I

Most historians now acknowledge the scale of Wehrmacht involvement in the crimes of the Third Reich. The two highest command bodies, the Army High Command (OKH) and Armed Forces High Command (OKW), and many higher-level field formations also, did not just follow the general directions for brutal action with which Hitler provided them; they also initiated brutal measures themselves. The result was a body of directives extensively implicating the Wehrmacht in the worst aspects of the Third Reich's prosecution of the Second World War: the mass death of Soviet prisoners of war; the use of security policy as a tool for escalating the emergence of the Final Solution across occupied Europe; the killing and terrorizing of countless civilians in the course of that same ‘security’ campaign, and, particularly from 1943, the plundering of occupied Europe for foodstuffs, labour, and raw materials to fuel the German economy's increasingly desperate war effort. These aspects attained their most monstrous dimensions in Hitler's proclaimed ‘war of extermination’ against the Soviet Union, its ruling ‘Jew-Bolshevik’ intelligentsia, and its ‘racially inferior’ peoples. An extensive picture of Wehrmacht involvement was revealed by the critical historiography which emerged, from the mid-1960s onward, in response to earlier historiography which had depicted the Wehrmacht as a ‘clean’ institution unsullied by involvement in Nazi crimes.Footnote ¹

There nevertheless remains considerable debate as to the relative importance of the roles which ideology, careerism, ruthless military utilitarianism, and pressure of circumstances played in shaping Wehrmacht conduct. Attention has to a large extent shifted from the highest command levels to large field formations such as army groups and individual armies. Further down the command chain, the picture is more disputed still. Here a particularly nuanced, complex debate is emerging as to the extent and motives of lower-level Wehrmacht involvement in Nazi crimes.

Some studies have focused upon the rank and file, investigating among other things the degree to which ordinary soldiers' perceptions, motives, and actions were hardened by their belief in National Socialist ideology and its anti-Bolshevik, anti-Semitic, and anti-Slavic tenets. That said, rank-and-file investigation is to a significant extent limited by the nature and availability of relevant sources. The vast majority of source material on the Wehrmacht in the field, consisting of the official files of Wehrmacht units, was produced essentially by officers for reception by other officers. Its extent, moreover, becomes very patchy below divisional level. For both reasons, it does not provide a comprehensive, detailed picture of rank-and-file motivation and conduct across the Wehrmacht as a whole. There are also significant problems of reliability and representativeness relating to those sources, particularly soldiers' letters, which were produced by the rank and file itself.Footnote ² Furthermore, sources which have shed extensive light on rank-and-file motivation within other agencies of the Third Reich, perhaps best exemplified by Christopher Browning's groundbreaking use of post-war judicial material in his study of reserve policemen involved in perpetrating the Holocaust in Poland,Footnote ³ are not extensively available in the case of the Wehrmacht.

All that notwithstanding, some extremely valuable work relating directly to the rank and file has emerged, utilizing sources including not just soldiers' letters and post-war judicial investigations, but also official personnel files.Footnote ⁴ Nevertheless, source considerations have gone a significant way to ensuring that the great majority of new work has focused not upon the rank and file directly, but upon the Wehrmacht's ‘middle level’ – military jurisdictions, corps, divisions, regiments, and other unit types.Footnote ⁵

A call to intensified study of Wehrmacht conduct came in Rolf-Dieter Müller's introduction to the 1999 essay collection Die Wehrmacht.Footnote ⁶ Müller urged that the numerous remaining research gaps be studied intensively, and that the results be synthesized to arrive at a new, and where necessary nuanced, understanding of the motives and behaviour of the Wehrmacht generally. Müller was echoing Martin Broszat's call, during the 1980s, for ‘historicization’ of the Third Reich, avoiding the pitfall of allowing moral condemnation, however justified, to blunt fuller historical understanding.Footnote ⁷

Müller was being especially mindful here of the Wehrmacht Exhibition, first toured across Germany by the Hamburg Institute for Social Research in 1995. Mixing official documents with ‘history from below’ sources such as private letters, diaries, and photographs, the exhibition had provoked bitter protest from veterans, far-right groups, and others over its depiction of a Wehrmacht which, from the bottom up, had been more thoroughly indoctrinated, and more extensively implicated in National Socialist crimes, than had previously been believed.Footnote ⁸ In eastern and south-eastern Europe in particular, it was claimed, the Wehrmacht had prosecuted a ‘war of extermination’, in which tactical considerations had taken second place to brutalizing the Wehrmacht's troops systematically and transforming them into fanatical ideological warriors. This ‘war of extermination thesis’ (Vernichtungskriegsthese) was promoted not just by the Wehrmacht Exhibition, but also in articles written by the exhibition's organizers for the 1996 essay collection Vernichtungsgkrieg.Footnote ⁹ In 1999 the exhibition was closed down temporarily, investigated independently over the reliability of its sources and the plausibility of its contentions, and reopened in modified form. Yet the extraordinarily dark picture presented by its first incarnation retained considerable influence.

Since then, extensive new research has emerged on all Wehrmacht command levels. Unsurprisingly, the majority of such work has focused upon the Eastern Front. How far it has borne out the claims of the Wehrmacht Exhibition, and how far, conversely, it has vindicated Müller's call for a more differentiated approach, are key concerns of this review.

The review's purpose is to survey recent developments in the study of a specific but crucial aspect of the Wehrmacht's war in the East – the role of the Ostheer, the German Eastern Army, in the anti-partisan campaign. This campaign was conducted only partly against actual partisans. To a great extent, it was conducted as cover for a vast enterprise of terror and exploitation aimed at annihilating the Reich's purported ‘ideological enemies’ – Jews, Communists, and others – and plundering alleged ‘bandit areas’ for labour and economic resources.

There are three reasons why such a focus is important. Firstly, the Ostheer's anti-partisan campaign generated much of the evidence on which the Vernichtungskriegsthese is based. It therefore makes for an excellent testing ground for how far subsequent research has gone on to support or undermine that thesis. Secondly, given that the war in the East was such a destructive enterprise, and anti-partisan warfare a particularly destructive aspect of it, the Ostheer's participation in such warfare clearly constitutes an important area for the study of Wehrmacht conduct not just in the East, but across occupied Europe generally. Finally, anti-partisan warfare involved more Ostheer troops directly than did other criminal Nazi endeavours in the East such as the mass death of Soviet prisoners of war and the mass shootings, particularly during 1941, of Jews, Gypsies, and Soviet commissars.

The review sketches the historical background and surveys the development of the historiography up to the late 1990s. It then examines the significant works that have emerged since, dividing them according to the operational levels on which they focus: High Command and the largest Ostheer field formations; regional Ostheer jurisdictions, and, finally, middle-level units such as corps and divisions. It concludes with brief pointers for potential future research.

II

The Ostheer's anti-partisan campaign was conducted primarily in the portion of the occupied Soviet Union under direct Ostheer jurisdiction – the rear areas of Army Groups North, Centre, and South, and, nearer the front line, the smaller rear areas of the subordinate armies. Granted, the Ostheer's anti-partisan campaign did not mete out the same levels of terror and bloodletting as that of the SS and Police in the civilian-administered Reich Commissariats in the westernmost portion of the occupied Soviet Union. It was, nevertheless, a brutal undertaking in many respects, encompassing ideologically driven killing, terror of civilians, destruction of thousands of villages, and – reflecting the economic imperatives increasingly driving the campaign by 1943 – seizure of vast amounts of foodstuffs and forced labour from purportedly pro-partisan areas. Whilst it is virtually impossible to arrive at exact figures either for deaths inflicted or villages destroyed, it is clear that both, overall, went well beyond the realms of military justification.Footnote ¹⁰

Yet the issues involved remain contentious. It is not clear just how many Ostheer units were involved in what degree of atrocity, or which combination of attitudes and circumstances combined to drive that involvement. Nor is it always clear which portion of killing on the ground actually fell into the category of ‘atrocity’, and which constituted a harsh but more measured response to an irregular form of warfare which was itself often deeply underhand and ruthless.Footnote ¹¹ Generally speaking, of course, the fact that the Germans had flouted international law by invading the Soviet Union in the first place, harbouring such ruthless intentions and employing such ruthless means, hardly made them best placed to complain about underhand methods. Yet individual German units on the receiving end of such methods, units which might not actually have behaved brutally otherwise, were not necessarily going to view matters in such a clear-headed way.

Finally, the combination of attitudes and circumstances shaping the conduct of those Ostheer units which did behave brutally was itself varied and complex.Footnote ¹² Throughout the campaign, anti-Slavism often hardened Ostheer units' treatment of the population generally as well as their prosecution of anti-partisan warfare specifically. And, during 1941 particularly, the two other animosities most central to the Nazi world view – anti-Semitism and anti-Bolshevism – helped lead the Ostheer to victimize Jews and Communists as hostage victims, scapegoat them as the source of all unrest in the German-occupied rear, and kill them on a grossly disproportionate scale. Indeed, this anti-Semitic victimization helped facilitate the emergence of the Final Solution on Soviet soil that year. Ideology was wedded to particularly harsh military attitudes towards guerrillas and potentially guerrilla-supporting populations, attitudes which manifested themselves in the view that the best means of ensuring peace and order on occupied enemy soil was to terrorize the population rather than engage it. During the eastern campaign, this fusion of ideological and military harshness was reinforced by successive higher-level orders.

A further brutalizing force was pressure of circumstances. The Ostheer troops charged with prosecuting anti-partisan warfare were mainly older and relatively poorly equipped, and of dubious quality, insufficient quantity, and low priority in terms of training, equipment, and supply. This was, to a large extent, a result of deliberate policy: the High Command perceived that supplying the front line with sufficient troops and resources, an undertaking that would grow ever more difficult due to the ferocity of the fighting in the East, necessitated a drastic de-prioritizing of rear-area security. Thus did rear-area security become an even more thankless task for the troops committed to it, troops already charged both with guarding the means of supply, administration, and economic exploitation, and with actively carrying the fight to the partisans themselves. In addition, they were expected to operate across a vast, predominantly rural area riddled with the kind of swampy, forested terrain which was a gift to partisans and a bane of occupying troops. These conditions were a further spur to higher command levels to issue orders of singular ruthlessness, perceiving such orders as they did as a means of overcoming the difficulties which such conditions created. Indeed, the frustration these conditions engendered could easily help to fuel brutality anyway.

Brutality was further fuelled by pressure from above for results and, from 1943 particularly, by the bid to deprive partisans of shelter and supply, and procure the resources and labour of ‘bandit-friendly’ areas for the German war effort. It was also fuelled, finally, by the fear and contempt which officers and men felt towards both partisans and the civilians who may or may not have been supporting them.

The Ostheer's anti-partisan campaign, like the occupation generally, underwent three phases. The first took place from June to December 1941. During this period, the Soviets' pre-war failure to prepare for effective partisan warfare and the occupied population's initial ‘wait and see’ attitude towards the German invaders resulted in low levels of partisan activity at first. The Germans nevertheless displayed considerable, sometimes disproportionate, alarm at such partisan activity as they did encounter. As 1941 wore on, large numbers of Red Army troops cut off behind German lines and initial Soviet efforts to co-ordinate them fuelled more widespread partisan activity, and the German response both to partisans and purportedly ‘bandit-friendly’ sections of the population grew more severe. Hostage-taking and mass reprisal shootings increased, and the first of many large-scale operational ‘sweeps’, targeting not so much actual partisans as the populations within areas deemed to be supporting and supplying them, took place.

The period from winter 1941–2 up to the fall of Stalingrad in February 1943 saw the widespread emergence of partisan groups enjoying rising levels of popular and logistical support. This development reflected the population's growing resentment at the brutal and rapacious nature of German occupation policy, and the Soviet regime's growing realization that the partisans merited proper supply and organization. From February 1943 onward, finally, the movement grew significantly in size and effectiveness. It received an enormous boost from the occupied population's growing realization that backing the partisans also made sense because the Germans were losing the war. Both latter periods also saw many Ostheer officers increasingly realize that any anti-partisan policy with a remote chance of success needed to cultivate the population with measured conduct and constructive occupation policies. Yet this emerging view was never strong enough either to challenge the ruthless precepts of Nazi occupation policy fundamentally, or to provide a genuinely effective counterweight to many officers' ongoing predisposition towards ruthless conduct. Nor did it remotely offset the mounting economic devastation which the German anti-partisan effort was by this time wreaking. The ultimate failure of the German anti-partisan campaign was assured.

The development of the historiographical debate up to the late 1990s was itself characterized by three phases.Footnote ¹³ Early studies, several written by former German participants in the anti-partisan campaign, often merely adopted various shades of argument vilifying the partisans' ‘bestial’ practices. Recourse to Soviet historiography hardly guaranteed a balanced outlook, however. Political pressure and ideological conviction ensured that it depicted the partisan war as a just, epic struggle into which the population of the German-occupied Soviet Union had thrown itself wholeheartedly. Awkward truths, such as the cautious support with which much of the population had initially greeted the Germans, and the terror the partisans had themselves often employed to compel the population's co-operation, were ignored.

Not until the late 1970s did western research start adopting a justifiably harsher line on Ostheer anti-partisan warfare, based upon increasingly exhaustive investigation not just of official High Command sources, but also of orders and reports from the official files of Ostheer field formations. Figures uncovered recorded often ludicrous disparities between the casualties the Germans themselves had sustained, and the vastly higher numbers of partisan dead which they claimed to have inflicted. It was not only these disparities, but also the often tiny amounts of partisan weaponry seized by the Germans, which indicated that the great majority of ‘partisan’ dead had actually been non-combatants. Such figures were seen increasingly by historians as symptomatic of a brutal, ideologically coloured ‘security’ campaign – albeit one exacerbated by frustration at practical difficulties on the ground – which had targeted Jews and Communists, and subjected the general population to widespread terror.

During the 1990s, finally, proponents of the Vernichtungskriegsthese entered the debate. The clearest statement of the thesis as applied to anti-partisan warfare was Hannes Heer's study of operations in Byelorussia.Footnote ¹⁴ Heer, utilizing among other sources judicial material from Soviet trials of former German soldiers, wrote of a ‘partisan war without partisans’, arguing that the Ostheer had not intensified the ruthlessness of its security campaign in 1941 as a response to mounting partisan activity. Rather, it had viewed such intensification as a means of stripping the troops of all civilized norms, and replacing them with an ‘extermination mentality’ designed to equip the troops for potentially endless warfare against the Reich's ‘ideological enemies’.

The motivation behind the research of recent years has essentially been twofold. The first aim has been to elaborate upon the critical historiography that emerged from the late 1970s onward, by investigating more thoroughly the relative importance of, and interplay between, the ideological and other attitudes which officers brought with them into the campaign, and the pressure of circumstances which they encountered in the field. The second aim, an extension of the first, is to establish how far the Vernichtungskriegsthese is borne out by this new research.

III

The two most prominent recent works investigating higher command levels – focusing upon the first year of the war in the East – are Klaus Jochen Arnold's 2005 study Die Wehrmacht und die Besatzungspolitik in den besetzten Gebieten der Sowjetunion, and Johannes Hürter's 2006 work Hitlers Heerführer.Footnote ¹⁵ Arnold's level of analysis incorporates both High Command and larger field formations, whilst Hürter employs a collective analysis of army and army group commanders. The two studies' level of analysis is thus higher than, and more general than, the levels of analysis of any of the other studies examined here.

Arnold's primary source base consists mainly of official directives and reports from the OKH, the OKW, and various army groups, armies, and subordinate formations, together with the war diaries of leading generals. He places particular importance on the brutalizing effect of conditions, contending that the prime reason why the Ostheer's anti-partisan campaign underwent a process of radicalization and brutalization during 1941 was the problems thrown up by the military campaign's unexpected duration.

Practical challenges had played an important role in driving the campaign's ruthlessness from the start; the poor standard of the Ostheer's security troops had combined with the size of the territory earmarked for occupation to instil a belief at higher command level that the best way of overcoming these challenges was a terroristic policy to keep the population in line. But it was only from autumn 1941, as the military campaign dragged on, that growing partisan activity seriously radicalized Ostheer conduct on the ground, and also stifled criticism of the criminality being perpetrated in the name of ‘security’ – something particularly noticeable in the Ostheer's attitude towards the ever larger mass killings of Jews and Communists by the SS. With respect to this, Arnold argues that the military leadership believed that scapegoating Jews and Communists as the perpetrators of all resistance in the German-occupied rear would actually improve relations with the rest of the population. For, with the ‘perpetrators’ of partisan actions being visibly ‘punished’, the troops' anger at such actions would be assuaged. They therefore would be dissuaded from acting on their anger via the kind of indiscriminate brutality that might alienate the general population as well as endanger their own discipline.Footnote ¹⁶

The watchword for Arnold, then, is ‘functional’ ruthlessness – ruthlessness which, though stipulated in pre-invasion decrees, did not fully translate into harsh conduct in the field until the Ostheer faced a series of mounting problems. Johannes Hürter adds a further dimension to understanding the Ostheer's motives. He devotes considerable attention to the longer-term life influences that helped predispose senior officers towards such a ruthlessly functional – and, as Hürter argues, narrow and ultimately counter-productive – approach in the first place.

Hürter employs a ‘collective biography’ treatment – backed up not just by official files, but also by particularly extensive use of private papers and contextualizing secondary literature – of the twenty-five generals and field-marshals who commanded the army groups and armies operating in the Soviet Union during the campaign's first year. These officers, Hürter argues, identified willingly with the campaign's ruthless aims, even though they hailed predominantly from an aristocratic background not normally conducive to supporting Nazism. Their self-conscious elitism and traditional identification with Prussian militarism provided them with the kind of attitudinal base conducive to the later addition, courtesy of National Socialism as well as other influences, of further brutalizing layers.Footnote ¹⁷ The First World War engendered these officers' belief that future wars must be waged on a ‘total’ basis, utilizing the most brutal means possible. It also provided them with a strong sense of who their principal enemies were – the Slavs who, they believed, had subjected eastern Germany to terror and rapacity during the Russian invasion of 1914; the Bolsheviks who had fomented bloody revolution against the established order in Russia in 1917, and had sought to do so in Germany subsequently; and the Jews who allegedly had not just played a leading role in the Russian Revolution, but also spread pacifism and defeatism to contribute to Germany's collapse in 1918. The nature of these enemy groups (Feindgruppen) contributed significantly to senior officers' readiness to employ extreme ruthlessness in the Soviet Union twenty-five years later.Footnote ¹⁸

These factors, together with various interwar influences and the euphoric effect of Germany's military successes of 1940, did not necessarily mean that senior commanders were ready to follow National Socialist dictates blindly by 1941. They did mean, however, that such officers shared an extensive range of goals and values with the Nazi regime, harboured a harshly utilitarian attitude, and stood ready to prosecute the invasion and occupation of the Soviet Union with according severity – even more so because they expected a quick campaign.Footnote ¹⁹ When it came to anti-partisan warfare, this meant directing the troops to conduct themselves with great harshness, providing it did not endanger their discipline. This, Hürter argues, was a recipe for needless brutality towards the population. In the context of 1941 this was a particularly short-sighted approach, for it failed to recognize that the vast majority of the population did not yet support the then minuscule partisan movement anyway. Consequently, relations with the population were needlessly damaged, and popular support for the partisans was inadvertently fuelled. Even though, by 1942, senior commanders were realizing that a more measured approach was needed, their ongoing predisposition towards harshness meant that they never implemented such an approach extensively enough.Footnote ²⁰

A key point of the overall picture presented by Arnold and Hürter is that the conditions the Ostheer anti-partisan effort faced did play a crucial role in hardening its conduct to an increasingly brutal degree. The Ostheer leadership did not, as Heer claims, invoke the menace of a non-existent partisan enemy in order to incite its troops to murderous, ideologically driven excess. It did, however, direct them to scapegoat Jews and Communists for partisan activity, and – over time – to inflict increasingly harsh treatment upon the general population. And although conditions were crucial in bringing this situation about, so too were senior commanders' preconceived notions of how to combat irregular warfare in the East – notions coloured by the ideology, virulent guerrillaphobia,Footnote ²¹ and ruthlessly utilitarian military thinking which they had absorbed earlier in their lives.

Two further studies focusing on higher command levels, though not directly concerned with the Ostheer itself, deserve mention. For they illustrate the murderous effects of the inter-institutional co-operation into which the Ostheer's conception of anti-partisan warfare led it. Edward Westermann's Hitler's police battalions and Philip Blood's Hitler's bandit hunters, published in 2005 and 2006 respectively, detail among other things the commonality of approach between the military leadership and the SS and Police.Footnote ²² Given the military leadership's harsh attitude, and the Ostheer anti-partisan effort's need for further manpower which its own self-inflicted lack of manpower created, it is scarcely any wonder that it entered into an infernal security pact with the SS and Police.Footnote ²³ These institutions provided an enormous manpower boost to the Ostheer's anti-partisan effort, but their personnel's conduct ratcheted up the campaign's brutality to new heights. The Ostheer leadership's readiness to conduct anti-partisan warfare not just with extreme harshness, but with threadbare resources also, had therefore led it into an agreement which increased its culpability for the campaign's worst aspects.

Admittedly, the Ostheer's preoccupation with its troops' discipline did sometimes translate into more measured treatment of the population. Moreover, as Hürter points out, it was the generals – not civilian administrators, and certainly not the SS and Police – who were the first to recognize the need for the kind of occupation policy that engaged the population more effectively.Footnote ²⁴ Yet this was not enough to ameloriate sufficiently the harshness with which those same generals infused the anti-partisan effort. The result remained a prosecution of anti-partisan warfare which, whilst functional on the surface, was in essence ill-conceived and ill-provisioned, needlessly brutal, and ultimately counter-productive.

The picture of conduct at the level of regional jurisdictions is, on balance, only marginally less grim.

IV

The past decade has seen publication of four regional-level case studies which, though not constituting a thorough, in-depth analysis of the spectrum of anti-partisan conduct across Ostheer-administered regions, do constitute an important step in that direction. This is due, in part, to the geographical range they encompass – north-west Russia, Byelorussia, parts of the Ukraine, and the Caucasus. All employ an extensive array of official directives, reports, and other official sources, drawn not only from the Ostheer but also from other security and civilian agencies.

Kalkulierte Morde, Christian Gerlach's 1999 study of German occupation policy in Byelorussia, is not an examination of the Ostheer as such. Nevertheless, focusing in part as it does upon anti-partisan warfare within Ostheer-administered army and army group rear areas in Byelorussia, it is relevant to this article. Gerlach's focus upon anti-partisan warfare is concerned primarily, as is his focus upon other aspects of the German occupation, with economic motivations.Footnote ²⁵ He argues, for instance, that the killing of ‘partisans’ behind German lines in 1941 was not just a manifestation of ideological hatred and utilitarian military harshness, but also cover for an economically driven ‘cull’ of fugitive Red Army soldiers and refugees. This cull was intended to close ‘surplus mouths’ in the face of food shortages that were threatening to create disorder in the occupied areas.Footnote ²⁶ The ‘plunder operations’ of 1942–3, meanwhile, saw short-term economic needs similarly override the need for long-term co-operation with the population. Whilst the worst examples of such operations took place under the aegis of the SS and Police in the civilian-administered Reich Commissariats, Ostheer involvement was extensive also.Footnote ²⁷

Gerlach's stress upon economic motives illuminates just how far economic calculation could play a direct role in driving the conduct of anti-partisan warfare at regional level, as well as in shaping occupation policy generally. That said, the vastness of the region on which he focuses characterizes his treatment as a thematic overview, rather than a focused case study illuminating in detail the workings of the anti-partisan campaign in a particular jurisdiction. Whilst focused studies of this kind dealing with the Ostheer-administered parts of Byelorussia have yet to emerge, such works have emerged on jurisdictions elsewhere in the occupied Soviet Union.

Two recent studies of Ostheer occupation policy in the Crimea, which was administered by the German Eleventh Army, convey a similarly grim picture of anti-partisan warfare – albeit one which, overall, attributes varying levels of importance to the economic factors which Gerlach emphasizes. Die Krim unter Deutscher Herrschaft, by Norbert Kunz, and Manfred Oldenburg's Ideologie und Militärisches Kalkül were both published in 2004.Footnote ²⁸ Although a small region, the Crimea has received considerable attention from historians because Nazi policy there was shaped significantly by long-term plans to populate the region with German colonists. Generally speaking, economic calculation does not appear to have played the kind of direct role in anti-partisan warfare in this region as it apparently did in Byelorussia. Given that the population and agricultural capacity of Byelorussia far exceeded those of the Crimea, this is hardly surprising. Indirectly, however, economic factors remained important, for the troops' need to live off the land increasingly helped drive that wedge between occupier and occupied which fuelled partisan support.Footnote ²⁹

More directly important was commanders' narrow-minded conviction that the narrowly defined ‘needs of the troops’ should override all other considerations. When it came to anti-partisan warfare, this meant that they were driven by an obsessive desire to ensure the troops' security against partisan attacks, even at the cost of alienating the population. The Ortskommandantur in Evpatorija, for instance, threatened to shoot 100 inhabitants for the destruction of every building, and on another occasion shot fifty hostages when a German soldier stepped on a mine.Footnote ³⁰ The Wehrmacht Secret Field Police (Geheime Feldpolizei or GFP), meanwhile, shot suspects on the flimsiest of pretexts.Footnote ³¹

Oldenburg uncovers similar instances in the anti-partisan policy of the Seventeenth Army, in both the Don Basin region of the Ukraine during 1941 and early 1942 and the Caucasus later on in 1942.Footnote ³² He points out that if there was one region in which prosecution of such a harsh, short-sighted approach was particularly ill-advised, it was the Caucasus. Within the racial hierarchy into which Nazi ideology ordered the various Soviet peoples, the Turkic tribes of the Caucasus enjoyed relatively privileged status. Yet this was not enough to deflect commanders from a policy which, as elsewhere, attached paramount importance to the security of the troops and much lower priority to constructive relations with the population.

Neither study supports the view that Ostheer anti-partisan policy somehow became significantly more ‘enlightened’ during 1942–3. What they show is that, at regional as well as higher command level, such growing appreciation as there was of the need to cultivate the population more and terrorize it less was never enough to change policy fundamentally.

Less damning is Alexander Hill's study of German military administration in north-west Russia.Footnote ³³ He argues that anti-partisan warfare in this region exercised terror selectively, and often effectively, in combination with a range of more constructive occupation measures. This approach achieved a genuine deterrent effect upon a population torn, through a mixture of fear, loyalty, and above all day-to-day survival calculation, between aiding the Germans and aiding the partisans.

The importance of regional variations is clear, for two factors were absent in north-west Russia which, elsewhere in the German-occupied Soviet Union, played a significant role in tilting anti-partisan conduct in a more terroristic direction. The absence of large numbers of fugitive Red Army troops within the region militated against the growth of a large partisan movement there in 1941.Footnote ³⁴ This, in turn, meant that Ostheer security troops felt less pressure than did their harder-pressed comrades elsewhere to employ terror in order to compensate. There was also an absence of large numbers of Jews there;Footnote ³⁵ this deprived the Ostheer anti-partisan campaign of the kind of scapegoat against whom it might have targeted its terror measures as a means of cowing the rest of the population whilst not alienating it.Footnote ³⁶ In the absence of either fugitive Red Army troops or Jews, then, recourse to more restrained, constructive conduct was seen as both advisable and feasible.

The picture that emerges from these four regional level case studies nevertheless remains on balance damning, if less unremittingly so than the picture at higher command level. Only the case of north-west Russia presents Ostheer anti-partisan policy in a more ‘constructive’ light. Otherwise, economic calculation played a major role, albeit not always directly, in debilitating the relations between occupier and occupied so crucial to success in anti-partisan warfare. The need of the troops, and of the occupation authorities generally, to procure food from the civilian population cast a dark shadow over occupier-occupied relations and fuelled support for the partisans. Commanders' narrow-minded ‘functional’ concern for the troops' security had a similar effect. All this could only reinforce the effects of the ruthlessness, brought about by conditions and by the harsh ideological and military attitudes permeating highest command levels, which characterized the anti-partisan approach of the Ostheer as an institution.

Nevertheless, the case of north-west Russia does indicate that regional variations could have a significant impact on behaviour, and the potential for studies to illuminate this further is clear. And among smaller middle-level units – divisions, regiments, and others – the picture is more differentiated still. It is here that the picture genuinely does start to break down, influenced by local-level conditions and the perceptions of individual field units and their commanders, in ways frequently not in accordance with higher-level dictates.

V

A contextual framework into which the actions of individual Ostheer units can be placed was presented in a 2004 article, based largely upon official Ostheer files, by Christian Hartmann.Footnote ³⁷ Hartmann demonstrates, first, that the actual number of Ostheer troops involved in anti-partisan warfare was relatively small. Such troops as were involved, moreover, do not deserve blanket condemnation. He maintains, having compared various historians' statistical interpretations, that the partisans lost c. 500,000 dead, the Germans and their allies c. 50,000, over the campaign's course. Such is the disparity between these figures that many amongst that 500,000 undoubtedly were unarmed civilians. Nevertheless, the figure of 50,000 Axis dead also reflects significant amounts of genuine combat with armed partisans. Indeed, the outcomes of such engagements partly explain the disparity – during the campaign's first phase, against ill-trained and ill-equipped fledgling partisan groups, German troops tended to get the upper hand. Moreover, even if the main incentive was practical rather than moral – the need to encourage desertion – both sides were by the campaign's latter phase increasingly taking prisoners rather than shooting them.Footnote ³⁸

Closely related to the issue of anti-partisan warfare is, as ever, that of the general treatment of civilians. Here too Hartmann balances the picture. On the one hand, he points out that the troops' sometimes enthusiastic, at worst cautious, reception by the population during the advance of 1941 soon evaporated as the severity of German occupation policy generally, and security measures particularly, became apparent. Yet he also cites high-level orders railing against the troops' failure to act with the ‘requisite’ harshness, and more moderate orders issued by units in the field – evidence that at least some units continued to behave with relative restraint.Footnote ³⁹

If the picture of Ostheer anti-partisan warfare is almost entirely black at higher command level, and predominantly so at regional level, the impression of smaller middle-level units which Hartmann conveys is significantly more differentiated. Moreover, recent unit-level studies do on balance bear Hartmann's picture out.

Some insights are provided in the regional-level studies already discussed; Oldenburg, for instance, illuminates the range of behaviours which Feldgendarmerie and GFP units displayed when investigating civilians suspected of aiding partisans. Suspects on the receiving end could expect any one of a range of treatments – shot on the spot; handed over to the Security Service (Sicherheitsdienst) of the SS (which in most cases merely delayed execution); investigated, by contrast, in a more even-handed way by the patrol itself; or, finally, passed on by the patrol for investigation by a senior commander. Whilst this ‘differentiated’ approach created an atmosphere of often fearful uncertainty amongst the population, it does demonstrate the importance of the individual perceptions of units in the field and their commanders.Footnote ⁴⁰

Truman Anderson's work on the reprisal policy of the 62nd Infantry Division, a front-line formation on anti-partisan duty in the Army Group South Rear Area during 1941, exemplifies an early post-Wehrmacht Exhibition attempt to break the picture down.Footnote ⁴¹ Anderson, utilizing both the division's official files and native eyewitness accounts, demonstrated that the 62nd's subordinate units did not behave in accordance with the kind of general extermination mentality depicted by Hannes Heer. Rather, the harshness of the reprisals they carried out varied according to the impact the partisans were having. Their reliance upon terror was, nevertheless, extensive. In particular, their victimization of the Ukraine's Russian and above all Jewish minorities in favour of the region's majority Ukrainian population – reflecting a more general policy across the Army Group South Rear Area – echoed the selective terror policy illuminated by Arnold.Footnote ⁴² Anderson's findings in essence exemplify the ‘functional’ terror, influenced by harsh ideological and military proclivities of longer standing but driven most directly by conditions in the field, which Arnold ascribes to the highest levels of the Ostheer's anti-partisan effort.

This author's own previous research, presented in the 2004 study War in the Wild East, was based upon the files of the 221st Security Division, a unit operating between 1941 and 1944 in the Army Group Centre Rear Area.Footnote ⁴³ There were many instances in which this division's conduct reflected the same correlation between harsher conditions and harsher conduct illustrated by Anderson at divisional level and Arnold at higher command level. That said, the picture varies in important respects. First, harsh conditions did not necessarily translate into more brutal conduct. During 1941, divisional command willingly displayed the generally harsh, ideologically coloured approach to anti-partisan warfare urged by higher-level directives. During 1942, however, the 221st felt compelled to moderate its handling of the population because its fighting power was so low that it actually was incapable of pursuing a credible policy of terror.Footnote ⁴⁴

Secondly, amongst the division's subordinate regiments, conditions of overstretch, falling fighting power, vast tracts of hostile terrain, and an at best increasingly ambivalent population did not just go a considerable way towards fuelling brutality; the greater immediacy with which these conditions were felt at regimental level often made for brutality more pronounced than at divisional level.Footnote ⁴⁵ Thirdly, the 221st's conduct showed that, whilst concrete conditions probably played a more important role in shaping conduct than did officers' individual perceptions, the latter were significant also. This is demonstrated by comparison with the 203rd Security Division, which administered a jurisdiction bordering the 221st's during 1942. Despite the fact that conditions within both jurisdictions were similar, the 203rd displayed markedly harsher behaviour.Footnote ⁴⁶ Clearly, then, it was not just conditions, but also how officers perceived them – perceptions shaped, in turn, by biographical influences – which shaped conduct at this level as at higher command level. But given the vastness of the number of units in operation and the range of conditions which they faced, the composition of influences and their effects at this level is likely to have been considerably more diverse.

At present there remains a lack of a ‘collective biography’-type study of divisional-level and regimental-level officers. It is therefore not yet possible to determine which biographical influences were most important in shaping their conduct. Yet the sorts of personal-level sources needed for such a study – such as officers' personal files, letters, and diaries – do exist, albeit unevenly. A 2002 article by Peter Lieb demonstrated their usefulness to particular effect.Footnote ⁴⁷

Lieb based his article on the private diary of a regimental commander on anti-partisan duty in 1941. Colonel Carl Freiherr von Andrian commanded the 747th Infantry Regiment, a formation subordinate to probably the most notorious Ostheer anti-partisan formation of all, the 707th Infantry Division. The 707th was responsible for what was arguably the most extreme case of murderous bloodletting in the Ostheer's anti-partisan campaign; during autumn 1941, units under its command shot 10,431 of its 10,940 (mainly Jewish) ‘prisoners’, whilst themselves sustaining losses of two dead and five wounded.Footnote ⁴⁸ In March 1942, in the Bobruisk region, it conducted Operation Bamberg, in which at least 4,396 ‘partisans’ were reported killed at a cost of seven German dead and eight wounded.Footnote ⁴⁹

Nevertheless, closer scrutiny of the figures indicates a more complex picture. Whilst the 707th's divisional command must bear responsibility for directing its subordinate units to such brutality, the units that committed by far the worst of it were not Wehrmacht units integral to the division's command, but rather Police, allied, or native auxiliary units under the division's temporary command. Moreover, insofar as the 707th's own regular Wehrmacht formations were involved in the killing of Jews and other civilians also, it was the 747th's sister regiment, the 727th, which was responsible for the greater part.Footnote ⁵⁰ Andrian's diary reveals that, though he harboured anti-Semitic feelings, he also questioned their justifiability, and was by no means a rabid Nazi. Moreover, even though he believed that shooting Jews in reprisal for partisan attacks was acceptable practice, he strongly disagreed with the mass shootings of Jews perpetrated by the SS. Although he once used civilians to clear mines, he displayed sympathy for the plight of the population on other occasions.Footnote ⁵¹ All this indicates that he was clearly implicated in National Socialist crimes and harboured a significant degree of sympathy for National Socialist ideology, but not that he was a fanatical mass murderer or unbridled ideological warrior.

Andrian's personal sources provide clues as to what biographical influences may have shaped his attitudes and behaviour.Footnote ⁵² But such is the ongoing need for a broader, quantitative study of the effect of divisional and regimental commanders' biographical influences upon their subsequent conduct, that it is not yet possible to establish with sufficient certainty which influences were most decisive in determining the degree of harshness he went on to display. What is increasingly clear is that the overall picture of unit-level conduct, and of the role which conditions and perceptions played in shaping it, is significantly more nuanced than the picture at either higher command level or regional level. It is the unit level, arguably, where there is greatest potential and greatest need for further study.

VI

Since 1999, an increasingly differentiated picture of Ostheer anti-partisan warfare has emerged. It belies the image both of a clean Wehrmacht unsullied by involvement in Nazi crimes, and of a criminal Wehrmacht whose personnel were for the most part deeply inculcated in Nazi ideology and clearly implicated in the outrages perpetrated in its name.

On balance, however, the picture remains damning. It is one in which the harsh military and ideological proclivities that permeated the Ostheer's highest command levels led them to victimize Jews and Communists, treat the general population with increasing harshness, and brutally and counterproductively overreact to the partisan enemy they were facing. At regional level, the ultimately devastating effects were reinforced by ruthless economic calculation and a narrow-minded preoccupation with the troops' ‘security’. The picture does, however, attain more nuance and differentiation the further one goes down the command chain, as the different conditions experienced at regional level, local level, and unit level combined with officers' individual perceptions to shape often varied behaviour towards both partisans and population.

Yet at higher command level also, there remains a need for further study. Given that the focus of the major works by Arnold and Hürter is upon the first six to twelve months of the war in the East, there is a need for studies of similar scope and depth focusing upon the attitudes and conduct of senior commanders at later stages. Such studies would, ideally, employ Hürter's collective biographical approach, employing not just official sources from the war itself, but also individual-level sources and extensive contextualizing secondary literature. The central question for such studies would be how far, and why – if at all – the generals advocated and/or implemented anti-partisan policies more measured and enlightened than those of the occupation's first twelve months.Footnote ⁵³ The most important element of this question would be how far, if at all, common sense prevailed over ruthlessness in the face of a security situation increasingly necessitating a much more constructive approach.

At regional level, the geographical scope which the studies of Gerlach, Kunz, Oldenburg, and Hill encompass is considerable. Nevertheless, Gerlach's work is more an overview than a focused case study, and numerous jurisdictions remain to be subjected to the narrower, more detailed scrutiny of the kind carried out by Kunz, Oldenburg, and Hill. Further such studies will deepen understanding of how regional variations contributed to shaping policy. As well as further illuminating the direct or indirect role which economic factors played in driving the campaign, a particularly important question is that of how far conduct at this level was determined by ‘practical’ factors rather than ideological ones. In north-west Russia, for instance, it was a practical factor – the absence of large numbers of fugitive Red Army troops in the German rear – which militated against development of harsher policy. In the Ukraine and the Caucasus, conversely, the presence of racial groups enjoying more ‘favoured’ ideological status in Nazi eyes than the population of north-west Russia did not hinder the emergence of harsher policy there.

It is also important in all this to subject regional-level commanders to the same sort of in-depth biographical scrutiny as higher-level commanders. Finally, regional-level studies also benefit from the incorporation of Soviet sources. Bernhard Chiari's case study of an area within the Reich Commissariats is an example of a regional-level work which demonstrates the potential for such an approach.Footnote ⁵⁴

The greatest potential for further study lies, probably, at the level of individual units. Here, the historian can illustrate the complex forces which shaped the motivation and conduct of the mass of individuals who conducted anti-partisan warfare in the field, yet avoid over-reliance on the problematic source base available for examining the rank and file directly. Here also, the range of situational and personal factors that shaped conduct is particularly extensive, and in particular need of further study.

Three aspects, particularly, require elaboration at this level. First, it is important to examine how the picture breaks down in terms of particular localities. Secondly, there is a need to examine the difference in perceptions between full-time rear-area units and front-line units on temporary security duty. Thirdly, further consideration needs giving to different dynamics at different command levels, the contrasting experiences of divisions and regiments being a prime example. A question common to all three aspects, one which research is still only in the early stages of uncovering, is that of how far pressure of circumstances overrode officers' individual perceptions in shaping conduct at this level.

This level too would benefit from further use of Soviet sources, and from the collective biographical approach. Granted, personal-level sources for officers at divisional and regimental level are much less substantial than those available for the highest generals. Nevertheless, Lieb's work and other studies not directly related to the topic of Ostheer anti-partisan warfare demonstrate the availability and potential of such sources.Footnote ⁵⁵ There is scope for combining available qualitative sources with more widely available quantitative biographical sources, such as Wehrmacht officers' personnel files, in order to attain more generalizable results.Footnote ⁵⁶

Regardless of the operational level, researching the remaining substantial gaps in the picture of Ostheer anti-partisan warfare remains centrally important to deeper understanding of the conduct of the Ostheer generally. Such conduct is, in turn, centrally important to understanding the role of the Wehrmacht as a whole within the Third Reich. Even this, however, is to understate the importance of further study. For, both as a high-level case study of how not to conduct an effective counter-insurgency campaign, and as a series of lower-level case studies of sometimes more sensible conduct, the Ostheer's practice of anti-partisan warfare retains considerable relevance for the study of present-day conflicts.Footnote ⁵⁷