Daniel Blatman

As gripping as a horror story in parts, and putting the horror back in the Holocaust is an achievement at this point, Blatman has set himself the problem of examining the end game of the Nazi death machine, when forlorn groups of concentration camp prisoners were literally sent on the road to nowhere in the hope of keeping them from the hands of invading allied forces. What was the point, considering Hitler's preference would have been for these people to have simply been executed in mass? Blatman points to a conjunction of policy imperatives, between Himmler's search for hostages to use as negotiating chips and a SS economic machine that still regarded the prisoners as a useful asset.

What further concerns the author is why the killings continued to the end, even when the war was sometimes literally hours from being over for the men (and occasionally women) who were charged with herding these prisoners somewhere to discharge their responsibility. The theory that Blatman offers is that this is a triumph of 12 years of Nazi enculturation where someone could always be found to pull the trigger when an expendable person had to be terminated. For Blatman the climactic example is the massacre at the small town of Gardelegen, where 1000-plus camp inmates from the "Dora" installation were driven into a barn for a mass killing at the insistence of district Nazi leader Gerhard Thiele; the killers being a motley gang of airborne recruits, militia, police, firemen, Hitler Youth and ad hoc volunteers who bought the argument that in the imminent chaos it was imperative that the potential threat the inmates represented had to be eliminated.

However, as important as this book is, I do have to mark it down a bit on the grounds of some sloppy writing when it comes to military topics. The 7th Waffen-SS Div. "Prinz Eugen" is referred to as "Prinz-Eugen's 7th Division." Messerschmitt is consistently misspelled as "Messerschmidt." There is a reference to the "ZV2 Rocket;" one presumes V2 is what was meant. There are other apparent gaffs, but my favorite is the reference to "electrocuted fences." Was it that hard to find a reader conversant with nuts-and-bolts military history when this book was being edited?… (altro)