ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the representation of war in the East between 1941 and 1945 in a number of ways. Adolf Hitler had envisaged a war against the Soviet Union as the final stage of his conquest. Hitler's strategy changed after the surprisingly quick victory over France. The campaign against the Soviet Union was planned to last not much more than ten weeks. Eleven days before German forces invaded the Soviet Union, a Fuehrer directive already set out the next aims for warfare after victory in the East. The simple German soldiers, who were silently assembled in new deployment sectors near the new German-Soviet border in former Poland, were kept uninformed about the events to come. The German Reich was declared the last bulwark against barbarism. The German attitude in the East was different from the beginning. "Landscape" had become something entirely different after the Germans, first during the advance and retreat, had destroyed whatever had been landscape before.
