SCROLL DOWN FOR PHOTOS OF
SOVIET PRISONERS OF WAR

Once we recognize that Jeffrey Herf is correct--that the Holocaust and war against the Soviet Union were two parts of the same war--a new understanding or conceptualization begins. Beginning with Herf's hypothesis, we start over by re-thinking our understanding of the meaning of the Final Solution in its relationship to the war against the Soviet Union

For the Nazis, genocide and warfare were not separate, rather were two sides of the same coin (or dream)--of  making the world "Jew-free."
The photos below of are Soviet Prisoners of War in a death camp--soon to be gassed. The number of Soviet Prisoners killed within a given period of time (1941-1942--see below) were greater then the number of Jews killed within any given period of time)

The Holocaust was war intended to exterminate the Jews and the likewise war against the Soviet Union was conceived as a "war of extermination." Two sides of the same coin.

Soviet Prisoners of War, Mauthausen Concentration Camp

In eight months of 1941-42, the invading German armies killed an estimated 2.8 million Soviet prisoners-of-war. The episode, according to Adam Jones, “vies with the genocide in Rwanda as the most concentrated mass-killing in human history.” There is good reason to think, Jones said, that this rate of killing “exceeds even the worst period of the Holocaust against the Jews.”