Surprisingly, this superb monograph is the first comprehensive analysis of the German Army in the Soviet Union, the “most brutal military occupation regime that history had known” (p. 337). The human cost remains staggering: under military administration, German authorities murdered outright a million Soviet prisoners of war, half a million Jews, and around 200,000 non-Jewish civilians. Millions more starved to death, especially in Soviet cities, as the direct result of the military's food distribution policy. As they planned the war on Bolshevism, military commanders shared Hitler's “brinksmanship in planning war,” racist consensus about the image of the enemy, and acceptance of unrestrained force as necessary for success and survival. The territorial expanse of the U.S.S.R. ruled out a comprehensive occupation, encouraging ruthless exploitation of its resources and war against its civilian population as the response to any resistance.

Pohl emphasizes the role of the German Army High Command (OKH), particularly the General Quartermaster's office, in waging this war of annihilation. His sketch of the complex structure of the military administration is of immense value to those who are not specialists in military organization and a good reference to those who are. He depicts a cordial relationship between the army and SS, based on an anti-Bolshevik, anti-Semitic, anti-Slavic consensus and the army's endorsement of the SS—police as an “integral part” of its security concept (p. 72).

German military policy included calculated mass murder, by direct methods, including shooting, and indirectly—but no less premeditated—through starvation. Military personnel in the rear areas participated fully in organizing the logistics of massacres and even in killings. The combat troops were also tainted; Pohl concludes that few frontline divisions did not have some involvement in killing civilians and prisoners of war (p. 348). Military administrations participated in and initiated the slaughter of Soviet Jews, Roma (Gypsies), and institutionalized people with disabilities. Despite the doubts of some, most officers accepted or even pushed for mass murder.

German military authorities also reckoned on mass starvation of up to thirty million civilians. The Germans feared scarce food resources and exposed and clogged supply lines, but they also harbored an ideology that condemned the cities, home to many communist officials and ethnic Russians, as breeders of Bolshevism. The drastic reduction of food rations for Soviet civilians in September 1941 caused mass death in the cities by winter. Beyond the millions who died, Pohl estimates that perhaps half of the Soviet population under German military rule suffered seriously from starvation (p. 199). Such conditions applied more harshly to Soviet POWs: “Never in history” had “so many prisoners of war died in such a short time as the Red Army soldiers in German hands” (p. 201). Hundreds of thousands were shot outright. Dreadful conditions in the POW camps killed hundreds of thousands more. Up to three million Soviet soldiers died in German custody (more than half of all those captured), approximately 845,000 in the territory under military occupation (p. 210).

Interpreting resistance as inspired by Jews and Communists and lacking the resources to pacify the countryside, military authorities targeted suspicious population groups, combating resistance with mass murder. The Germans had little to offer the indigenous population to counterbalance terror, seizure of agricultural produce, mass starvation, and deportation to the Reich for labor. By maintaining the collective farms, the army squandered whatever favor it earned by permitting churches to reopen. Nevertheless, the Wehrmacht recruited hundreds of thousands of auxiliaries, many of whom became perpetrators of or accessories to criminal acts. Miserable living conditions and fear of deportation to the Reich were chief motivating factors. By 1942, the German occupation authorities were contending with actual partisan activity. Organized primarily by the NKVD and often “extremely violent,” Soviet partisan activity cannot legitimize German anti-partisan tactics. German soldiers killed civilians in numbers that dwarfed their own losses and casualties inflicted on actual partisans. In 1942, to supply the Reich with forced labor, German military units deported 1.4 million Soviet civilians from areas under military administration. In a final orgy of violence, German commanders depopulated entire regions in the wake of the Soviet advance, killing those not evacuated in frantic scorched-earth retreat. These last-minute evacuations affected 2.3 million people.

Pohl concludes that German soldiers in the U.S.S.R. were “average German men,” who had generally internalized Nazi values, remained loyal to the Führer, and were infected with anti-Semitism (p. 114, 116, 349). In his careful comparative analysis of the German occupation regime in the Soviet Union, Pohl sees similarities to other German occupation regimes, particularly in Serbia and France, where the army took initiatives in the murder of Jews, Gypsies, and communists. He finds that other Axis military personnel generally shared an ideologically driven hatred of Jews and communists and disdain for Slavs (insofar as they were not themselves Slavic), an intent to plunder and exploit occupied territory, and, on occasion, a will to engage in mass murder of civilians because they were Jews (the Romanians) or during anti-partisan operations (the Hungarians). For German Army policies of mass starvation or mass murder of prisoners of war, however, Pohl finds no counterpart among the Axis partners.

This book is a well-documented and carefully analyzed indictment of the German armed forces that does not shield frontline troops from responsibility. The Wehrmacht's close relationship to the political leadership and its consensus that the ideological enemy must be eliminated were unique among the armies of World War II. German commanders and officers at all levels were responsible for the murder of communists, Jews, patients in institutions, and Roma, as well as broader killings within the framework of anti-partisan warfare and starvation policy. A significant number—perhaps the majority—of German perpetrators in the U.S.S.R. wore Wehrmacht uniforms (p. 349). Despite limited internal debates on occupation policy, military commanders consistently favored radical options, often perceiving the crimes to be a sideshow in achieving a legitimate military goal. There were soldiers who, confronted with the truth, chose not to be morally blind, but, “unfortunately, there were far too few of these” (p. 356). Postwar West German courts reflected this moral blindness; of more than 9,000 convictions of Nazi offenders, only 87 involved soldiers. Among its other outstanding qualities, this volume convincingly demolishes the myth of a German Army separate from German society under Nazi rule.