Joachim Hoffmann - Stalin’s war of extermination 1941-1945
Planning, realization and documentation
In the 1980s and 1990s, Dr. Joachim Hoffmann was clearly the most qualified specialist in Soviet military history in Germany. For over thirty years he had pored over Russian language documents about the Second World War. Stalin’s War of Extermination can be seen as the most important result of Dr. Hoffmann’s long-lasting research. Because he followed certain official guidelines, the Freiburg Court Vice-President Johann Birk confirmed that this book does not violate any German law. This procedure was necessary in order to protect the author from criminal prosecution in Germany, where historians dissenting with official German myths are frequently subject to prosecution and sometimes even imprisonment.
The cover of this book attempts to capture artistically what Dr. Hoffmann describes and substantiates in this book: Since the 1920s, Stalin planned to invade Western Europe in order to initiate the “World Revolution.” The outbreak of war between Germany and the Western Allies in 1939 gave Stalin the opportunity to prepare an attack against Europe which was unparalleled in history both in terms of Stalin’s far-reaching goals as well as in terms of the amount of troops and armaments amassed at the Soviet border.
Of course, Stalin’s aggressive intentions did not escape Germany’s notice who in turn planned a preventive strike against the Red Army. However, the Germans obviously underestimated both the strength of the Red Army and the determination of its leaders. What unfolded in June 1941 was undoubtedly the most-cruel war in history.
Dr. Hoffmann’s book shows in detail how Stalin and his Bolshevik henchman used unimaginable violence and atrocities to break any resistance in the Red Army and to force their unwilling soldiers to fight against the Germans who were anticipated as liberators from Stalinist oppression by most Russians. Stalin ordered not only to kill all German POWs, but also to kill Soviet soldiers who fell into German hands alive, because they failed to fight to their death.
Dr. Hoffmann also explains how Soviet propagandists incited their soldiers to unlimited hatred against everything German, and he gives the reader a short but extremely unpleasant glimpse into what happened when these Soviet soldiers, dehumanized by Soviet propaganda and brutality, finally reached German soil in 1945: A gigantic wave of looting, arson, rape, torture, and mass murder befell East Germany. After reading this book, the world should thank the German Army that they prevented Stalin from succeeding with his plans of World Revolution, despite all the wrongdoings the Germans committed themselves.
Joachim Hoffmann, Dr. phil., born 1930 in Königsberg, East Prussia; studied modern history, eastern European history and comparative ethnology at the University of Hamburg and Berlin’s Free University. He received his PhD in history in 1959. Between 1960 and 1995, he was historian at the Militärgeschichtliche Forschungsamt der Bundeswehr (Research Department for Military History of the German Army). His field of expertise was “Armed Forces of the Soviet Union.” Dr. Hoffmann has authored numerous articles and books about political, diplomatic and military history of the 19th century and about the history of the German-Soviet war. In 1991 he was granted the “Dr. Walter- Eckhardt” Award, and in 1992 the “General Andrej Andrejewitsch Wlassow” Cultural Prize. He passed away on February 8, 2002, in his home near Freiburg, Germany.
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Tuesday 11 November 2025
