Alexander Hill (2) (1974–)

In this closely argued and researched monograph the author teases out the particulars of partisan warfare in the environs of Leningrad during World War II. As such, Hill adopts a middle position between Great Patriotic War propaganda of there being a mass partisan movement and some recent analyses essentially arguing that the German security forces waged partisan warfare on non-existent partisans.

The reality would appear to be that the partisan forces were more akin to regulars, rather than being guerrillas organic to the community, and support in the occupied zone was limited by the German ability to generally bring superior force against any but the most stealthy recon unit until not long before liberation, which discouraged much of the local population from offering as much support as Soviet authorities hoped. In this respect one is reminded of the experience of the American Civil War (which Hill does not invoke), where those caught in the no-man's land between Federal and Confederate forces bore the brunt of the violence and were often mostly concerned with simply maintaining as neutral a state as possible.

Speaking of other useful points of this study, since the area in question was not one of wide-spread Jewish settlement, it offers something of a control as to how the German occupation was conducted without the complication of the Nazi racial imperatives. Hill found a rather more restrained occupation than might be expected, at least until the forced-labor drafts of the local population began. A missed opportunity here might have been to try and tie official policy in Army Group North with the traditional twitchiness of the German military in the presence of irregular forces, though this work is more from the Russian perspective.… (mehr)