(PDF) (DOC) (JPG)May 29, 2014

(MAHWAH, NJ) –On April 17, Dr. David Wildermuth, Assistant Professor of German at Shippensberg University in Pennsylvania, in a presentation entitled “And from that moment, the Shoah began for us:’ What Survivor Testimony Tells Us About the Wehrmacht and its Victims during the German Invasion of the Soviet Union”revealed the extensive and varied nature of the involvement of regular German army units in the Holocaust.

Prof. David Wildermuth

Dr. Wildermuth used victim testimony, corroborated by pre-invasion orders and war diaries of army units involved in occupying communities around the town of Lida, in present-day Belarus, to paint a a more nuanced picture of what happened during the invasion on a grass roots level. As his research shows, the essential components of Wehrmacht behavior towards Soviet Jews were ingrained anti-Semitism and operational latitude on their part of individual commanders. While in some commanders these components combined to produce murderous results, in others they did not.

Much of the field-level flexibility and ideological impetus, to which Wildermuth referred, accrued from Hitler’s infamous Commissar Order, issued by the German Armed Forced High Command on June 6, 1941. Its crucial passage read: “The originators of barbaric, Asiatic methods of warfare are the political commissars…. Therefore, when captured either in battle or offering resistance, they are to be shot on principle.” Given the Nazi ideological nexus between Jews and Bolshevism, many unit commanders regarded this text to give them a carte blanche in exacting reprisals against Jews when encountering civilian and partisan resistance. As Wildermuth conclusively pointed out, this was a matter of discretion, and some unit commanders chose not to kill Jews when exercising reprisals for resistance activities.

At Shippensberg University Dr. Wildermuth is Assistant Professor of German. He holds a B.A. from the State University of New York at Cortland, an M.A. from Bowling Green State University, Ohio and
a Doctorate in Modern Languages (D.M.L) from Middlebury College, Vermont.

In the fall of 2013, Dr.Wildermuth held a four-month fellowship at the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich, Germany. His article, “Who Killed Lida’s Jewish Intelligentsia? A Case Study of Wehrmacht Involvement in the Holocaust’s “First Hour,” appeared in the Spring 2013 issue of Holocaust and Genocide Studies.

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