In Hitler's Army, Omer Bartov successfully challenges the prevailing view that the German Army of World War II was an apolitical, professional fighting force, having little to do with the Nazi Party. Bartov focuses on the titanic struggle between Germany and the Soviet Union -- where the vast majority of German troops fought -- to show how the savagery of war reshaped the army in Hitler's image. Both brutalized and brutalizing, these soldiers needed to see their bitter sacrifices as noble patriotism and to justify their own atrocities by seeing their victims as subhuman. - Back cover.