Second World War

Scholarship over the past decades has brought into question this portrayal of a “clean
Wehrmacht,” especially in relation to the eastern front of the Second World War. The Germans
launched Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union, on 22 June 1941. The eastern
front immediately became the focal point of the war, not only because of the numbers of men
employed in operations, but because the Soviet Union was a primary target of Hitler’s ideology.
Hitler’s anti-communism and anti-Semitism, combined with his concept of Lebensraum [living
space], gave Nazi policies in the east a particularly sinister character. With Operation
Barbarossa, the Holocaust escalated from the ghettoization of Jews to their mass murder by
the Einsatzgruppen, paving the way for the establishment of extermination camps in 1942.
During the war, more than 3 million Soviet prisoners of war and 15 million Soviet civilians died
as the result of Nazi starvation policies or repression measures. In many respects, the brutal
confrontation in the east between the Nazi and Soviet brands of totalitarianism was the
culminating point of the totalitarian age.
Over the course of the term, through a series of three assignments, you will re-examine the
“clean hands” thesis and evaluate the extent of the German army’s involvement in the Nazi
regime’s criminal policies in occupied Soviet territory. Each assignment builds upon the other,
simulating the methods that historians use to conduct research. In the first assignment, you will
use library databases to gather reliable sources for research into the topic of the German
army’s role on the eastern front. In the second assignment, you will read, summarize, and
evaluate an article-length secondary source on the topic. The third assignment will provide you
with primary source material, permitting you to draw your own conclusions in a research-style
essay.