A ‘War in a Region beyond State Control’? The German-Soviet War,1941-1944

In recent years the German historian of Eastern Europe Jörg Baberowski has applied the tag ‘wars in regions beyond state control’ (Kriege in staatsfernen Räumen ), ‘over which the central state power has no control and where the claim of the state to enforce its monopoly on violence collapses under the resistance of armed competitors’, to ‘all armed conflicts that occurred between 1914 and 1950 on the territory of the Tsarist and the Soviet multi-nation empire’. This piece examines the soundness of the thesis in the case of the German-Soviet War of 1941 to 1944, the conflict to which Baberowski has applied his thesis most often. In doing so, it demonstrates that the thesis is fundamentally flawed and unpersuasive with regard to this specific conflict.