ABSTRACT
The German army also had an importance beyond its intrinsic utilitarian role. The power and traditions of the Prussian officer corps require little rehearsing here, save the necessity to underline Hitler's growing domination of the army leadership from 1938. But beyond this lay the relationship between Wehrmacht and the Nazi Weltanschauung. Until preparations for the invasion of Russia, the military remained clearly separated from Nazi political ideology. But as the Russian war plans and the war itself unfolded in 1941, Hitler sought a fusion of ideological and military warfare. By and large he was successful. The majority of army leaders joined in the war of extermination against 'Jewish Bolshevism' and 'Asiatic Barbarism' , sometimes seeking their own specific justifications for doing so. This is not to say that the appalling conditions of the Russian Front, the long-standing antagonism of German and Slav, and the intensity of Russian partisan activity were insignificant contributors to the inhuman sufferings of Russians, soldiers and civilians alike, at the hands of the German army. Furthermore, the activities of the SS and its Einsatzgruppen, by comparison, were doubly savage. It is nevertheless true that the German army in Russia fulfilled a task which its western counterpart hardly even addressed and that international codes of military conduct vanished on the Russian front as Hitler's infamous order to the army to liquidate all Russian political leaders and Commissars was carried out.
