"The Holocaust in History"

[In] Serbia, where the Wehrmacht was in charge... the Germans faced... uprising that began on 22 June [1941], with the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union. As the insurgency spread, the Wehrmacht imposed an ever more draconian reprisal policy, spreading terror throughout the Serbian countryside. Doubtless the ruthlessness of the repression flowed in part from the occupation troops' contempt for the local population, often assimilated in the Nazis' minds with the savage inhabitants of eastern Europe. But the specific terms of reprisal came from Berlin. Concerned at the extent of the disturbances, armed forces chief of staff Wilhelm Keitel sent strict instructions to shoot large numbers of hostages. Given that Jews and Gypsies were stigmatized as primary enemies of the Reich, it was but a short step to feeding them to the firing squads, ... Christopher Browning's research into Wehrmacht reprisal policy shows how this slid easily into a "final solution" for local Jews - or at least the males among them. "As long as the anti-Jewish measures in Serbia were perceived and construed as military measures against German's [i.e. Wehrmacht's] enemies," he observed [in his book Fateful Months, on page 49], "it did not require Nazified zealots [among the Wehrmacht troops] (though such were not lacking), merely conscientious and politically obtuse professional soldiers to carry them out." On the strength of such conscientiousness and obtuseness, the number of reprisal shootings approached twelve thousand by the end of 1941.