Abstract
Recent decades have spawned a rich scholarship on the brutalization and crimes of the Wehrmacht across Europe during the Second World War, most prominently in the Soviet Union. Bastiaan Willems’ impressive new study examines the Wehrmacht’s contribution to the suffering of civilians in Germany itself during the war’s final months. Focus on this contribution, as opposed to those of other Nazi agencies or of the Red Army, is not unknown within the historiography. It is certainly underdeveloped, however, and Willems’ case study approach invests it with a new degree of analytical depth, emphasizing agency at the local level. His focus is on the East Prussian city of Königsberg, present-day Kaliningrad, and on the Wehrmacht’s conduct during the course of its defence against besieging Soviet forces.
Willems situates his study within an increasingly sophisticated body of literature that considers the interconnecting influences upon the German soldier not just of Nazi ideology, but also of the conditions he experienced on the ground, and of a ‘unit culture’ that fostered an intense, exclusionary form of camaraderie. Together, these influences led the troops to disregard civilian needs contemptuously, and fostered an unusually harsh perception of ‘military necessity’ among them. Willems begins by examining East Prussia’s broader experience under the Third Reich, emphasizing, among other things, the region’s long tradition of animosity towards ‘the East’. In view of this, and of the fact that East Prussia flourished economically under the Third Reich, the strong pro-Nazi attitude within the region is unsurprising, even though it weakened with the turning tide of war. Yet Wehrmacht forces in East Prussia in 1945, from senior command levels down to the rank and file, were dismissive of civilian needs and subordinated them to the dictates of ‘military necessity’. Though this attitude dovetailed with Nazi ideals, particularly when it came to ‘inferior’ Slavic peoples, it also predated them in German military thinking. As numerous studies have demonstrated, one of its manifestations, most apparent in the occupied Soviet Union between 1941 and 1944, was ruthlessly utilitarian policies that deprived occupied civilians of food, shelter, and other resources. The ordinary soldier was also disdainful of civilian needs due to the brutalizing effects of the day-to-day conditions of the war in the East, of an unusually fierce system of military justice, and of a corpus of orders and directives that legitimized ruthless conduct. That such an attitude persisted once the Wehrmacht found itself pushed back into East Prussia is unsurprising.
Rank-and-file soldiers, for instance, often looted with impunity, and efforts to evacuate Königsberg’s civilians were downgraded in importance by higher command if they were seen to undermine the security and supply of military personnel. Towards the very end of the siege, refusal to surrender in the name of ‘military honour’ – an obsessive preoccupation of many officers following the defeat of 1918 and the ‘traitorous’ attempt by a handful of their colleagues to assassinate Hitler and stage a coup in July 1944 – doomed the city’s remaining population to unnecessary death and suffering. Willems thus demolishes the popularly held notion that military commands sought to alleviate the civilian misery caused by heartless, intransigent, and incompetent Nazi party officials, however self-seeking and unimpressive the performance of the latter could be. Yet in order to ensure orderly conditions in its rear, the Wehrmacht also needed to keep civilians in line. It did so via increasingly extreme discipline, but also via propaganda measures emphasizing Red Army atrocities and through practical efforts to maintain civilian life and assure the population a degree of leisure and distraction.
Underpinning all this was a strategy that assigned eastern German cities the status of fortresses against the Soviet tide. The concept of the ‘fortress city’ had originated on the Eastern front. Though ultimately unsuccessful there, the Nazi leadership and Wehrmacht commands hoped it could now prevail thanks to the supposed practical benefits of fighting on home soil. These included the ability to harness a ‘battle community’ encompassing civilians also, whether by deploying them in home guard units or via other measures. Willems argues that although the fortress strategy was unrealistic, it was also rational; he thus challenges assertions that the Wehrmacht was actively facilitating a conscious choreography of self-destruction during the war’s final months.
Willems’ study employs copious, varied empirical evidence encompassing official and personal-level material drawn from the German federal military archive in Germany, from Kaliningrad, and from sources from the city that found their way into the west during the immediate post-war period before being housed in Duisburg. It is original, analytically rigorous, and engagingly written. It significantly deepens and refines understanding of the Third Reich’s collapse and of the Wehrmacht’s role within it, and deserves attention from specialists and students alike.