Soldiers participated willingly in acts of barbaric savagery Hitler’s Soldiers: The German Army in the Third Reich
by Ben H Shepherd
Yale University Press, 639 pages, £25 In the 1990s, a travelling exhibition illustrating the war crimes of the Wehrmacht – Nazi armed forces – caused outrage in Germany. The army, its critics averred, was stainless, and any atrocities had been committed by others: the Gestapo, the SS, Nazi thugs or foreign mercenaries.
Ben Shepherd’s highly readable history gives the lie to that and many other legends. The Wehrmacht, he shows with unimpeachable detail, was steeped up to its collective neck in blood. Its soldiers participated willingly, and often enthusiastically, in acts of barbaric savagery against civilians, prisoners of war, communists, Jews and many other innocents unlucky enough to inhabit…
