War Without Garlands: Operation Barbarossa 1941-1942

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Nobody has written a definitive ‘soldier’s’ account of Operation ‘Barbarossa’. Academic historians and survivors writing on the Russo-German war of 1941–45 generally concentrate on military operations and have often ducked uncomfortable moral issues, or concentrated on one area to the exclusion of the other. I read with interest Paul Kohl’s comments retracing the footprints of the invading Army Group Centre during a historical pilgrimage through Russia in the 1980s.(1) Of 35 Wehrmacht veterans he contacted to assist in the project, only three admitted to having participated in excesses during the conflict. At the other end of the extreme is the Vernichtungskrieg (War of Annihilation) public exhibition travelling the length and breadth of present-day Germany seeking to publicise and lay clear blame for war guilt on the Wehrmacht. The significance is that the present-day Bundeswehr (the Federal Republic of Germany’s Army) developed from the Wehrmacht after the war. There is no shortage of epic and heroic tales from German survivors, who rarely saw an atrocity. Conversely the equally stirring Russian rhetoric of the ‘Great Patriotic War’ tells a similar tale of heroism from a political and ideological perspective. An honest account is that of a Wehrmacht veteran who admitted during a TV interview, ‘if some people say that most Germans were innocent, I would say they were accomplices’.(2)

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