Hitler’s Soldiers: The German Army in the Third Reich

Dating from the exculpatory memoirs of Hitler’s generals, there has been no shortage of studies on the German army in World War II. Scholars in different eras have asked different questions. John W. Wheeler-Bennett’s The Nemesis of Power (1953) placed the army within the context of global debates on civil-military relations; Manfred Messerschmidt’s, Die Wehrmacht im NS-Staat (1969) attempted to measure the degree to which Nazi ideology infused the officer corps; and a host of scholars since the 1990s from Christian Streit to Walter Manoschek to Birgit Beck have gauged war crimes committed by the army, from the mass starvation of Soviet POWs, to the mass shootings of Jews, to sexual crimes in occupied areas. All the while there have been numerous operational histories, studies on military production and logistics, and studies of the rank-and-file, by individual scholars and also by official research offices such as the Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt. Military history has slowly vanished from university curricula, particularly in North America. But reports of its death remain premature.