War in the Wild East: The German Army and Soviet Partisans. By Ben Shepherd. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2004. Pp. 300. $29.95. ISBN 0-674-01296-8.

Abstract

This concise study of the German army's anti-partisan campaigns on the Eastern Front in World War II provides added detail and nuance to historical understanding of the “war of devastation” launched by the Nazi leadership. While titanic armies clashed on the battlefields, German campaigns in the occupied territories behind the front also took a devastating toll, with “the destruction of more than 5,000 villages and the killing of up to 300,000 mainly civilian Soviet citizens” (p. 27). This brutal treatment was meted out not only by the indoctrinated killers of the SS units, but also by units of the German army (contrary to the idealized depictions of a “fundamentally decent” regular army circulated after 1945). Shepherd aims to reveal the mix of “personal influences and particular conditions” (p. 33) and their interplay in causing the brutalization of the German army, the Wehrmacht. Shepherd states, “the Wehrmacht was the single institution that, more than any other, shaped the lives and actions of ordinary Germans between 1933 and 1945” (p. 28), with eleven million men serving in its ranks in this period.