Occupation and Insurgency: A Selective Examination of The Hague and Geneva Conventions on the Eastern Front, 1939-1945

When Germany invaded the Soviet Union, they had an opportunity to 'win the hearts and minds' of a population disaffected with their national leader. In Occupancy and Insurgency, a military history professor looks at Nazi racial, counter-partisan, and counterinsurgency policies in the context of The Hague and the Geneva Conventions and suggests that the way an occupation is carried out can create an insurgency where none existed before.
Occupancy and Insurgency details German policies towards civilians and captured military forces in the Soviet Union from 1941-1945 and examines them in the context of the laws of war. The results of these policies illustrate how an occupying force can establish a sense of legitimacy or spur a stronger resistance among the local citizens. While focused upon World War II, the book is very relevant to today's war on terror and the handling of current counterinsurgency scenarios.
Evaluating certain actions by the Germans in the USSR from the standpoint of the Geneva and Hague Conventions, the book also studies many actions that, while morally egregious, did not qualify as war crimes under the law. Some of the events analyzed prompted the 1949 revision of the Geneva Convention.
The analysis of German actions, as well as the Soviet responses, lend themselves to discussion as related to international law and military actions. There is no other book that uses chronicled events to address both international legal conventions and to analyze them in both a legal and historical paradigm. The book is closely documented, including 21 photographs and numerous interview segments with SS officers, resistance fighters, and other primary persons involved in the war, and it provides as well the perspectives of other historians regarding the critical issues discussed.
Complementing and going beyond works such as Christopher Browning's
Read more