Vernichtungslager Prussian military history But Adolf Hitler and his generals were greatly stretching the notion of “decisive battle,” as had the Kaiser’s staff officers in 1914 Hitler and the OKW and OKH spoke in 1941 not of a single decisive battle but of a succession of “Vernichtungsschlacht,” of interconnected and cascading decisive battles constituting a determinative campaign and short “war of annihilation.” That was essential to achieve because Germany simply did not have sufficient resources to wage protracted war, or any war on two main fronts Planning for “Vernichtungskrieg” in the west and then again in the east, without making provision even for the possibility of protracted war, was the fatal flaw in German strategic thinking It may also have been a necessary psychological underpinning to making war at all, given the geopolitical odds against final success When Hitler rolled the war dice a third time, against the Soviet Union in 1941, the Wehrmacht’s military fortunes shattered on the hard realities of deep Russian spaces, undetected reserves of manpower, economic resources that were unavailable to tsarist armies, and sheer determination of the defenders to resist invasion All that disadvantage was exacerbated by the barbarous manner in which the Wehrmacht and Nazi occupation authorities behaved from the first hours of the war in the east in accordance with pre-invasion planning In a briefing for Wehrmacht commanders leading into BARBAROSSA on March 30, 1941, Hitler attached a heinous new meaning to “Vernichtungskrieg” by ordering mass murder of commissars and Jews No objections were raised by any of the German officers present, and not a few later showed themselves to be enthusiastic enforcers of “harsh measures.” That turned the invasion of the Soviet Union into a primitive and primal campaign of wanton destruction, expropriation, and genocide Among other evils that such practices ultimately brought down on German heads, it became impossible to portray the war to local populations as a struggle for liberation of the subject peoples of the Soviet Union Yet, only by harnessing anti-Soviet minority nationalisms could the Germans have hoped to overcome the inherent strength of Stalin’s police state Instead, there was rising resistance to Nazi occupation policies from early 1942 The incredible German miscalculation about the likelihood of a short war against the Soviet Union thus gave rise to two of the most awful facts of the 20th century First, a great and protracted German–Soviet war of attrition killed tens of millions by 1945, devastating whole peoples and countries Second, the “final solution” of genocide in the Holocaust was arrived at by the Nazis after a proposed “territorial solution to the Jewish problem” became impossible Why? Because the Soviet Union refused to collapse or submit That left no territory open to early Nazi “resettlement” plans for any Jews Hitler and the Schutzstaffel (SS) might have allowed to lived outside a victorious “Greater German Reich.” See also Commissar order; Germany, conquest of; Materialschlacht; Phoney War; Stellungskrieg; Verwüstungsschlacht VERNICHTUNGSLAGER See death camps “annihilation camp.” 1137