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One of the greatest paradoxes of the Second World War was that between 1941 and 1942 the Wehrmacht's combat units underwent a radical process of demodernization, just as the Third Reich's economy was being mobilized for a total industrial war. Read the first page
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Only in the last couple of decades have scholars like Bartov chipped away at this myth by analysing the great mass of photographs, letters and diaries that show ordinary Wehrmacht soldiers enthusiastically participating in atrocities, while documentary evidence from higher up the command chain has illustrated the degree to which the army was intimately involved at every level in genocide.
Of particular value in this respect is the Federal Republic's official history Germany in the Second World which is still being published (although the extortionate price of these volumes means you'll never see them outside of a university library).
Bartov's distinctive contribution is to not just document the degree to which the Wehrmacht was indoctrinated and behaved as Hitler's Army but to ask how this impacted on its miltary effectiveness.
While modern military historians tend to see the maintenance of small unit cohesion as central to combat effectiveness (i.e. soldiers do what they do not primarily out of patriotism or hatred of the enemy but 'for their mates'), any analysis of German casualty rates in the eastern front indicates that personnel turnover was far too fast for small unit cohesion to be maintained.
However as the fighting qualities of the Wehrmacht remained extrordinarily high right up to the end some other explanation is required.
For Bartov the key is Nazi ideology - most Germans of military age in 1943 had spent a decade undergoing intensive indoctrination and had in many if not all cases thoroughly internalised the values of the Third Reich and behaved accordingly.
To back up the ideology a savage military discipline stepped in with thousands of German soldiers being shot for disciplinary offences that in the US or British armies would earn only a few days in the stockade.
However German soldiers while they could be executed for dozing off on guard or overstaying a leave were almost never punished for crimes against civilians in the occupied east and effectively encouraged to murder and plunder to their heart's content (rape though not unknown, was frowned upon for racial reasons).
This led even the best amongst them into a state of uneasy complicity with the worst - fully aware of their criminality and expecting to be treated similarly by the enemy, German soldiers had little choice but to fight to the bitter end.
The sort of people who collect books glorifying 'SS panzer aces' clearly find such evidence disquieting and would rather it was swept back under the carpet.
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