Winner of the Wallace K. Ferguson Prize:
"The Holocaust in History"
by Michael R. Marrus
Published by: A Meridian Book, New American Library, New York
[In] Serbia, where
the Wehrmacht was in charge... the Germans faced... uprising that began
on 22 June , with the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union. As the insurgency
spread, the Wehrmacht imposed an ever more draconian reprisal policy, spreading
terror throughout the Serbian countryside. Doubtless the ruthlessness of
the repression flowed in part from
the occupation troops' contempt for the local population, often assimilated
in the Nazis' minds with the savage inhabitants of eastern Europe.
But the specific terms of reprisal came from Berlin. Concerned at
the extent of the disturbances, armed forces chief of staff Wilhelm Keitel
sent strict instructions to shoot large numbers of
hostages. Given that Jews and Gypsies were stigmatized as primary
enemies of the Reich, it was but a short step to feeding them to the firing
squads, ... Christopher Browning's research into Wehrmacht reprisal policy
shows how this slid easily into a "final solution" for local Jews - or
at least the males among them. "As long as the anti-Jewish measures in
Serbia were perceived and construed as military measures against German's
[i.e. Wehrmacht's] enemies," he observed [in his book Fateful Months,
on page 49], "it did not require Nazified zealots [among the Wehrmacht
troops] (though such were not lacking), merely conscientious and politically
obtuse professional soldiers to carry them out." On the strength of such
conscientiousness and obtuseness, the number of reprisal shootings approached
twelve thousand by the end of 1941.
NOTE: It is no surprise that the Nazi minds did not change over time.
The newest "New World Order" propagandists once again painted the Serbs
as "savage inhabitants of eastern Europe". The New York Times and other
mass-media propagandists openly called the Serbian people - "backward",
"Eastern oriented", "byzantine",...
- Common suffering of Jews and Serbs
The truth belongs to us all.
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Last revised: Sept. 7, 1997