Hitler's Bandit Hunters: The SS and the Nazi Occupation of Europe (review)

This study deals with Nazi policies toward occupied areas—especially the Eastern territories, but also France, Italy, and the Balkans—at a time when the situation was becoming ever more tenuous for the occupiers, as the combination of partisan movements and a shrinking front moved the Nazis to ever more destructive security measures. Blood's book is a story of policy, structure, personnel, and activity, involving the Waffen-SS, police formations, the Wehrmacht, ethnic units such as the "Cossack" formations, and even criminal bands such as that of Oskar Dirlewanger, all evolving to cope with an ever more dangerous situation.

The author sketches a history of irregular warfare under the concept of Bandenbekämpfung. Tracing "security" warfare back to the Thirty Years' War—even to the Battle of Cannae—he moves to the post-Napoleonic era (curiously leaving out the Spanish guerrilla resistance to French occupation) to survey examples of "bandit hunting" in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including the franc-tireurs in the Franco-Prussian War, German efforts in China in 1900 and Namibia in 1904, the Etappen structure (echeloning of administration behind the Front) of the First World War, and the re-conquest of Munich in 1919. He is certainly right to emphasize the connection between operations in colonial areas prior to the First World War and Nazi genocidal policies of the Second. Blood draws attention to a continuity in personnel, including Hermann Goering's father and Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski's uncle, both originally active in colonial Africa. These connections have long needed more attention, since in the long run it was unlikely that the Europeans would isolate from the European continent colonial practices such as concentration camps, forced marches, slave labor, scorched earth, and extermination. After all, the Nazis viewed "the East" in both racial and colonial terms.

What Bandenbekämpung really boils down to is the task of taming large swaths of occupied and potentially hostile territory, i.e., establishing "security." Many questions emerge from this task: How do you deal with odd and often unprecedented forms of guerrilla warfare? What means are legitimate? What vision do you have for the occupied peoples, and, of course, how do you treat them? What is the connection between the Front and the rear areas? Blood deals with each of these fundamental questions.

In the realm of policy, Blood quite accurately points out that Heinrich Himmler played a central role. By July 1942, alarmed by increasing partisan activity and the Wehrmacht's inability to deal with it effectively, and especially by the assassination of his second-in-command, Reinhard Heydrich, Himmler announced that he was taking control of security in the field. Hitler backed him in Directive 46, defining all partisans as "bandits" to be dealt with ruthlessly (as, Hitler noted, "red Indians" had been in North America) (p. 79). Himmler composed a pamphlet entitled "Reflections on the Fundamental Methods for Combating Bandits" that laid out the ground rules for dealing with the problem. Blood makes an important contribution in sketching out Himmler's continuing role in this enterprise.

As for those pursuing the partisans, Blood spends more time than has any other historian, examining the background and behavior of men such as Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, Himmler's chief deputy in the mounting anti-partisan effort. The successes and failures of security warfare are thus personalized, demonstrating the confluence between ideology, the character of individual perpetrators, and activities in the field. Blood thus offers important insights into what enabled "ordinary men" to do terrible things.

Blood examines virtually all areas of occupied Europe. In the lengthiest and most valuable part of his book, where he defines what Bandenkampfgebiete were, Blood looks at their individual characteristics, addresses the forms of resistance, and judges how successful the Germans were in dealing with them. His topics range from German "bases" such as SS-Waldlager Bobruisk, to full-fledged...