audiobook Mahogany: The Costs of Luxury in Early America by Jennifer L. Anderson in History

Description

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 exposé 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.