Krausnick co-authored Die Truppe des Weltanschauungskrieges, the 1981 work on the mass murder of Jews in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union by the Einsatzgruppen, which was considered a milestone in Holocaust studies.
[1] Krausnick co-authored Die Truppe des Weltanschauungskrieges ("Troops of an ideological crusade"), the 1981 work on the mass murder of Jews in the occupied areas of the Soviet Union by Einsatzgruppen units.
[3] The book traces the beginnings of the Einsatzgruppen during the Anschluss of Austria in 1938 and then during the invasion of Poland in September 1939, where they engaged in the persecution of clergy, intellectuals, Polish nobility, and Jews.
Reviewing the book for The Journal of Modern History, political scientist Peter H. Merkl [no] calls it an "utterly absorbing, if grisly, reading for the non-specialists and systematic confirmation for historians specialising in the area".
Historian Peter Longerich describes the work as a "seminal academic study", which made Krausnick the leading figure in the Holocaust functionalism versus intentionalism debate.
[5] Die Truppe des Weltanschauungskrieges was one of the first works to challenge the legend of a "clean" or "innocent" Wehrmacht,[6] which had depicted the German armed forces as free of blame for the crimes committed.
Within Germany, however, from the start of the 1950s, military circles (the so-called soldatische Kreise) were so effective in suppressing this information that it was not until the early 1980s that historiographers could begin to expose their involvement, which even at that stage was still met with storms of protest.