WWII reader because this is not a novel-like narrative of this difficult time, and some portions can be especially disturbing. Instead, it is a heavily researched and almost academic study; its intent is to disprove the traditional belief that the Wehrmacht's role in the Holocaust was ancillary. The author demonstrates that the German army, with few exceptions, was an active and often eager participant in atrocities committed against the Jews.
February 3, 2024
Very good and detailed account of how the Wehrmacht rapidly became complicit in the Holocaust over the course of 1941. He draws on the histories of individual units assigned to occupation duty in various localities occupied Belarus as the front moved eastward. While there were some soldiers and officers who avoided participation in the killing of the Jews, and even would demonstrate decency and heroism, as a rule most soldiers went with the flow and willingly participated in the executions, either supporting it with security to seal off areas, or in many cases pulling the trigger. Beorn provides a solid discussion of how the Wehrmacht's organizational culture helped enable this, along with the social pressures of soldiers to go along with the others. One key point was the Mogilev Conference in September 1941 that laid out the extermination polity, what was expected of army units, and how to go about the nuts and bolts, complete with a field demonstration. Lots of factors involved in this overall history, and the author does a fine job unpacking them. Depressing, but important reading.
January 31, 2025
An excellent book on the collection of accounts from average German soldiers on the Eastern Front and their direct involvement in the mass murders in the early stages of the Holocaust.
December 19, 2014
A Wehrmacht atrocity in occupied USSR painstakingly examined.
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