Following up from a couple of Thursdays ago: I'm now about halfway through War in a Twilight World: Partisan and Anti-Partisan Warfare in Eastern Europe, 1939-1945 (eds. Ben Shepherd & Juliette Pattinson, 2010). My initial favorable impressions have soured, to be perfectly honest. The chapters on German occupational policing thus far tend towards almost a subtle reinvention of the Clean Wehrmacht myth. They heavily emphasize the legitimate policing & anti-banditry role of the Schutzpolizei and their Schutzmannschaft local auxiliaries, juxtaposing it with the general lawlessness and self-interest of the partisans. This strikes me as problematic for several reasons. One, it brushes under the rug the extractive, colonial nature of the occupation - and by extension, of the interests & legal order which the Schupo were protecting. For example: Erich Haberer's chapter on the Schupo in Eastern Belarus (Generalkommissariat Weissruthenien) presents the local population's passive acceptance & occasional collaboration with the Schupo as evidence that the occupation forces were not really that bad towards the locals and in fact offered much-needed security against partisan bands.^(1) However, in this depiction of policing operations in protection of local farms, Haberer somewhat buries the lede when it comes to the reality that the Germans viewed protecting the farms as necessary in order to more effectively extract their caloric resources to bolster the German Reich's food supply. The survival and feeding of the local populations was not of tremendous concern to the Germans in and of itself, though at various points in the war they did wind up diverting food to regions of extreme starvation so as to retain the productivity of local workers (as part of the extractive colonial system, of course) and avoid the short-term consequences of a famine.^(2) The author also almost entirely obfuscates the locals' motives for compliance with the Schupo, specifically the fact that noncompliance was a guarantee of punishment. Haberer does rightly point out that noncompliance with partisan bands was also often punished quite violently, but not as predictably or as harshly as noncompliance with the Germans. However, the conclusion he draws here is not that, faced with a choice between two bad options, the locals tended towards self-preservation by choosing possible rather than certain reprisal. Rather, Haberer concludes that this was a more-or-less voluntary exchange of cooperation for protection from partisan raids.^(3) In the modern language of counterinsurgency, Haberer is mistaking the Belorussian peasants' acquiescence to Germany's superior coercive means for acceptance of their posited superior ability to provide security.

Some of the other chapters also seem oddly ignorant of key developments in the historiography of the occupation. For a quick example (which I will perhaps expand on later, but at the moment I must be brief) I offer Jeff Rutherford's chapter on the 121st Infantry Division in the Leningrad region from June 1941 through April 1942. Rutherford offers this nugget: “Whilst some men fought Hitler’s war against Jews, Bolsheviks, and ‘racially inferior’ Slavs, others maintained a much more humane outlook toward Soviet civilians. The wide range of attitudes and actions displayed at both the institutional and individual levels of the 121st Infantry Division provide a cautionary note to those who speak of one homogeneous, habitually violent and criminal Wehrmacht.” (74) This is the conclusion to a chapter describing, in addition to instances of mercy and noble self-reflection by soldiers of the 121st, the Division's use of machine-gun fire to prevent starving women and children from leaving Leningrad proper during the siege. The misalignment between evidence and conclusion nothwithstanding, Rutherford seems blithely unaware of the well-known crisis point or transition point in mid-late 1942, which sharply increased (indeed, completed) the Wehrmacht's ideological radicalization and concomitant mass violence.^(4) Truncating his account prior to this crisis point means that the conclusions he presents are, to be blunt, not that meaningful.

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1. " In other words, occupation did not just mean exploitation, it also meant a modicum of stability and a degree of authority that was obeyed, if not respected, by much of the population in the first year and a half of occupation, and had not completely evaporated even by 1943-4." (112) This quote is largely representative of this book's tack.
2. I suspect the author has either lost sight, or is counting on the reader losing sight, of the simple fact that vast sections of Eastern Europe were destined for ethnic cleansing & resettlement by ethnic Germans. In some regions the process of settler colonialism began almost immediately.
3. "For the most part, this information was not coerced from an uncooperative and frightened population, nor was it just in the nature of denunciations or long standing vendettas, though these undoubtedly did exist." (112)
4. See Omer Bartov's Hitler's Army or Barbarisation of Warfare for a more complete analysis. Bartov's work was a big enough deal in the historiography of Wehrmacht war crimes that neglecting its basic arguments is a real head-scratcher for a book written almost 20 years after Hitler's Army.