WJU Historian at Work, Part III: Combat and Genocide on the Eastern Front: The German Infantry's War, 1941-1944

In keeping with the History Department's emphasis on maintaining an active scholarly agenda, Jeff Rutherford, Associate Professor of History, recently published the monograph Combat and Genocide on the Eastern Front: The German Infantry's War, 1941-1944 with Cambridge University Press. The book was released simultaneously in hardcover, paperback, and electronic form. David Stahel, author of four books on Germany's 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union, has written in War in History that the book is "[a] pioneering new work. . . It is an impressive achievement which underlines the potential for future research into the many unknown divisions of the German Ostheer. Wherever such research takes us, Rutherford’s concept of ‘military necessity’ will require substantive engagement. . . "
   







Rutherford's book examines the experiences of three German infantry divisions and their combat and occupation practices in northwestern Russia. In contrast to the tendency in English-language historiography to attribute the Wehrmacht's behavior in the Soviet Union exclusively to Nazi ideological affinity and indoctrination, Rutherford instead argues that a radicalized version of the German Army's traditional notion of military necessity proved far more consequential in determining the army's behavior in the east. By tracing the development of the army's policies during the war against the Soviet Union, he identified four specific periods of German behavior. During the initial invasion, the army, believing that victory was assured, acted callously if not brutally, towards those sections of the civilian population not deemed enemies by the Reich. This period of relative indifference was soon followed by the Winter Crisis of 1941/42. During this existential crisis, the army's divisions lashed out violently against the civilian population, taking whatever measures deemed necessary for victory and indeed survival. It was during this period that the German Army's actions on both the battlefield and in occupation closely approximated the ideological war demanded by the Nazi state.

Once the front stabilized in spring 1942, however, the Wehrmacht began to transform its occupation policy. Realizing that it needed the population of the occupied Soviet Union to have any possibility of winning the war, it instituted much more conciliatory policies towards Soviet civilians. This conscious effort to not only limit the violent tendencies of the troops, but to also provide civilians with food and medical care paid dividends as insurgent activity decreased. Unfortunately for Soviet civilians, these new policies were still complemented by various violent and disruptive German policies, including brutal anti-partisan sweeps and round-ups for forced labor. As the balance of force in the Leningrad region began to tilt in favor of the Red Army, Germany policy again evolved, this time in a much more ruthless and ideologically-influenced manner. Such policies culminated in the German practice of scorched earth retreats during 1943 and 1944. By analyzing both the army's appreciation of its military efficiency and its administration of the rear areas, Rutherford ensures that the primary task of the Wehrmacht -- combat against the Red Army -- is not lost in an examination of its interaction with Soviet civilians.