This chapter highlights the crucial importance of Operation Barbarossa for the Second World War and the Holocaust; summarizes major stages in the escalation of violence (pre-campaign plans for domination, exploitation, and ethnic restratification; murder of Soviet POWs, Jews, and others by Germans, Romanians, and local helpers), their root causes and key agents (Wehrmacht, SS, police, other occupation authorities); explains Nazi perception of “the East” as the locus for the “Final Solution,” the relevance of German anti-partisan warfare, occupation policy priorities (”pacification,” exploitation, elimination of “useless eaters”) for massive loss of civilian life; and situates violence (mass shootings, gas vans, destruction of villages, deportation of forced laborers) in the Soviet Union in the perspective of other features of the Holocaust and the Second World War.

This chapter explores Nazi violence against non-Jewish eastern Europeans during the Holocaust. It covers German anti-Slavic thought, the experience of Slavic peoples and POWs during the Nazi genocidal project, and issues of collaboration and complicity.

Though their experience was in no way typical of American service in the Vietnam War, American prisoners of war have dominated American perceptions of the conflict. A small, strikingly homogenous group, the POWs were important because of, not despite, their unusual character. As most were pilots captured while waging air war against North Vietnam, they were subjected to harsh treatment by Vietnamese authorities, who sought to make them confess and repent their aggression against the Vietnamese people. But because aviators tended to be older, well-educated, white, career officers who identified deeply with the United States and its mission in Vietnam, American POWs were determined to resist Vietnamese coercion. In enduring torture rather than admit guilt, they inverted the wars moral framework, representing themselves as victims of Vietnamese aggression. Because they so neatly embodied the nation as its white majority wished to imagine it, their suffering and sacrifice worked to redeem the American cause in Vietnam and restore national honor. This chapter explains this phenomenon through close attention to the POW experience in North Vietnams prisons.

Chapter 4 focuses on the months from June to December 1941. As the Germans and their Axis partners invaded Soviet territory, they carried out massacres of Jews, murdering hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children in open-air shootings. Chaplains accompanied the Wehrmacht in this period, too, as the regular military cooperated with SS killing squads. Along with violence against Jews and Soviet POWs, the German invasion brought widely publicized efforts to rescue Christianity from Communism. Central to that project was the reopening of churches that had been closed under Soviet rule. This chapter uses a set of photographs of the reopening of a church in Zhytomyr to analyze the linkage between saving Christianity and killing Jews and to understand how military chaplains fit into that equation. Chaplains were key figures in a narrative that recast German violence as a story of Christian redemption. Their reports and sermons rarely mention atrocities but they communicated awareness indirectly in ways that fixated on the Germans’ own suffering. This chapter uses Jewish sources to contextualize and understand German accounts without reproducing their erasure of the victims.

The armistice logic combined a short war, Britain’s rapid capitulation, and the quick conclusion of a Franco-Axis peace to liberate French POWs. “L’homme providentiel,” Pétain, was embraced as “a substitute for politics and a barrier to revolution.” The Armistice transferred responsibility for defeat to the Republic and its combat-shy “citizen soldiers,” liberated the professional army from the tyranny of the levée, and transformed surrender into a collective rather than individual act. Vichy wagered that collaboration would place France in a position to play a major role in Hitler’s New Europe. The three departments that comprised Alsace-Moselle were incorporated into the Reich. But it also sealed the status of France as a second-tier power. Despite the armistice and the fact that many French soldiers remained incarcerated in Germany, France retained considerable latent military power, that included a 100,000-man Armistice Army, roughly the same number in French North Africa, a considerable air force sans avions, and a significant navy. However, rather than prepare clandestinely for la revanche as many of its supporters believed, Vichy’s energies were directed into collaboration. A paramilitary Chantiers de la Jeunesse, designed to build the character so lacking in French youth, was stood up, as well as various organizations like the LVF that provided a vehicle for recruiting Frenchmen to serve in German forces. The armistice, not the British attack at Mers-el-Kébir, took Vichy and its navy down the path of collaboration.

Demonstrates that music was a vital part of the daily routines of those interned in prisoner of war camps. The forming of orchestras and theatrical revues were a popular way of passing the time and maintaining morale, but in many cases musical activities were used by prisoners of war to conceal attempts to escape. This chapter will give examples of how prisoners of war used music as a means of keeping up their morale to stave off feelings of ‘mouldiness,’ later identified as barbed wire disease.