On October 10, 1941, the entire Jewish population of the Belarusian village of Krucha was rounded up and shot. While Nazi death squads routinely carried out mass executions on the Eastern Front, this particular atrocity was not the work of the SS but was committed by a regular German army unit acting on its own initiative. Marching into Darkness is a bone-chilling expose of the ordinary footsoldiers who participated in the Final Solution on a daily basis.

Although scholars have exploded the myth that the Wehrmacht played no significant part in the Holocaust, a concrete picture of its involvement at the local level has been lacking. Among the crimes Waitman Wade Beorn unearths are forced labor, sexual violence, and graverobbing, though a few soldiers refused to participate and even helped Jews. By meticulously reconstructing the German army's activities in Belarus in 1941, Marching into Darkness reveals in stark detail how the army willingly fulfilled its role as an agent of murder on a massive scale. Early efforts at improvised extermination progressively became much more methodical, with some army units going so far as to organize "Jew hunts." Beorn also demonstrates how the Wehrmacht used the pretense of anti-partisan warfare as a subterfuge by reporting murdered Jews as partisans.

Through archival research into military and legal records, survivor testimonies, and eyewitness interviews, Beorn paints a searing portrait of a professional army's descent into ever more intimate participation in genocide.

About the Author
Waitman Wade Beorn is Director of the Virginia Holocaust Museum in Richmond.

Reviews
With a level of detail that is chilling to the bone, Beorn demonstrates that during the first phase of the war with the Soviet Union, a time when Germans were euphoric about their results on the front, every single Wehrmacht unit in Belarus contained a core group of men who could be counted on to murder Jews. Marching into Darkness convincingly shows how and why these atrocities could occur. A major contribution. -- Karel C. Berkhoff, author of Motherland in Danger: Soviet Propaganda during World War II
Beorn's meticulously researched work confronts us with Nazi crimes, up close, as they happened. It allows us to see the choices that were available to the perpetrators, and the process by which many ordinary German soldiers gradually turned into willing criminals. In this way, it helps us to understand how such crimes were possible. -- Geoffrey P. Megargee, author of War of Annihilation: Combat and Genocide on the Eastern Front, 1941


Awards
Commended for Sybil Halpern Milton Memorial Book Prize 2015. Nominated for Raphael Lemkin Award 2015 and Distinguished Book Award - Military History 2015 and DAAD Book Prize of the German Studies Association 2015 and Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize 2015 and Hans Rosenberg Book Prize 2015 and George Louis Beer Prize 2015.



Book Information
ISBN 9780674725508
Author Waitman Wade Beorn
Format Hardback
Page Count 336
Imprint Harvard University Press
Publisher Harvard University Press