Buena obra que realiza un paneo de toda la segunda guerra pero desde el punto de vista de las opciones morales. campos de concentración, bombardeos, crimenes de guerra, y la protección de algunos criminales por opciones geopolíticas ( )

This is a great book on World War II, but not quite the unique, genre-busting work that some reviewers would have you believe. There is little here that has not been covered extensively elsewhere; indeed, the two main areas of Burleigh's insight are the Holocaust and Allied strategic bombing, hardly fresh topics.

The hook of Burleigh's work is that he seeks to retell the story of World War II through a moral lens. Before reading the book, and given the title of Moral Combat, I eagerly expected a fresh investigation into what ordinary combat soldiers went through in the war and the difficult choices they had to make, often in the heat of the moment. This is dealt with competently in Chapter 14, 'We Were Savages', but disappointingly, the bulk of the book seems to deal with those in positions of authority. Indeed, the opening and closing chapters deal predominantly with the main 'predators': Hitler, Hirohito and Mussolini. The book also deals extensively with areas of the war which cannot be deemed 'combat', moral or otherwise, such as the German depravities towards civilians in the East (though Burleigh is in his element here, as he has written extensively on this subject in previous books). Often, the book is just yet another retelling of the course of the war to add to the voluminous number of straight histories of World War II, merely laced with anecdotes describing some of the atrocities committed. When he does address some interesting areas untouched by historians, such as the murky history of British military procurement" (pg. 489) that left the country so woefully unprepared for war, the scope and breadth of the book prevents him from delving too deeply into any one such topic.

I cannot help but feel that embracing the moral philosophising Burleigh devalues so readily would have made for a more interesting book. That said, Burleigh's scholarship is strong and the book is very readable. But it seems like a missed opportunity not to delve into the philosophical and psychological dilemmas faced by men in combat on all sides, an approach that would have been particularly daring considering that World War II is seen in the West as the last 'good war'.

As one final note, this book is not recommended for beginner historians. Whilst loosely chronological, the chapters are mainly thematic, covering such topics as life under Nazi occupation, the toll of decision-making on commanders, alliance politics, Allied bombing, etc. It requires prior knowledge of how the wars in Europe and the Pacific developed, as Burleigh (rightly) has little time for providing a mere chronological narrative of the course of the war that advanced readers will already be familiar with. Overall, it is a good history tome, but it feels like a missed opportunity." ( )

5298. Moral Combat Good and Evil in World War II, by Michael Burleigh (read 3 Aug 2015) This book discusses the good and the evil in World War II, with of course most of the discussion being of the evil because there was so much more of it. The long recitation of the evil things done by the Nazis is dreary reading and made me even consider ceasing to read the book. The account of other events of the War is somewhat fresh, and the author does not hesitate to give snap judgments on men and events, some of which I did not agree with. He tends to look favorably more easily on what the British did as opposed to his view of American actions, which I have long come to expect from British writers. For instance, he is very dismissive of Harry Truman and says only unfavorable things about Dr. Robert Oppenheimer treating the denial of clearance to him as if it reflected on his work during the war, whereas it only came about long after the war was over, during the Eisenhower administration. The book is full of interesting stuff, but also has some pretty dull or boring pages, ( )

could have executed this better. Such an important topic to come up short on. ( )

The book was quite a surprise as the focus was mainly on NAZI Germany's crimes. Discussion is had on the USSR, Japan and on Allied Bombing of Germany, but the mass slaughter by the Germans is the main course. The book rightly points out that while Stalin was responsible for as many deaths as Hitler, the USSR never launched a war of annihilation and extermination as Germany did against Poland and the Soviet Union. If you were not immediately killed, the German plan was starvation as a helot for the master race.

Interesting Facts From Moral Combat

This is already well known, but given current events, it is useful to remember: At least 6 million Ukrainians died of starvation due to forced farm collectivization by Stalin starting in 1932.

One of the initial mass murderers introduced is Otto Rasch, an SS brigade leader and commander of Einsatzgruppe C. Rasch was responsible for the massacre of Babi Yar. He received his first doctorate in Marburg in 1912 for the work “dialect geography of the circle Eschwege” and his second PhD in 1922 at the University of Leipzig. Having advance degrees was evidently common among leaders of the Einsatzgruppen. Rasch died during his trial after the war.

The Soviets deported 1.25 million Poles from their Polish occupied zone before the German invasion of the Soviet Union.

Das Generalgouvernement, by Karl Baedeker (1943)
From Salon, "The iconic Baedekers of Leipzig, pressured by the Nazi government into producing a vacation guide to occupied Poland, published the most inadvertently creepy guidebook ever, complete with Reichminister General Governor Hans Frank promising visitors the charms of home—"ein stark heimatlich anmutendes Gebilde." Those charms include an Adolf-Hitler-Platz in the foldout Warsaw map and a brief entry for Auschwitz listing it only as a "train station.""

During the invasion of France in 1940, German Wehrmacht troops, not SS, murdered 180 French Senegalese who had fought well against them. They were black and that was reason enough.

Some 300 million bottles per year of French wine were diverted to Germany during the occupation of France..

In Odessa, the Romanians carried out the single largest slaughter of Jews. The Romanian soldiers used live Jewish babies for "trap shooting" by tossing them in the air and shooting them.

A quote from German General Manstein demonstrating that the entire German Army knew their role in the USSR -- "This is about wiping out Red sub-humanity..."

Female Red Army soldiers that were captured were immediately shot.

During Barbarossa, sixty to eighty thousand Jewish Red Army prisoners were taken. By April, 1942 only 68 were alive in German captivity.

Even Hermann "Papa" Hoth was implicated -- "pity and gentleness towards the population is totally out of order... every manifestation of active or passive resistance or any machinations by Bolshevik-Jewish agitators is to be pitilessly exterminated."

In 1940, the Soviet Commander Konstantin Rokossovsky went straight from an NKVD torture center to command of a Soviet Army. Rokossovsky endured 3 mock executions, the pulling of his finger nails, three broken ribs and nine teeth knocked out. In 1956 as Poland's defense minister, he sent tanks against demonstrating workers.

From July 1944 to the German capitulation on May 8, 1945, more Germans died than the previous combined 5 years of war. Much of this is a result of increased civilian casualties due to bombing of German cities along with fighting taking place in Germany itself.

“8th Co., SS-IR 8 platoon leader Alois Knabel enters Russian village in 1941, informed by the village headman that there’s a Jewish cobbler, wife and child in the town.

Knabel has the Jewish man and wife brought to the company’s quarters, where they are forced to wash and scrub the area while Knabel shouts insults and beats them with a club.

Then Knabel and 2-3 of his fellow SS troopers escort the couple to the edge of the village, where they shoot them in the back of the neck, while Knabel hold the hand of their three-year old child.

Witnessing the sudden, bloody execution of the parents, the child starts screaming. Knabel cradles the child, shushing and stroking the child’s hair with his left hand.

And with his right hand brings a service pistol to the child’s neck and fires a bullet to the base of her skull.

One of the fellow SS troopers later commented, “Look and see how finely Knabel did that, how he first calmed the child down and then shot it.””

Gustav Lombard admittedly murdered at least 6500 Jews in the Soviet Union and served 8 years as a war criminal.

In December 1941, in Simferopol the capital of Crimea, Manstein’s troops worked with Einsatzgruppe D to kill thirteen thousand Jews. Manstein’s staff officers received watches from the victims that Manstein had requested.

Out of the 403,272 Red Army tank soldiers deployed, 310,000 were killed. ( )