Scottish Centre for War Studies and Conflict Archaeology

War Studies Research Seminar

Thursday 7 March 2024

at 5.15 pm

Dr Ben Shepherd (Glasgow Caledonian University)

In Lockstep for Hitler? The Wehrmacht, the Waffen-SS and Anti-partisan Warfare

During the Second World War, all land-based branches of the German armed forces carried out brutal anti-partisan warfare across Nazi-occupied Europe. Such warfare ostensibly targeted irregular resistance forces operating from inaccessible swampy, forested and mountainous regions, predominantly in occupied eastern and southern Europe. In reality, German anti-partisan warfare targeted not so much actual partisans as the civilian populations accused of supporting them, as well as racial and political victim groups, above all Jews and Communists. Of the three branches of the German armed forces that participated, one might expect the Waffen-SS, the combat wing of the SS, to have had the worst record of atrocity. Yet in fact its brutality was rivalled and sometimes surpassed by that of army units and Luftwaffe (air force) ground units. Nazi fanaticism did play a major role in brutalizing some units, dramatically so in the case of the Waffen-SS. But all three branches were hardened by the German military’s longstanding, unusually harsh attitude towards irregular warfare, its unusually severe definition of military necessity, the ethnic complexities of the occupied populations whom the Germans were dealing with, and the pressure of conditions on the ground in which often under-strength and under-resourced German security units faced large partisan forces across vast, inaccessible and inhospitable territory. None of this means damning the Waffen-SS any less emphatically; rather, it means apportioning damning degrees of blame across all three branches. At the same time, however, the strength of these brutalizing factors could vary at different times, across different units and combat theatres.

Dr Ben Shepherd is Reader in History at the Glasgow Caledonan University, and a member of the Arbeitskreis Militärgeschichte, the German History Society and the German Studies Association. His research and extensive publications have focused on German and Austrian military history from 1914 to 1945, with particular emphasis on the Third Reich. His most recent book is Hitler’s Soldiers: The German Army in the Third Reich (Yale University Press, 2016), and he is currently engaged in a new history of the Waffen-SS.

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First published: 4 March 2024