My Book Pick: The Soviet-German War: The Devastation of a War of Annihilation
Aichi Insurance Physicians’ Newspaper
April 5, 2020
Tsuyoshi Ooki
Iwanami Shinsho
July 19, 2019
The Second World War was the culmination of total war, driven by fantasies such as Japan’s “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” and Nazi Germany’s quest for “living space in the East,” with entire populations mobilized to pursue them. Nazi Germany invaded Poland and then the Soviet Union, while Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and went to war against the United States and Britain. The Soviet-German War, the largest battle of the war, claimed more than 20 million Soviet lives and several million German lives. The Axis powers were defeated, and the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union, and France determined the framework for the postwar order at the Yalta Conference.
My maternal uncle was drafted into the Imperial Japanese Army. When war broke out between Japan and the Soviet Union, he was forced to retreat and was taken prisoner, eventually being detained in Siberia. During summer holidays at my mother's family home, the stories he told were always about The Count of Monte Cristo and Jean Valjean. Perhaps, through these stories, he was trying to convey how he had been forced into an unjust war yet never gave up hope of surviving and returning home, even as a prisoner.
Clausewitz wrote, “War is merely the continuation of politics by other means.” There is truth in this. But politics is also an extension of economics.
This book presents the Soviet-German War as a war of annihilation between Nazism, which sought to destroy Jews and communism, and the Soviet Union, a self-proclaimed socialist state. It also shows that Nazism and Stalinism, despite their different ideologies, were both poisonous forms of totalitarianism. It is easy to see why the book was named the year’s best new paperback.
