German historian Adrian Wettstein writes: “The hunger strategy was part of the war of annihilation and aimed at the starvation of up to thirty million Soviets in the wooded regions of Belarus and northern Russia, as well as in the cities. The essays focusing on food policy, in particular, show how these two objectives were interrelated. While not explained in Marxist terms, these driving motives are noted in the book. Second, control over the enormous resources of the Soviet Union-not only agricultural produce, but also oil (particularly in what is now Azerbaijan)-was considered necessary for fighting a war against the United States, Germany’s most important imperialist rival, for world hegemony. Despite the degeneration of the Soviet Union under the rule of the Stalinist bureaucracy, many achievements had, at least in part, been maintained and continued to serve as an inspiration to workers worldwide.Īs one SS-Oberführer put it in the spring of 1941: “In Russia, all cities and cultural sites including the Kremlin, are to be razed to the ground Russia is to be reduced to the level of a nation of peasants, from which there is no return.” First, “Operation Barbarossa” was a counterrevolutionary war aimed at dismembering the Soviet Union, reducing its republics to the status of colonies of the Third Reich, and reversing all the social and economic gains of the October Revolution. The Nazi war drive against the Soviet Union had two basic, interrelated aspects. Part 1: “Russia is to be reduced to the level of a nation of peasants, from which there is no return” The material presented sheds light on the historical background to the criminal policies currently being pursued by US and German imperialism in Ukraine and Eastern Europe. The book is comprised of eleven essays on different aspects of Germany’s war of annihilation against the Soviet Union-the most brutal war history has ever seen. In 2012, Rochester University Press published an important volume on the policies of the Nazis in the occupied territories of the former Soviet Union. The second part of the review was posted January 13.Īll quotations refer, unless otherwise indicated, to this book. Kay, Jeff Rutherford, David Stahel, Rochester University Press, 2012, 359 p. Below is the first part of a two-part review of Nazi Policy on the Eastern Front, 1941: Total War, Genocide, and Radicalization, ed.
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