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

This important book marks the confluence of several relatively recent historiographical trends that have influenced military history in general and accounts of Nazi Germany's war in the east in particular. Military historians have shown a growing interest in the experience of the common soldier. Omar Bartov and other specialists have devoted much of their work to studying the motives and actions of the average German soldier on the eastern front. Christopher R. Browning's study of the members of a German reserve police battalion who had participated in the murder of Polish Jews further drew the historian's attention to the involvement of "ordinary men" in the Hitler regime's crimes.

Ben Shepherd contributes to this tradition by focusing on the officers and, to some degree, the soldiers of the five security divisions assigned to the Army Group Center rear area in the context of the Wehrmacht's war against Soviet partisans. Concentrating on the 221st Security Division, which operated primarily in German-occupied Byelorussia, he sets out to explain how soldiers and particularly field officers executed the German army's war of annihilation. Shepherd correctly describes the ruthlessness of the German campaign as "preordained" (p. 224) and the Wehrmacht's antipartisan fight as particularly brutal. Given the German army's institutional history, the attitudes and prejudices of its senior officers, Hitler's genocidal goals, and the chronic shortages of resources and manpower, it should not be surprising that midlevel officers adopted a harsh approach.

At the same time, Shepherd's research shows that the Wehrmacht, an army in which eleven million Germans served during World War II, was not a monolith. The author detects considerable differences in the conduct of the different security divisions. Some relied on brutality at all times, while others, especially the 221st, sought to cultivate the civilian population for at least part of the occupation. Similarly, officers at the regimental and battalion levels often acted decidedly more harshly than those at the division level (the 221st may have been an exception because several of its regimental commanders did not resort to particular harshness). Furthermore, officers working in divisional intelligence sections preferred cultivation to the brutal methods favored by operations officers. The author posits that the officers' own proclivities and the conditions they encountered are vital to evaluating their behavior.

Shepherd also finds that the anti-partisan campaign consisted of several phases. The brutality was at its worst in 1941, when the security divisions participated in the murder of Soviet Jews and other groups targeted for elimination by the Nazis. The next two and a half years witnessed a varying mixture of ruthlessness and attempts to cultivate the indigenous population.

Shepherd demonstrates his mastery of the considerable literature in this area. For primary sources, the author relies on documents in German and American archives. There is, however, no evidence that the author visited archives in the former Soviet Union which have sizeable holdings of captured German records.

Shepherd's monograph is well written, and his arguments and conclusions are sound. This book will appeal to experts as well as general readers with an interest in the Soviet-German war.