En skole i vold: Bobruisk 1941–1944. Frikorps Danmark og det tyske besættelsesherredømme i Hviderusland by Dennis Larsen and Therkel Stræde (review)

The racial ideology of the SS is first and foremost associated with exclusion and genocide. Less attention has been given to the idealization of “blood-related” peoples. However, from the perspective of the SS, the “gathering together of Nordic blood” and the systematic extermination of Jews, Roma, and other Fremdvölkischen were two sides of the same coin.

Isabel Heinemann shows in her study of the SS Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt (RuSHA) how closely these two extremes of the SS could actually be intertwined. In the search for “good blood” in Eastern Europe, for instance, the same RuSHA “racial inspection” could result in the “Germanization” of some and the murder of other screened persons. Matthew Kott demonstrates the structural and personal interrelations between the SS’s “Germanic policy” in Norway and the Holocaust in the Baltic states.¹ Without explicitly mentioning it, the authors of the study under review tackle a similar question: What did the recruitment of Waffen-SS volunteers in occupied Denmark have to do with an extermination camp in the occupied USSR?

Dennis Larsen and Therkel Stræde concentrate on the town of Bobruisk in Belorussia, which was under German occupation between 1941 and 1944. In April 1942, a base of the Waffen-SS was established at the outskirts of Bobruisk in a former Red Army tank officers’ school. Supplies were stored there; it also served as a training and equipment camp. The local Jewish population had been murdered, so the work-force needed to complete this Waldlager (forest camp) was imported from the Warsaw ghetto in 1942. There, next to Bobruisk, 1,500 Polish Jews, among them numerous teenagers, arrived in two convoys. A so-called Judenlager was built and attached to the Waldlager.

In the fifteen months that followed, the prisoners were worked extremely hard. Selektionen were held regularly; larger groups were executed in the surrounding woods. SS-Blockführer terrorized, tortured, and murdered hundreds more. When the Judenlager was closed down in September 1943, only about ninety prisoners had survived. Knowledge of this camp grew more certain in the early 1970s, when West German prosecutors collected testimony about crimes committed in the Waldlager.

Between October 1942 and June 1943, the Ersatzkompanie of the Freikorps Danmark—the Danish SS-legion—was stationed there. Between 800 and 1,000 Danish Waffen-SS volunteers were trained there. Larsen and Stræde explore the context in which the young Danes received their training, their role guarding the Judenlager, and the extent to which they were involved in war crimes.

The study opens with several introductory chapters on the ideological and political background to German warfare in “the East.” Larsen and Stræde then focus on Bobruisk to analyze German tyranny in eastern Belorussia. They give a very detailed picture of the economic exploitation of the region, including the deportation of laborers to the Reich (chapter 6). They then discuss the segregation of the Jewish population in ghettos and the ensuing “Holocaust by bullets” (chapters 8–11), the systematic mass murder of POWs (chapters 12 and 13), and the merciless fight against partisans, actually directed mainly against civilians (chapter 15). Then, in chapters 17, 18, and 20, the authors turn from a regional to a local focus. They depict the erection of the base’s Judenlager, its system of terror, and its liquidation in autumn 1943.

All of this formed the context for the Danish recruits posted in Bobruisk; Larsen and Stræde label the Waldlager a “school of violence” for the Danes. They show that Danes were involved in the fight against the partisans and to some extent as guards in the Judenlager. Nonetheless, this study may disappoint those who are primarily interested in Danish SS members. Only two of more than twenty chapters deal explicitly with the role Danish SS men played in the Waldlager and...