Submitted by:  Omer Bartov
        bartov@RCI.RUTGERS.EDU


Wehrmacht Exhibition and Symposium (NYC)

I am not sure who Mr Thomas Reimer is and what his own agenda might be.
But I feel constrained to respond to his posting lest it be taken at face
value by some readers of H-German.

Let me say that I am on the organizing committee of the Wehrmacht
Exhibition and symposium at NYC. In that sense I am not an objective
commentator. But there are several objective facts that need to be
established and cannot be waived through any kind of tired apologetics.

That the Wehrmacht was involved in mass crimes in the Soviet Union is by
now a well established fact. Some 3.3 million Red Army POWs out of 5.7
captured died at the hands of the Wehrmacht or after being passed on to
other Nazi agencies. Between 25-30 million Soviet citizens, the majority
of them innocent civilians, died during the German occupation. The
Wehrmacht was heavily involved in the destruction of an estimated 70,000
villages, towns, and cities in the USSR. It was directly responsible for
the death of about 1,00,000 citizens of Leningrad during its siege of that
city. It was the primary provider of forced labor in the USSR
(whose compensation is still being debated today). And it was both
indirectly and directly involved in the genocide of the Jews. These facts
are not denied by any respectable historian today. Rolf-Dieter Mueller, in
his rather apologetic introduction to the massive volume, Die Wehrmacht:
Mythos und Realitaet, does not try to deny any of these facts. He merely
thinks that not all, and perhaps only a minority of Wehrmacht soldiers
took part in such crimes. Yet the book he introduces, and enormous amounts
of research dating from the 1960s to, most recently, Christian Gerlach's
detailed study of the German occupation of Belorussia, indicate massive
involvement of the Wehrmacht on all levels. My own study of several combat
divisions on the Eastern front confirms these findings.

Mr Reimer may agree with all this and merely argue that some of the
photographs in the Wehrmacht Exhibition are wrongly labled. That is
possible, but is of little relevance to the issue at hand. The task of the
exhibition was and is not to present unknown or doubtful facts to the
public; it is to present to the public what historians have known for a
long time, but has been difficult to accept by the general public in
Germany, namely, that the German army served as the instrument of
destruction, subjugation, and murder, on an unprecedented scale during
World war II. That other political systems and other nations have also
carried out mass crimes before, during, and after World war II in no way
diminishes the responsibility of those Germans involved in mass murder.
One would hope that fifteen years after the Historikerstreit, we should be
past such unhelpful debates.

As I noted a couple of years ago here, what is interesting is the
difference in German reactions to the Goldhagen thesis and to the
Wehrmacht Exhibition. While in the former case, despite his rhetoric,
Goldhagen pointed a finger at men who could hardly been seen as

representative of the German population, the Wehrmacht Exhibition does
precisely that, without employing the rhetoric of "all Germans." The
Wehrmacht was the people's army; it also became Hitler's army, and as such
it committed widespread crimes. Since up to 20 million German men (and
some women) served in the German armed forces, this is a fact that is
difficult to accept. But that should make it no less true.

Omer Bartov
Rutgers University

----------------------------------------

Omer Bartov
Professor of History and Project Co-Director
"Utopia, Violence, Resistance: Remaking and Unmaking Humanity"
Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis
Rutgers University
88 College Avenue
New Brunswick, NJ 08901
Tel. (732) 932-8701/8706 Fax (732) 932-8708
Project e-mail: rcha@rci.rutgers.edu
URL http://rcha.rutgers.edu

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