ABSTRACT
So ran the testimony of a Wehrmacht soldier on trial before a Soviet court in Minsk in 1946 for atrocities committed in the course of anti-partisan warfare during the Second World War. Popular views still hold that the German Wehrmacht amassed an exemplary fighting record during the Second World War, untainted by association with the odious fanaticism of National Socialism – the uniquely murderous blend of anti-Semitism, anti-communism and social Darwinism which inspired the ‘war of extermination’ the Third Reich waged against the peoples of German-occupied Europe.
