Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/News/November 2014/Book reviews


 * By Nick-D

The Unknown Eastern Front provides an overview of the non-German forces which fought on the Axis side of the Eastern Front of World War II. Its author, Rolf-Dieter Müller, is a German historian who has been responsible for coordinating the major series Germany and the Second World War.

The book is structured into a series of twenty 15-30 page long essays on each of the nations and ethnic groups of volunteers and conscripts who fought alongside the Germans. Each essay provides a brief summary of the relations between Germany or the relevant ethic group before the war, before moving on to describe how they came to fight alongside the Germans, the forces involved, and what their fate was. Knowing little about this subject before reading the book, I was surprised by the scale of some of these forces, and Müller notes that they made up about a third of the soldiers who fought on the German side of the Eastern Front. The losses suffered by the various forces are staggering (most of the various forces were almost completely wiped out on at least one occasion), and provide a good illustration of just how bloody the Eastern Front was, as well as the folly of pitting ill-equipped forces against a high-quality opponent. Müller's approach generally works, and the book offers a useful introduction to its subject.

The Unknown Eastern Front does have some significant weaknesses though. Most significantly, the quality of its editing leaves a lot to be desired - in particular, the figures relating to the sizes of the various contingents appear to be all over the place, and differ between, and sometimes within, chapters. Casualty figures can also be difficult to follow at times. Given Müller's reputation I imagine that this is the fault of his translators, but it's completely unacceptable and should have been caught by the editors. While Müller does a remarkable job in ensuring that the chapters aren't repetitive, despite their often-similar content, the book would have also benefited greatly from an overview chapter tracing how German attitudes towards the various forces (and especially those from ethnic groups which were seen as being racially inferior) changed over time, and why. It appears that the initial disinclination to recruit from these groups crumbled as the war situation deteriorated in 1942 and 1943, but the process by which this occurred is never clearly explained. An analysis of whether Germany made good use of the forces would also have been valuable - Müller notes that the Germans treated the various forces as little more than cannon fodder, but doesn't discuss whether they would have received better results if they had invested resources in properly training and equipping the units.

Overall, I'd recommend The Unknown Eastern Front mainly due to the fairly comprehensive way in which it covers its topic, which remains little known in English-speaking countries. Hopefully the problems with the book's editing will be corrected in a future English-language edition, and other authors will provide a more detailed account of the subject.

Publishing details: