User:Peacemaker67/Review of Shepherd

Terror in the Balkans: German Armies and Partisan Warfare

By Peacemaker67

This is a well-presented and readable book that has an interesting take on the brutal counter-insurgency operations of several German divisions in occupied Yugoslavia during World War II. The author is Dr. Ben Shepherd, currently Reader in History at Glasgow Caledonian University. One of Shepherd's key themes is that the World War I experiences of the commanders of each division had a strong influence on the extent to which their division exceeded the usually ruthless methods promoted by the German Army to crush resistance. He acknowledges that German counter-insurgency doctrine had tended towards the extreme end of the spectrum since the 19th century, and also recognises the role of Nazi ideology and other factors in the mass reprisals, burning of villages and targeting of civilians that occurred during the huge but ineffective cordon and destroy operations.

What adds the extra dimension to this study is the idea that commanders who experienced extensive service on the Eastern Front in World War I were more likely to order higher levels of brutality by their divisions than those that saw other types of service during World War I. This is not to say that the latter group weren't themselves brutal, but instead that those that had seen service on the Eastern Front in World War I were more likely to exceed the standard level of brutality exhibited by the German Army in World War II. Key to this idea is that such commanders had seen Slavic peoples as enemies during their service in World War I, and therefore more closely adopted the Nazi conception of Slavs as "sub-human". Shepherd reinforces his observations of the behaviour exhibited by German Army divisional commanders in Yugoslavia with similar examples drawn from the operations of three security divisions in the rear areas of Army Group Centre on the Eastern Front.

Although he is working off a fairly small sample, Shepherd's ideas are developed and presented in a compelling way, and warrant further study. The book is a valuable contribution to the examination of counter-insurgency operations by the German Army during World War II.

Publishing details: Shepherd, Ben (2012). Terror in the Balkans: German Armies and Partisan Warfare. Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-04891-1.