Reading Grossman's “Stalingrad” and ”Life and Fate”
adamtooze.substack.com
adamtooze.substack.com
My grandfather was a teen during the war, spending most of it under the occupation as a cow herder in Grodno, a small-ish city that is now on the westmost edge of Belarus. For him, war rolled over really quick one way over that town and then rolled over the other way, and in the middle was lots of hunger and keeping your head down.
I took my girlfriend to visit with them back in early oughts and we were walking around through the Grodno old town and she was asking about a certain part of town that seemed to her to be in a really poor upkeep and he answered - well this is where the ghetto was situated, near synagogue, and nobody really wanted to do much with that part of town after all the jews were "liquidated" in 43. I am sad to say that even though I spent every summer in that town, I never really noticed until then. She told me it was really the first time the war became truly real to her.
For me it was when I was little, I remember working in the garage with my family and this one older guy, we were painting something, and it was hot, so he took off his shirt. Underneath, he was completely covered by this elaborate criss-cross pattern of scars all over his body. I asked him what it was and he said he was in infantry retreating in summer of 1941 and their battalion was taking shelter in a burned out village where only the central stoves of the houses were left (wood outside, brick inside) and people were hiding behind the stoves and the tanks opened up with heavy machine guns, exploding the bricks and cutting people up with the sharp clay pieces. He said he was one of just few survivors because he hid inside one of the stoves, everyone else got cut to pieces on the outside.
Nice article. I'm always impressed with accounts of what were in the minds of Soviet soldiers. I'd also recommend Nobel's Laureate Svetlana Alexievich book "The unwomanly face of war", a book of interviews with women that fought the war.
There's also an excellent translation with light commentary of Grossman's journalistic notes and articles from the war, "A Writer At War". Something that separates him from even certain more modern commentators is an intense concern for the experience of the ordinary soldiers, not just the cut and thrust of grand strategy and leadership.
It's much shorter book and an easier read but still an important account of a specific part of war that Grossman also briefly touched. That is a retreating army and what happens to soldiers and the leadership. The leadership skills are an important learning part. How to inspire and lead a completely demoralized, tired and hungry group of people.
A soul shaking book. It changed my outlook on bureaucracy/society/humanity.
This is a narrative flourish meant to grab the reader's attention, but it's also an inadmissible interference by the author, and one where he inserts his own bias. I find Beevor's style very hard to take, since I don't enjoy being told what to think.
Contrast this with someone more dispassionate, such as David Glantz. He will tell you about the Eastern Front with more dry facts and less "going inside the minds" of generals or ordinary soldiers (UNLESS there is a reference that supports this). The resulting account is both more factual, with less author's ideology seeping through, but also drier and harder to read. Boring at times, even.
So Beevor is "more fun" to read than Glantz, but also way less impartial and more concerned about telling the reader what to think, and I really dislike that.
Do u have an opinion on Peter Zeihan? Horribly entertaining, but is it speculative analysis or pure fiction?
> Artistic license, and so forth
I know, but because this is a history book (even if it's more "pop" history) the shape of the authorial voice matters more than in a fictional novel. Beevor's voice is often misleadingly disguised as impartial information, enough that I'm sure lots of his readers actually think everything he describes happened exactly like he said, inner thoughts included.
Now, if "Stalingrad" was a historical novel like "I, Claudius", where you understand the author is making many things up for the sake of entertainment, that'd be fine -- but I don't think that's what Beevor intends.
It certainly added an extra dimension to be shivering from fever while reading about those poor cold souls.
Mentioning it to my grandfather would break him and he would just walk away.
He stabbed dead Germans and fellow Russians with his bayonet to make sure they were dead. It's messed up.
Just to give one example: the male/female ratio post-war was 3:4, and has never exceeded 9:10 ever since. It had a profound effect on gender dynamics, which persists to this day.
That's one of the reasons mail-order brides often hail from ex-USSR countries: it's to escape not only the economic conditions, but the social ones too.
The Soviet Union, of course, inherited Imperial Russia's participation in WWI (~3 million dead), as well as the Russian Civil War that immediately followed (Another ~8 million dead).
If you're ever wondering why Russia is so paranoid about maintaining buffer states, and foreign encirclement, look no further than those numbers.
Another difference is the death rate in terms of the proportion of men 18-60. Losing that population is more catastrophic than if the deaths are more evenly distributed.
For example, in France after WW1 it became normal for women to marry old men and crippled men. Men who survived WW1 and later WW2 in Germany had their pick of wives, and women tended to not marry at all (WW1) and married foreigners (WW2).
I.e. both rate of deaths and the demographics of the deaths matter a great deal.
It's true that the demographic impact of the death toll was more skewed, depending on whether or not the war was happening right on your doorstep, and on whether or not the Nazis were actively trying to liquidate people of your ethnicity.
> What Stalingrad demonstrated was precisely that the unfreedom of the Soviet Union, as terrible as it was, was different from that of Nazi Germany or for that matter of the West precisely because it was more historically generative, more potent. >
Not quite. What Stalingrad demonstrated is that people faced with annihilation on their own soil will fight harder than a supposed conquering army more than 1,000 miles beyond its legitimate national boundaries.
This lesson keeps being retaught -- somewhere in the world -- every decade or so. Perhaps even more often.
Great read and I had never heard of these books. Though I found that to be the weakest part of the essay as Adam Tooze certainly has the background to provider the reader clearer, and less ideological, reasons for what played out
This podcast episode is an interesting story about an escape in WWII from an illegal labor camp (Geneva Convention prohibits slave labor for PoWs) by several American POWs. Covers a lot about the way the camps worked too: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL3d3MnBvZGNhc3QubGl...
I'm not naive, I understand a man can break and tell on his friends under duress. But to commit actual rape and murder without a second thought, that makes you the worst of the worst, a stain on the planet.
They believed they are doing the right thing or simply the job. They were convinced they are the good ones. Tho, these two are massively different organizations. SS were not secret police, they were basically army doing a lot of actual combat.
Gestapo would be closer equivalent of NKVD.
This was mainly the Waffen-SS which was only built up during the war, the SS as a whole was responsible for the worst atrocities in the occupied areas and within Germany (for instance running the extermination camps).
(also, Himmler was both head of the SS and Gestapo by 1934, I guess there wasn't much of a distinction between the two organizations)
The army itself had ethnic cleansing as one of the goals too. I mention this mostly because after war there was tendency to blame everything on SSand create myth of "clean" Wehrmacht. Because that felt better to Germans.
Gestapo was literally professional police. They were people who did criminal inveatigations prior and repurposed many of the same tactic. That is massive difference.
You never seen them at battlefield. It was organized, effective, produced bureaucracy. They were police force.
They did not run camps, tho they could send people there.
They did, keyword "AEL". Plenty Gestapo were SS-members too. Yes, there were some differences, but in many areas they did plenty of the same things, and were different parts of overall the same system.
Article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Speer#The_Speer_myth
Is a great exploration of educated people becoming extremists. It's an easy read and the literal origin of the phrase 'True Believer' in modern English
My understanding was different. These were willing participants, going above and beyond the mere instinct to survive. See my other replies. At the behest of their Nazi masters, the Trawniki enacted key parts of the Holocaust and of Generalplan Ost -- the plan to exterminate most of the Slavic population of Eastern Europe.
I urge everyone commenting here to read what the Trawniki actually did. These weren't mere collaborators!
Second, antisemitism itself is not nazi invention. It was pre-existing in Eastern Europe, Ukraine and so on.
Third, "might is right" was strong aspect of nazi ideology where stronger have no responsibility toward weaker. So was "empathy is feminine weakness" and "manly men suppress these emotions and are brutal". Once you indoctrinated people into this, it does not matter whether they are Germans or Ukranians, they are more likely to be ok with committing atrocities.
> in exchange for warm clothes, gear and food, and the feeling of importance you must get when you can freely terrorize other people
It also needs to be acknowledged that lack of warm clothes means death and so does lack of food. We are not talking here about slight discomfort due to somewhat malnutrition. We are talking about no food full stop. Neither of those will make you nicer well empathetic person. Instead, they will make you focus on survival and loose whatever empathy you was previously capable of.
Put it this way: say an alien race enslaves humanity, you're first a starved POW, later given some privileges for good conduct, and later put in charge of some tasks on behalf of the aliens, which you must do in order to keep your privileges.
In this thought experiment, do you see betraying your fellow humans? I want to think I wouldn't, but maybe I would. Telling on people, maybe even shooting some? Sure, it's possible. But you must remember the Trawnikis enacted much of the Holocaust. They raped and murdered women and children, and did so of their own free will. Do you see yourself raping a mother and murdering her children for the sake of keeping your privileges with the alien overlords?
I don't. The Trawniki embraced this with willingness. They are the worst of the worst, unforgivable human scum.
> People in brutal conditions become brutal.
I reject this. People with the potential for brutality fully unleash this under brutal conditions. But there are decent people too, people you can break with brutality but which will never descend into it, they won't pillage, torture and rape no matter what you do to them -- and examples of this abound!
I think that most of us like to think we would be the moral exception, it offers some mental comfort, but it's far more likely that we won't.
> what does (and doesn't) happen to them if they don't
This is key. What happens if they didn't follow orders? It turns out that... pretty much nothing. You could get away with not following orders. So those who did anyway, murdered, tortured and raped, are monsters in my eyes. Their lives weren't even in immediate danger!
> I think that most of us like to think we would be the moral exception, it offers some mental comfort, but it's far more likely that we won't.
If you think you would break down and commit rape, torture and murder, then I'm sorry for you. I'm nothing like you then, and most decent people aren't either.
I'm not naive: I know there's a lot of behavior people will engage in under extreme conditions -- I can admit cannibalism, robbery, violence and lots of things unacceptable in normal society -- but there IS a line, and torture and rape are way beyond that line. I'm willing to admit under exceptional duress I'd betray my country and my friends. I can see myself being forced to shoot another human being "or else". What I cannot absolutely accept from you or anybody else is to claim "well, if I'm threatened with torture or death then I can break and be willing to rape women and crush their babies". I'm sorry but I cannot, and if you think you would, I hope I never meet you in person: you terrify me.
If it comes to a point where someone tells me "unless you rape this child, I'll do the same to your children" then I might as well accept we're all doomed and it's beyond anything I can do. I won't commit rape, period.
Note we're discussing the Trawniki men in this context. Read about what they did before claiming everyone in their position would do the same. These were really scum, the worst of the worst.
I'm not talking about that level, I'm talking about:
>I can see myself being forced to shoot another human being "or else"
I was speaking in the context of the reservists described in Ordinary Men in this comment, not the Trawnikis, though I still don't agree with your blanket characterization of them. Please provide the references you speak of about them being the worst of the worst. Their wikipedia article claims with references that approximately 1000 out of 5000 ran off during operations, that hardly seems like the actions of a bunch of willing sadists frothing at the mouth to kill.
They were righ-wing supporters and their political convictions made them ok with those orders. They perceived Reich as free long after everyone else was persecuted, after synagoges were burned etc.
Since not all of us are right-wing supporters, antisemites, or believe in the racial superiority and the innate right to rule of this or that race, this means it's not true that all of us would happily engage in rape and ethnic cleansing just because we're told by some authority figure that it's right to do so.
Also, literally all armies raped, some more then others. Rape is horrible, but it went on in wars a lot. Germans raped, some units really very much a lot. Russian soldiers raped. Both on the way to Germany and then a lot inside Germany. American soldiers raped (less then Germans and Russians). You are bringing it up and it is horrible, but it was not unique to these units at all.
Second, I have no idea how I would acted. I think I would die, because I am sickly in general. Which absolve me of moral choices I guess.No one of us knows how he would really act in such situation. Ressentment and hunger and genrally violence make people ok with things they are not normally.
Go even read that comic about Elan school someone posted on HN. Exact same dynamic in nutshel.
Third, the more I read about history, prisons, wars, genocides and cults and such, the more I became convinced of this. When you create brutal environment, people in it will become brutal gradually. Some more then others and yet others will be victims. But that is what happens every single time.
The scale and horror that Nazism and their willing lackeys inflicted upon the (modern) world is terrifying. No, under no set of conditions I would have behaved like the Trawniki. You say that every army raped, and this is true, but
> You are bringing it up and it is horrible, but it was not unique to these units at all.
I'm sorry, but again read what the Trawniki did and tell me it's of the same order of magnitude than what other armies "regularly" did. You can't, because it's not. Nazism enabled them, and these men, out of their own free will, went above and beyond the "call of duty", embraced it and rejoiced in this monstrous behavior. In many cases they weren't frontline units -- so their savagery upon civilians cannot be excused by saying "they were numbed and desperate by combat, and their prisoners suffered because of it" -- they conducted reprisals on civilians and served as guards in extermination camps, and were a key part of the Holocaust. They were reasonably well fed and clothed, and they chose to murder women and children. What's their excuse then?
I've read a lot about history, and know of men and women that perished because they refused to behave like savages, to know this is not the only possible course of action.
The Trawniki were really scum and there's no excuse for what they did.
> I'm sorry, but again read what the Trawniki did and tell me it's of the same order of magnitude than what other armies "regularly" did
Germans had units composed of criminals run by rapist. Like, literally guy convinced of that. It was largely uncontrolable body, not that anyone tried to controlled the rape away.
The history of armies and wars are people exactly like that. There were multiple genocides in history and it involves killing children each time. ISIS included. Rape included.
> The history of armies and wars are people exactly like that. There were multiple genocides in history and it involves killing children each time. ISIS included. Rape included.
In recent history very little resembles WWII in scale, savagery and murder. Things in Africa in more recent history, I guess, and the Armenian genocide that even Hitler paid attention to. But WWII's scale of bloodshed and ethnic cleansing is unmatched, as is the systematic, planned nature of said cleansing.
> There were multiple genocides in history and it involves killing children each time.
I'm not even sure what you're arguing here. Maybe that because killing of children happened before and after, that the Trawniki weren't monsters to be singled out and repudiate every time they are mentioned? I disagree. They were monsters, the worst of the worst. Notice I didn't claim the Trawniki invented ethnic cleansing or rape though. If you mention some other army that killed children, maybe hacked them to pieces using machetes during one of Africa's stomach churning conflicts, I'm ready to call them monsters too. Are you?