Harvard University Press
War in the Wild East: The German Army and Soviet Partisans
Key Metrics
- Ben H Shepherd
- Harvard University Press
- Hardcover
- 9780674012967
- 8.52 X 5.52 X 1 inches
- 1.05 pounds
- History > Military - World War II
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
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.
Author Bio
I was awarded my PhD in German History by the University of Birmingham in December 2000. I was a teaching fellow in the School of History, University of Birmingham before beginning a lectureship in History at Glasgow Caledonian University in September 2002. I became a reader in 2009.
My most recent main research activity engaged with German and Austrian military history 1914-1945, with particular focus on the Third Reich, through a project designed with general as well as scholarly appeal: a general, single-authored work on the German army under the Third Reich, titled Hitler’s Soldiers: The German Army in the Third Reich (New Haven CT, London: Yale University Press, 2016).
With the encouragement of Yale University Press, I have started research for a companion study to Hitler’s Soldiers, this time focusing on the combat wing of the SS, the Waffen-SS. The resulting study will form the basis of a book provisionally titled The Waffen-SS: A New History, and of applications for related research grants.
Member of the Arbeitskreis Militärgeschichte, the German History Society and the German Studies Association.
Re Hitler’s Soldiers: from 11 July 2016, a list of clarifications and corrections, and scanned examples of primary sources cited in the book, will be available.
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