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Wendy Lower, War in a Twilight World: Partisan and Anti-Partisan Warfare in Eastern Europe, 1939–1945, German History, Volume 29, Issue 4, December 2011, Pages 667–669, https://doi.org/10.1093/gerhis/ghr054
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Extract
This collection of essays is a welcome addition to post-Soviet studies of the Second World War. Much of the recent literature on the war in Eastern Europe focuses on the Holocaust, and rarely integrates the history of partisan warfare that was a central aspect of Nazi genocidal theory and practice. Furthermore, this European chapter of ‘irregular’ warfare has not been placed within the broader history of guerilla warfare before and after the Second World War, a blind spot which Shepherd and Pattinson effectively begin to fill with their substantial introduction. They explain that the ‘need to combat guerillas, partisans and insurgents generally has given rise to models of counter-insurgency warfare’ (p. 3). In the case of the Nazi occupation of Eastern Europe, the Germans eschewed these models because for the most part they did not pursue policies that promoted stability and political rapprochement with civilians. On the contrary, the Germans’ excessive brutality, ideological racism and rapaciousness were counter-productive and made the rise of partisan warfare and cycles of violence between occupier and occupied inevitable.
