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  • Hitler’s Bandit Hunters: The SS and the Nazi Occupation of Europe
  • Lee Baker
Hitler’s Bandit Hunters: The SS and the Nazi Occupation of Europe. By Philip W. Blood. Dulles, Va.: Potomac Books, 2006. ISBN 1-59797-021-2. Photographs. Illustrations. Tables. Diagrams. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. xxii, 400. $29.95.

This book analyzes the evolution of the antipartisan campaign in Europe from Partisanenkreig (partisan warfare) to Bandenbekämpfung (bandit fighting) by focusing on a critical meeting held on 19 June 1943 between Heinrich Himmler, chief of the SS, and Adolf Hitler. The outcome of this meeting was the creation of mechanisms for more effectively combating the partisan problem on a European-wide scale, whether in France, the Balkans, or behind the lines along the eastern front. The distinction between the two names given these actions, while seemingly minor, is of capital importance. Bandits are inherently criminal and thus beyond the pale while partisans are soldiers who must be accorded the protections required by the rules governing warfare. The capstone of this conference was the appointment of Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski as overall commander of all units, regardless of theater, fighting "bandits." Much of the central core of the book is an elucidation of the units and their training, tactics, and operations as bandit-fighters in the various theaters.

The roots of the murderous German security policies lay in the distant German past: in the experience with banditry during the Thirty Years' War, [End Page 568] the franc-tireurs of 1870–71, and the colonial wars at the turn of the century. These negative experiences combined with Schlieffen's obsession with battles of annihilation (in the mode of Cannae) to create a potent and deadly matrix in which attacks behind the front were perceived as criminal banditry and therefore required total annihilation. Security became an obsession of the German military establishment as it became apparent that without it the goals of the main army at the front would be more difficult to achieve. Almost immediately after the Second World War began, however, the goal of security was redirected from merely securing the rear areas to ensure military success at the front into a policy designed to achieve both security and the racial policies of the Nazi regime (which the author lumps together under "Lebensraum"). The primary signal of this shift was an order issued by the armed forces high command in August 1942, known as Führer Directive No. 46. This order identified all insurrection behind the lines as communist-inspired criminal banditry whose eradication was the responsibility of army and SS units. The meeting in 1943 completed the process by setting up an organization whose responsibility was to prosecute the war against "bandits" throughout Europe.

The book presents a compelling picture of the links between the Holocaust and the campaigns against "bandits." In essence it is evidence that Bach-Zelewski and others escaped paying for their crimes and as such fits into recent historiography seeking to remove the postwar whitewash from heinous criminal activity camouflaged as security operations. It complements recent work on the partisan war in the east and clarifies the connections between it and the same kinds of activities elsewhere in Europe, and would be best utilized in a graduate seminar whose focus includes that literature.

Lee Baker
University of Cincinnati, Raymond Walters College
Cincinnati, Ohio
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