Wehrmacht Security Regiments in the Soviet Partisan War, 1943
Ben Shepherd Wehrmacht Security Regiments in the Soviet Partisan War, 1943 Historians generally agree that, as an institution, the German Wehrmacht identified strongly with National Socialism and embroiled itself in the Third Reich’s criminality through a mix- ture of ideological agreement, military ruthlessness, calculation and careerism.1 Less certain is how far this picture extends to the Wehrmacht’s lower levels — individual units and jurisdictions, middle-ranking and junior officers, NCOs and rank-and-file sol- diers. For the German Army of the East (Ostheer), which fought in the ideologically coloured eastern campaign (Ostfeldzug) of extermination, subjugation and plunder against the Soviet Union, the scale of complicity, of the resulting killing and of the manpower involved make lower-level investigation especially pertinent. The picture emerging from a detailed, albeit still embryonic, case study treatment of units of the Ostheer’s middle level (mitt- lere Schicht) — a picture which, thanks to the nature of the sources available, is significantly fuller than that of its rank and file — is one in which motivation and conduct, whilst unde- niably very often ruthless and brutal, were nonetheless multi- faceted in origin and varied in form and extent.2 This article argues that, if the dynamics behind mittlere Schicht brutality are to be understood more fully and their effects quantified more comprehensively, the mittlere Schicht itself needs breaking down and examining in terms of the different levels — divisions, regi- ments, battalions and others — that comprised it. The setting is the Ostheer’s anti-partisan campaign in the central sector of the German-occupied Soviet Union, namely Byelorussia and the areas of greater Russia to the east of it, during the spring and summer of 1943.
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