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  • In Final Defense of the Reich: The Destruction of the Sixth SS Mountain Division “Nord.”
  • Robert Weldon Whalen
In Final Defense of the Reich: The Destruction of the Sixth SS Mountain Division “Nord.” By Stephen M. Rusiecki. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2010. Pp. xviii + 439. Cloth $42.95. ISBN 978-1591147442.

In the 1980s, when Stephen M. Rusiecki was a young officer in the US Army, he was stationed in Germany east of Frankfurt, near Gelnhausen and the Büdingen forest. Working on a history of his unit’s Kaserne, Rusiecki heard older Germans’ grim stories about savage fighting that had raged in the area in the last days of World War II. Rusiecki continued his military career back in the United States, taught English at West Point, and in the 1990s was again stationed in Germany, where he was again drawn to the stories about that ferocious weekend battle that took place around the Büdingen forest during Easter in 1945—a battle virtually ignored in the vast military history of the war. Rusiecki walked the battlefield, interviewed elderly German and American veterans, and hunted through piles of German and American military documents to produce this meticulous and exhaustive account of a brutal battle that other historians had forgotten.

The battle was primarily fought between the US Army’s Seventy-first Infantry Division and the German Sixth SS Mountain Division “Nord.” It raged for three days, from April 1–3, 1945, and ended with the destruction of the Sixth SS Mountain Division. Rusiecki’s book is military history in the traditional mode. His narrative is driven by battalions moving here and regiments moving there. Military historians’ newer concerns about the mentalité and cultures of war, for example, or about technology, gender, and homefronts, are not Rusiecki’s primary concerns. His account, to be sure, is filled with individual soldiers’ recollections about that Easter battle, but it is the military operation itself that is the focus of attention. The ten chapters are chronologically arranged, from the creation of the Sixth SS Mountain Division “Nord” to its destruction. Three appendices help the reader navigate the book’s military technicalities: a table of comparative ranks, a glossary of terms and equipment, and an order of battle.

A handful of veterans’ histories of the Sixth SS Mountain Division and the Seventy-first Infantry Division already exist, but Rusiecki’s study is the first fully researched account of this little-known battle. It nicely balances a “band-of-brothers”-style narrative keyed to specific soldiers’ experiences with a professional soldier’s interest in larger unit operations, and he tells his story from both the German and the American perspectives. That story is full of surprises—for example, that savage fighting and pitched, large-unit battles continued as late as April 1945; in fact, in Rusiecki’s judgment, “the last six weeks of the war in Europe represented some of the fiercest fighting on record” (xi). The Arctic prelude to the Büdingen forest battle is equally intriguing: the Sixth SS Mountain Division “Nord” was created specifically to fight [End Page 434] in northern Scandinavia, along the Arctic Circle, and Rusiecki provides a brief but fascinating account of the little-known Arctic theater of the German-Russian War.

Any history involving a Waffen-SS unit unavoidably becomes entangled in the intense debates about the behavior of both the Wehrmacht in general, and the Waffen-SS in particular, during the war. Rusiecki carefully insists that his approach is strictly descriptive and nonjudgmental; he writes that his “focus has always been on telling the stories of soldiers from both sides—the human aspect of battle. I judge no one, and I tell the story as it is, warts and all. I do not concern myself with anyone’s political beliefs except as they have an impact on the battle itself” (xiv). Nevertheless, In Final Defense of the Reich addresses familiar and contentious issues, at least implicitly: were Waffen-SS troops primarily “SS” or primarily “troops”? And did this Waffen-SS unit participate in the atrocities for which the SS became notorious, and in which the Wehrmacht was often complicit? On the one hand, the...

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