(Ebook) Violence In Defeat - The Wehrmacht On German Soil (1944–1945) by Bastiaan Willems ISBN 9781108846073, 9781108479721, 9781108856270, 1108846076, 1108479723, 1108856276

(Ebook) Violence In Defeat - The Wehrmacht On German Soil (1944–1945) by Bastiaan Willems ISBN 9781108846073, 9781108479721, 9781108856270, 1108846076, 1108479723, 1108856276

Bastiaan Willems offers the first study into the impact and behaviour of the Wehrmacht Forces on its own territory and people, focusing primarily on the German units sent to fight Soviet Russia in East Prussia, and in and around its capital of Königsberg. He shows that the Wehrmacht's retreat back into German lands long thought invulnerable to such an attack by the 'primitive' Russian Army, after three long bloody years of some of the most brutal battles on the Eastern Front, contributed significantly to the spike of violence which later occurred throughout the country immediately prior to the Reich's final defeat in 1945. 

Soldiers from all of the Wehrmacht branches of service, including the newly formed Volksstrum, all arrived with an already deeply ingrained mindset of barbarism. These thoughts from either years of constant propaganda or from being in constant action on the 'Ost Front', saw a callous indifference to life enter into and shape the actions inside the immediate environment of their new area of operations. 

Willems establishes how the norms of the Wehrmacht as a retreating army also impacted upon their own behavioural patterns, and of those on the home front - arguing that its presence increased the propensity of those concerned to carry out extreme acts of violence on German soil - with the same level of ruthless barbarism they had heard of being shown to village after village since the Invasion of Russia.

"The suffering of the population in East Prussia under Soviet occupation, even long after the war had ended in 1945, is well known. This book will stimulate lively discussions about how the conduct of the radicalised Wehrmacht units retreating from the Eastern Front onto German territory in 1944/45 impacted these miserable conditions''. - Margit Szöllösi-Janze (Author).