Violence in defeat : the Wehrmacht on German soil, 1944-1945 /
In the final year of the Second World War, as bitter defensive fighting moved to German soil, a wave of intraethnic violence engulfed the country. Bastiaan Willems offers the first study into the impact and behavior of the Wehrmacht on its own territory, focusing on the German units fighting in East...
| Main Author: | |
|---|---|
| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Cambridge ; New York :
Cambridge University Press,
2021.
|
| Series: | Cambridge military histories.
|
| Subjects: |
| Summary: | In the final year of the Second World War, as bitter defensive fighting moved to German soil, a wave of intraethnic violence engulfed the country. Bastiaan Willems offers the first study into the impact and behavior of the Wehrmacht on its own territory, focusing on the German units fighting in East Prussia and its capital Koenigsberg. He shows that the Wehrmacht's retreat into Germany, after three years of brutal fighting on the Eastern Front, contributed significantly to the spike of violence which occurred throughout the country immediately prior to defeat. Soldiers arriving with an ingrained barbarized mindset, developed on the Eastern Front, shaped the immediate environment of the area of operations and of Nazi Germany as a whole. Willems establishes how the norms of the Wehrmacht as a retreating army impacted behavioral patterns on the home front, arguing that its presence increased the propensity to carry out violence in Germany. |
|---|---|
| Physical Description: | xvii, 348 pages : illustrations; maps ; 24 cm. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references (pages 303-338) and index. |
| ISBN: | 1108479723 9781108479721 |