Bestiality, buggery, incest, child molestation, and rape count as some of the most universally reviled crimes in western societies today. The Nazis added even consensual homosexual acts to that black list. David Snyder sets out to explore how the Wehrmacht dealt with them during the Third Reich. His thesis is a straightforward one, which he states repeatedly as he examines each of the offenses in turn: that the Wehrmacht was not so decisively infected with Nazi racial ideology that it joined forces with the Party in the latter's agenda of purifying the Volk by eradicating such deviants. Rather it was swayed almost always by considerations of military efficiency. Even those offenses declared by courts martial to be the most revolting crimes could often be declared “atoned for” relatively quickly, and the convicted soldier paroled and, even in cases of multiple homosexual offenses, returned to his regular unit, especially at the war's end when manpower shortages at the front became more acute.

This presents a very different picture from my own research on the civilian police and its unbending fanaticism with regard to the destruction of homosexuality right into the final weeks of the war [cf. Geoffrey J. Giles, “The Denial of Homosexuality: Same-Sex Incidents in Himmler's SS and Police,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 11, nos. 1/2 (January/April 2002): 256–290]. Snyder claims that the military leadership was more interested in the Wehrgemeinschaft than the Volksgemeinschaft: “Rapists, child molesters, and, more often than not, homosexuals did not have to be excluded from the Wehrgemeinschaft if they were willing to carry a weapon in good faith” (p. 24). Habitual criminals and political opponents could be excluded from military service as “wehrunwürdig,” but Snyder sees nothing peculiarly German, let alone Nazi, about that: “All military organizations employ similar precautions for the protection and morale of the troops” (p. 31). At times, then, Snyder's argument begins to sound like a whitewash of the Wehrmacht, an institution that was closely involved in the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Jews in eastern Europe. Elsewhere he states that “while punishments [for homosexual offenses] could be severe, this was a Prussian tradition, not necessarily a Nazi one” (p. 130). Actually the army did not treat such cases with particular severity between 1871 and 1933, except where an abuse of subordinates by an officer, or more usually a noncommissioned officer, had occurred.

Individual crimes complicate the picture. For example, many instances of rape of Slavic women on the eastern front were punished ruthlessly, contrary to the claims of some authors that sexual assault was encouraged here as a tool of pacification. Snyder tries to fit this into his overall argument by claiming that the prime concern of the military courts was security, not race. There was a well-founded fear that such acts of violence would simply drive the local population to support or join the partisans. That was a lesser concern in France, but even here the commanders were anxious to avoid a repeat of the Allied propaganda of World War I about the Huns' proclivity for rape. In fact, the rape of a Jewish woman in the Lublin area reveals other grounds for the conviction that parallel cases in Germany of Stormtrooper rape following Kristallnacht, about which Snyder could have commented. The army in this 1942 case was driven by the very same considerations as the Nazi Party courts in 1938, namely the breach of discipline through inebriation. The corporal concerned had also caused the death of a four-day-old Jewish baby with flying shards of glass, but no charges of manslaughter were brought against him. Nor did the court martial waste time deploring the violation of racial laws by the rape. Instead it focused almost entirely on the issue of alcohol abuse and the resulting violence of the attack at gunpoint. Snyder sums up: the court “tolerated the death of a Jew at the hands of a German soldier, but not the behavior that caused the death” (p. 197).

The author admits at the outset that this study “is based primarily on the secondary literature and published documents” but he did examine a sample of primary source files, together with all 418 cases of sexual offenses on the eastern front in the German military archives at Kornelimünster. The problem is that the surviving files may not represent a significant enough sample to justify the sweeping conclusions that Snyder hazards. The files on death sentences imposed by courts martial were all destroyed in a wartime air raid on Potsdam. Snyder therefore relies on a Wehrmacht statistic, showing one single death sentence for homosexuality between 1940 and 1942, to conclude that “it seems safe to assume” that this “is fairly representative of Wehrmachtjustiz,” even though he notes in several other places the increasing severity of punishments later in the war (p. 101). Sometimes he sounds a note of caution about the validity of generalities, as when he garners only five cases of incest with a blood relation: “With such a small sample of incest cases, no definite conclusions can be drawn” (p. 170). He then immediately attempts to tease out such conclusions from his sample, peppering his various explanations with “perhaps” and “possibly.”

Snyder often cites a German term in the original, which unfortunately merely highlights his difficulty with the language. There are about twenty errors in reproducing German terms in the text, and another two dozen in the bibliography, even with well-known names—it is Erwin Rommel, not “Irwin” (p. 154). Another ten inaccurate or weak translations leap out from the page—the “Purple Heart” was not a German military medal (p. 216).

In the end, his argument is not altogether convincing. He would like to believe that the Wehrmacht judiciary acted from sensible, practical considerations. He rejects the notion that consignment to a frontline parole battalion was virtually an automatic death sentence, claiming that it would have been foolish for the leaders to squander in suicide operations what were initially elite formations struggling to prove their Manneszucht as a path to reinstatement. Yet he cannot ignore Franz Seidler's estimate that there was a fifty percent death rate in these units. As for the field penal camps, “the Wehrmacht's version of the civilian concentration camp,” he admits that “suicide was allegedly a daily event,” with the guards' behavior bordering on sadism, “according to one contemporary account” (p. 83). Curiously, Snyder seems rather more wary of the victims' accounts than he is of the story presented by his court records. He thinks that prisoners' memoirs must be assumed “to have biases and agendas” and should be taken with a grain of salt (p. 88). In the end, then, for all the useful and often surprising material that comes out of individual cases described in this book, his study leans too heavily to one side. And despite the caveats that Snyder scatters around, the impression with which the study leaves the reader is of an exoneration of the Wehrmacht from having actively promoted the Nazi agenda of racial purification during the years of the Holocaust.