War in the Wild East: The German Army and Soviet Partisans

By Ben Shepherd and Ben H. Shepherd

Book Overview

In Nazi eyes, the Soviet Union was the "wild east," a savage region ripe for exploitation, its subhuman inhabitants destined for extermination or helotry. An especially brutal dimension of the German army's eastern war was its anti-partisan campaign. This conflict brought death and destruction to thousands of Soviet civilians, and has been held as a prime example of ordinary German soldiers participating in the Nazi regime's annihilation policies.

Ben Shepherd enters the heated debate over the wartime behavior of the Wehrmacht in a detailed study of the motivation and conduct of its anti-partisan campaign in the Soviet Union. He investigates how anti-partisan warfare was conducted, not by the generals, but by the far more numerous, average Germans serving as officers in the field. What shaped their behavior was more complex than Nazi ideology alone. The influence of German society, as well as of party and army, together with officers' grueling yet diverse experience of their environment and enemy, made them perceive the anti-partisan war in varied ways. Reactions ranged from extreme brutality to relative restraint; some sought less to terrorize the native population than to try to win it over. The emerging picture does not dilute the suffering the Wehrmacht's eastern war inflicted. It shows, however, that properly judging ordinary Germans' role in that war is more complicated than is indicated by either wholesale condemnation or wholesale exoneration.

This valuable study offers a nuanced discussion of the diversity of behaviors within the German army, as well as providing a compelling exploration of the war and counterinsurgency operations on the eastern front.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0674012968
• ISBN13: 9780674012967
• Release Date: December 2004
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Solidly researched, this is an important contribution

I agree with Prof. Hill that this is a superb monograph. It is very well-written, and the research integrates exiting historiography with some very impressive research in German archives. The theme is the escalation of German reprisals against Soviet partisans, so yes: there is a lot about violence in this book. The main question is: what was the driving force in the escalation of German violence targeting civilians in occupied zones? Continuing the work begun by Omer Bartov ("barbarization of warfare" in the East) and Truman Anderson (reprisals policy and ethnicity), Shepherd traces the microhistory of a single unit: the German 221st Security Division's antipartisan campaign. His findings are an important contribution to our knowledge of how the Hitler-Stalin confrontation escalated into total war. My only objection is that Dr. Shepherd did not draw from published or unpublished Soviet sources. This would have been a much better book if the author had followed the lead of Dieter Pohl and Truman Anderson, who have studied the German occupation as international history: drawing from interviews with locals, and blending these with documents from Soviet and German archives.

An important contribution to the literature

Dr Shepherd has reviewed my monograph, which has kept me from reviewing his book. I will not write a full review, but wish to point out the following in the light of the review by chitadel. Dr Shepherd's book is concerned with the nature of German activity against the partisans, and Dr Shepherd notes a range of factors contributing to the nature of German partisan warfare in the case study area, which might not facilitate the clear cut conclusions perhaps desired by one or two readers.

a excellent perspective of the counterinsurgency in the East

Sherpherd has written an excellent perspective of German military operations against insurgents on the Eastern Front. The case study of the 221st Sercurity Division in Shepherd's book were forced to rely on tactics that depended less on violent actions and more on propaganda and working with the local population due to the lack of manpower in the division. However the neighboring 203rd Security Division comitted more atrocities because it was closer to the front and had to compete with the SS in order to curry favor in the high command. The only weakness of Shepherd's book is that he leaves out perspectives by Soviet partisans and whether or not they support his view of the 221st Security Division. I would highly reccomend this book for anyone who wants a new view of conterinsurgency operations on the Eastern Front.