Hitler’s Soldiers: The German Army in the Third Reich by Ben H. Shepherd (review)

In the twenty years following the end of the Second World War in Europe, the losers wrote the history books. That is, Germany’s military leaders established a narrative in which the war’s origins, its culmination in their country’s ruinous defeat, and the horrible crimes that attended it were all solely the fault of Adolf Hitler and his evil Nazi minions, while the German Army fought honorably and skillfully against overwhelming odds. Although evidence to the contrary was there from the start, the generals led a campaign of dissimulation that, in the context of the emerging Cold War, met with success on both sides of the Iron Curtain. British and American military historians, who lacked access to the original documents but who were eager to benefit from firsthand accounts, bought into a story of military and moral superiority. Their accounts also tended to look at the clash of arms rather than at messy affairs behind the lines. Later, when Holocaust studies came on the scene, its scholars were often ignorant of military matters; for a long time they focused their attention on the Nazi Party, and especially on the SS. All of this was just what the former generals wanted.

Only gradually did the situation change, starting tentatively in the 1960s. With time, scholars had the opportunity to organize and process the mass of documents that the Allies had captured at the end of the conflict. The end of the Cold War meant that a further trove of source materials came to light. As a result, the military history community began to recognize that the German Army’s leaders were neither military geniuses nor paragons of virtue. At the same time, Holocaust scholars began to acknowledge the importance of military developments to the history of the Nazi genocidal project. Progress was slow, as various specialists contributed important but relatively narrow studies on topics as varied as staff organization, operational doctrine, officer culture, SS-Army cooperation, food policy, and partisan warfare. One needed an extensive library and considerable linguistic skill to put everything together. More than seventy years after the war ended, the time was ripe for a synthesis of the Army’s role. That is what Ben Shepherd has ably provided.

As one would expect of a work of this scope, there is no single thesis in Hitler’s Soldiers. Rather, Shepherd poses a series of questions: Why did the Army align itself with the Nazis? How can we account for the Army’s early victories? For its eventual defeat? How, and why, did it maintain its resistance long after the impending catastrophe should have been obvious? Why did it participate in the regime’s crimes? Those questions inform the dual themes that run through the book’s twenty-four chapters: military effectiveness and moral righteousness, in all their degrees. Shepherd pursues those themes through a predominantly narrative structure, starting with a brief introduction to the years before 1933. He then takes us step-by-step right through to the final collapse, with just a few topical chapters on subjects such as occupation policies, resistance, and morale. The chapters’ internal organization is clear, with introductory and concluding sections that serve to give the reader a solid understanding of the main points. The book’s themes remain front and center throughout.

Shepherd’s main accomplishment is to have processed a vast amount of material, gleaning the most important conclusions from it and presenting those conclusions in a way that is both understandable and interesting. Naturally, he has relied mostly upon secondary sources, while using primary material, such as orders, letters, and diaries—some published but many of them drawn directly from the archives—to make specific points or to add emphasis or interest. His bibliography is impressive: he includes both the best military history—that is, works that go well beyond the battlefield...