Omer Bartov

Bartov, a scholar of genocide, argues that the ongoing genocide is in part the result of Israel’s failure to adopt a real constitution, as well as, in the shorter term, Biden’s failure to exert pressure when he could. For an American, the surprising thing is how seriously he seems to take the idea that Trump might pressure Netanyahu into doing something.

In Erased, Omer Bartov uncovers the rapidly disappearing vestiges of the Jews of western Ukraine, who were rounded up and murdered by the Nazis during World War II with help from the local populace. What begins as a deeply personal chronicle of the Holocaust in his mother’s hometown of Buchach — in former Eastern Galicia — carries him on a journey across the region and back through history. This poignant travelogue reveals the complete erasure of the Jews and their removal from show more public memory, a blatant act of forgetting done in the service of a fiercely aggressive Ukrainian nationalism.

Bartov, a leading Holocaust scholar, discovers that to make sense of the heartbreaking events of the war, he must first grapple with the complex interethnic relationships and conflicts that have existed there for centuries. Visiting twenty Ukrainian towns, he recreates the histories of the vibrant Jewish and Polish communities who once lived there-and describes what is left today following their brutal and complete destruction. Bartov encounters Jewish cemeteries turned into marketplaces, synagogues made into garbage dumps, and unmarked burial pits from the mass killings. He bears witness to the hastily erected monuments following Ukraine’s independence in 1991, memorials that glorify leaders who collaborated with the Nazis in the murder of Jews. He finds that the newly independent Ukraine-with its ethnically cleansed and deeply anti-Semitic population — has recreated its past by suppressing all memory of its victims.

Illustrated with dozens of hauntingly beautiful photographs from Bartov’s travels, Erased forces us to recognize the shocking intimacy of genocide.

Source: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691131214/erased show less

Hitler's Army: Soldiers, Nazis, And War In the Third Reich
Omer Bartov

Omer's thesis is that the Wehrmacht was far from the professional, nonpolitical force it has often been portrayed to be in postwar histories. This is a thesis that has been promulgated in an increasing number of more recent histories, I came to this book prepared to believe it, and Bartov does in fact make a very strong case. Hence the title, Hitler's Army.

Bartov develops four supporting subsidiary theses. The first is that show more the Wehrmacht was rapidly demodernized in the brutal fighting on the Eastern Front. The "demodernization" that Bartov speaks of is the rapid loss of the technical edge of the Wehrmacht, most visible in its high tank losses but extending even to company-level equipment, which led to the bulk of the Wehrmacht fighting a trench war very much like World War I for most of the war.

Bartov's second subsidiary thesis is the destruction of the primary group. By "primary groups" he means the social structure of squads, platoons, and companies that had trained and fought together, the "band of brothers." He quotes extensively from letters and cites casualty statistics that show how incredibly bad the attrition was and how little chance there was of meaningful primary groups remaining intact or being reestablished once destroyed. He argues instead that the continuing ability of the Wehrmacht to fight so well rested on its increasing Nazification. This is in direct opposition to the school of thought, first developed by Dupuy and most clearly articulated by van Creveld, that the fighting power of the Wehrmacht was almost entirely due to its excellent unit cohesion, which was a creation of its primary groups. Bartov shows quite convincingly that the Wehrmach's institutions and policies for maintaining the primary group existed mostly on paper once the war of attrition in the East kicked in -- and it kicked it much earlier in the fighting than has been recognized. This may be because the Russians suffered much more visible attrition, deflecting attention away from just how much the Germans were hurting.

I note that Bartov seems to regard the fighting in the West as mostly a side show, largely irrelevant to really understanding the real nature of the Wehrmacht. Yeah. That sounds like cherry picking. Still, it's certainly true that most of the Wehrmacht did most of its fighting in the East and it's plausible this is where its character was mostly shaped after 1941.

Bartov's third subsidiary theme is the inversion of discipline. Germany executed far more of its own soldiers in the Second World War than in the First, but almost never for crimes against civilians or enemy combatants. The troops were kept fighting, in part, through brutal discipline towards those who showed cowardice or disobeyed orders -- but, at the same time, crimes against civilians or enemy prisoners were ignored or even encouraged. Bartov argues that the combination had the effect of maintaining fighting strength by making the entire Wehrmacht guilty together; losing the war was unthinkable because of the retribution every soldier knew was likely to follow.

Bartov's fourth and final thesis was that the soldiers of the Wehrmacht were indoctrinated with a world view that had strong religious overtones and which was actually the inverse of reality. He seeks to demonstrate that, the worse the Nazi crimes became, the more the soldiers blamed their own crimes on their victims -- a particularly powerful example of projection. He demonstrates that even opponents of the regime at the time, and German historians decades later, subconsciously lapse into Nazi ideological language in their letters and other writings. This was probably the weakest part of the book, and it's no surprise that this is also the part where Bartov's own political agenda peeks out. Bartov tells us, in effect, that Germans and non-Germans who argue that the postwar German army was important as a bulwark against Communism are just a bunch of neo-Nazis. He is clearly unsympathetic to a reunited Germany (this book was published in 1992) and I have to admit that this made me a bit unsympathetic to Bartov.

Nevertheless, the book is worth reading, and most of the theses stand up. Thumbs up. show less

Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz by Omer Bartov tells of the violent history in a small Polish town during World War II, when people who lived side by side their whole lives turned on one another. Mr. Bartov is an Israeli scholars who went off to write a family history and stumbled onto something bigger.

This is the book I was waiting to read for a long time. I have had interest in World War II for many decades, I read numerous history books and works of show more fiction, all trying to explain human nature and the brutality which ensued, seemingly out of nowhere.
But we all know that it wasn’t out of nowhere.
And we all know that atrocities don’t just “happen”.

Mr. Bartov’s mother was raised in Buczacz (present day Ukraine), one day on offhand remark to her son raised his interest. Mr. Bartov started digging, trying to learn how his family lived and died.
Mr. Bartov failed to write a family history, but succeeded enormously in writing a fascinating and important book about the European mindset which caused the justification of genocide.

Buczacz lies in the middle of a politically charged region, due to its strategic importance. The town received its unfair attention from rival superpowers which put a microscope to the region and to the populace.

The violence against Jews did not start with the Third Reich, and sadly did not end with its demise. The district which had a population of Jews, Christians, Poles, and Ukrainians all living together relatively peacefully for centuries. Rivalries always exist where people are, Mr. Bartov analyzes those rivalries, especially those between the Poles and Ukrainian, which was made even more complicated when the Nazis invaded. The Soviets plan was to incorporate the region into the Soviet Union, something the Ukrainians embraced and the Poles rejected, the conflict which started before the First World War saw the population of the region reduced by one-third by the time 1945 came around.

So how did ordinary men and women turn on their neighbors during World War II?

As I mentioned, Anti-Semitism started much earlier, when Jews were lumped together with Russians, communists, and savage hordes. Portrayed as aliens which will not be assimilated into the society, Jews were looked upon as a subversive element. During the wars, this false rhetoric was manifested into mass murder. The Germans transformed the local Ukrainian militia into a district police force which committed dreaded atrocities at an “astonishing ease”. People killed those they personally knew, men, women, children, and friends.

This book of the mindset of mass murder and genocide is an important book which is well written and easy to read. Not only an important history book, but a cautionary tale as well.

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