Historians also jumped on the bandwagon. Books such as Lost Victories by Erich von Manstein became a best seller. This book implies that if Hitler had not been so controlling and had not interfered with the war, the German Army could have won the war on the eastern front. This aim took attention away from the sins of the army and placed more of a focus on the potential

ability of the army to fight. It was not until the nineteen seventies that this view began to change. The focus shifted from the high command to the regular soldiers. These were the soldiers that actually would have been the ones that dirtied their hands.

It has been demonstrated how the cycle of terror had continually escalated. It is well known how it went from harassment to full terror. The final step in the extermination of the Jews began in September of 1941 with the appointment of General Franz Bohme to the post of Plenipotentiary Commanding General in Serbia. General Bohme transformed the killing of Jews from a bloody, but unsystematic terror to a purposeful liquidation. When General Bohme arrived in Serbia, the partisans controlled most of the country outside of the cities. The Army’s four divisions stationed in the country had been formed for occupation duties and consisted of two, rather than the usual three, regiments. Each division had about 6,000 men with no combat experience, whose training consisted of little more than target practice. Bohme ordered additional combat troops to be transferred to Serbia. The entire population was declared to be an enemy. All men were to be arrested and interned in a newly constructed prison or concentration camp; women and children were to be driven from their home localities; villages were to be burned, and livestock was to be confiscated.

An example of such behavior can be seen when German troops invaded Yugoslavia in April of 1941 and subsequently subdivided the country. This left approximately 17,000 Jews living in Serbia under German rule. One year later, Serbia was “free of Jews”. How was this accomplished? The first step, which occurred 6 weeks after the occupation had begun, was to identify, register, and to require all Jews and Gypsies to wear a gold armband. The second step was to isolate them by dismissing from public offices and private businesses. The third step was to “aryanize” the property and introduce forced labor. The establishment of a ghetto in the town of Majdanpek was also considered, but never implemented. The attack of the Soviet Union in June 1941 set the stage for a bloody repression in Serbia. As early as June 22, 1941, the chief of the military administrative staff ordered the arrest of all leading communists and veterans of the Spanish Civil War. In addition, Belgrade’s Jewish community was required to supply 40 men as hostages to be shot in the event of a partisan uprising. There was a partisan rebellion in Serbia; however, how effective can these efforts be against trained units of men? During the rebellion, the military and the police pursued different tasks. Wehrmacht units were responsible for burning down whole villages after partisan attacks, arresting “suspicious persons”, and handing t

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