Page 365 - Conflitti Militari e Popolazioni Civili - Tomo I

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against the background of deliberate racial propaganda, to complicity in the mass war crimes
against Poles and Jews, took place in 1939. The entry-point was the franc-tireur phobia and
the will to mete out collective punishments, based on ideas that can be traced back to 1914
and 1870. The second turn was to genocidal killing, which only took place in the course of
Operation Barbarossa in autumn and winter 1941.
The fate of the prisoners of war shows the distinctions clearly. The great majority of the
694,000 Polish soldiers taken prisoner in 1939 were adequately nourished and subsequently
released during the winter 1939/40; only about 7,500 of them died in captivity. Of the 3.35
million Soviet soldiers whom the Germans took prisoner in 1941, two million had died by 1
February 1942. The extent of this war crime far exceeded even the killing of half a million
Jews in the same period.
In sum, the war of 1941 was sui generis. Nazi warfare, characterized by the readiness to
commit massive war crimes and genocide, differed fundamentally from the war of 1914, but
it was unthinkable without the experience and reconfigured memory of the First World War,
defeat, the post-war violence, and the war of 1939.