It is a long time since Austrian governments or historians argued that the Gemütlichkeit of Austrian soldiers set them apart from their militaristic German comrades and used the contrast to make general claims about Austria's victim status. Other concerns have dominated recent Austrian discussions: first, the controversy over the 1995 “Wehrmacht exhibition” and, more recently, the rehabilitation of deserters (see Maria Fritsche, Entziehungen. Österreichische Deserteure und Selbstverstümmler in der Deutschen Wehrmacht, Vienna, 2004). In neither case did Austrian soldiers (ca. 1.2 million) seem to have behaved significantly better (or worse) than Germans. Bertrand Buchmann's book does not really argue that they did either, but it sits rather awkwardly between the older legitimizing claims and the newer sensibility. It is also strongly marked by a third tradition, the supposedly value-free “technical” evaluation of military achievement. The result is often confused and confusing.

Buchmann cites many examples of the prejudice and sadism that Austrian (ostmärkisch) private soldiers experienced and clearly feels great sympathy with them, but he is less certain when it comes to evaluating them. Sometimes he deploys instrumental “rationality,” as when he sees the demotion of able Austrian officers as evidence of the “wastefulness of human resources” (25). At other times, he appears to defend Austrian soldiers against the “classical prejudice” that they were “inferior soldiers” (41). But he also returns sporadically to the older legitimizing theme, including the dubious argument that, unlike the “Hitler army,” the k.u.k. army would never have stooped to looting a private French wine cellar!

Part of Buchmann's uncertainty can be ascribed to a creditable awareness of the fragmentary nature of the evidence and a wariness about overgeneralizations. He recalls that there were humane officers from the Altreich, as well as sadistic Austrians (including some who tried to “out Prussian the Prussians.”) But this caution leads to a collage effect in which one vignette is offset by the next, with little sense of an overall pattern. And in the end, the reader is left wondering whether there was a specifically Austrian pattern of behavior at all.

Buchmann comes closest to this issue when he briefly discusses the divisions with a high proportion of Austrians who were destroyed at Stalingrad. Yet, here he overlooks the meticulous studies by Walter Manoschek and Hans Safrian of the depredations of the 717th and 718th Infantry division in Serbia and Greece (“Österreicher in der Wehrmacht” in NS-Herrschaft in Österreich, Vienna, 1988,) as well as Manoschek's later monograph (“Serbien ist Judenfrei”: Militärische Besatzungspolitik und Judenvernichtung in Serbien 1941–42, Munich, 1993). Buchmann asks whether General Franz Böhme's bloodcurdling reprisal policy in Serbia may have been a belated revenge for the collapse of the monarchy, but he then swings back to viewing the partisan war as “primarily” a Yugoslav war, though without seeking to diminish the murderous complicity of German (and Italian) soldiers. The possibility that Austrians were deployed in the Balkans because they had a special ability in dealing with Balkan inhabitants is also raised but not discussed.

When it comes to the “war of annihilation,” Buchmann certainly does not try to defend the honor of the Wehrmacht, and he cites testimony suggesting that some Austrians were fully committed to it. Yet again, he undercuts this by stressing the lack of information about the Holocaust available to the ordinary soldiers (German, as well as Austrian). Some of this strains credulity—especially when it rests heavily on the testimony of Lothar Rendulic (usually referred to respectfully as Generaloberst Dr. Lothar Rendulic) and Franz Schönhuber. He concludes that no soldier of any rank (or nationality) could have stopped the Holocaust but also asserts that there were certainly many more “quiet heroes” than the forty-five Austrian soldiers honored at Yad Vashem (204).

Buchmann's zigzagging conclusion (287–88) is in line with the rest of this flawed book, the balance of the Wehrmacht is “appalling” since “although” (because?) it was “an outstandingly organized, meticulously planned, well equipped and intelligently-led institution,” it left behind millions of dead, ravaged countries and destroyed cities. Austrians were involved on all fronts of the war but, whether privates or generals, they were merely cogs in a gigantic mechanism of war. Austrian soldiers demonstrated both the best and the lowest of human behavior, but then so did Reichsdeutch and Volksdeutsch soldiers.

In the end, therefore, Buchmann's book may be most interesting as evidence of the ambivalence some Austrians still feel about World War II. Although it includes some interesting unpublished primary material (letters, diaries, and postwar memoirs), Buchmann's book unfortunately cannot be recommended either as an introduction to the subject or as an analysis of current scholarly debates.