Birds of Prey. Philip W. Blood
History of Germans Ancient and Modern, (London, 2010), p. 17.
29 Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory, (New York, 1995), pp. 75–120.
30 Barbara Ehrenreich, Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War, (London, 2011).
31 Simon Harrison, Dark Trophies: Hunting and the Enemy Body in Modern War, (New York, 2014).
32 See Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. A.M.Sheridan Smith, (New York, 1994).
33 Richard Holmes, Riding The Retreat: Mons to the Marne—1914 Revisited, (London, 2007), p. ix.
34 Peter Hennessey, The Junior Officers’ Reading Club: Killing Time and Fighting Wars, (London, 2010).
35 Thomas Kühne, Kameradschaft: Die Soldaten des nationalsozialistischen Krieges und das 20. Jahrhundert, (Göttingen, 2006). See also Kühne, Belonging and Genocide. Hitler’s Community 1918–1945, (New Haven, 2010) and ‘Kameradschaft – “das Beste im Leben des Mannes”, Die deutschen Soldaten des Zweiten Weltkrieges in erfahrungs- und geschlechtergeschichtlicher Perspektive,’ Geschichte und Gesellschaft 22 (1996) S.504–529, and Kühne, The Rise and Fall of Comradeship: Hitler’s Soldiers, Mass Bonding and Mass Violence in the Twentieth Century, (Cambridge, 2017).
36 TNA, WO 208/3608 CSDIC SIR 1329, Establishment of a Jgdko by Secret order of the Befehlshaber Südost, interrogation of UFF’S Kotschy and Boscmeinen, 13 December 1944. WO 208/3979, A Study of German Military Training, Combined Services, May 1946.
37 TNA, WO 208/3000, ‘The German Squad In Combat, Military’, Intelligence Service, US War Department, Washington DC, 25 January 1943. WO 208/3230, US Army Pamphlet 20-231, ‘Combat in Russian Forests and Swamps’, Department of the Army, July 1951. Military Intelligence Service, No.15, The German Rifle Company, (Washington DC, 1942), 1942, partial translation of Ludwig Queckbörner, Die Schützen-Kompanie: Ein handbuch für den Dienstunterricht, (Berlin, 1939).
38 Edward A. Shils and Morris Janowitz, ‘Cohesion and Disintegration in the Wehrmacht in World War II,’ The Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 12, No. 2 (Summer, 1948), pp. 280–315.
39 Lord Russell, of Liverpool, The Scourge of the Swastika, (London, 1954); Russell was a judge advocate officer and had worked on numerous war crimes trials.
40 For example, Max Hastings, Overlord, (London, 1986).
41 Martin van Creveld, Fighting Power: German and U.S. Army Performance 1939–1945, (London, 1983).
42 Bartov, Barbarisation, passim.
43 Institute of Historical Research: School of Advanced Study, University of London, German History seminar, Professor Omer Bartov, 21 May 1997.
44 The Wiener Holocaust Library, lecture ‘Intimate Killing’, 26 February 1999 presentation of Joanna Bourke, The Intimate History of Killing, (London, 1999).
45 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, (London, 1991).
46 Arbeitskreis Militärgeschichte e.V., Essen conference, August 1999.
47 In particular: Henry Metelmann (panzer—Guildford), Heinrich Schreiber (infantry-Aachen), Paul S** (Luftwaffe-Magdeburg), Frederich Baumann (infantry-Berlin) and Boso L**(Waffen-SS).
48 Philip W. Blood, ‘Securing Hitler’s Lebensraum: the Luftwaffe and the forest of Białowieźa 1942–4’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, (Oxford, 2010).
An Aide-Mémoire:
Reading Maps Like German soldiers
A.J.P. Taylor once wrote: ‘Every German frontier is artificial, therefore impermanent; that is the permanence of German geography.’1 The Luftwaffe’s mission in Białowieźa was part of a policy of erecting a permanent frontier on the eastern borderlands. Beyond this ‘new’ frontier lay Belorussia, Soviet Russia, and Ukraine, in effect Hitler’s Lebensraum empire. A permanent eastern frontier represented a geopolitical goal for the Nazis. Göring’s three-part plan to bring this about included racial population engineering in Białowieźa. The first and fundamental goal was to bring about the eradication of Eastern European Jewry. The second goal involved the reduction and deportation of Slavs, dubbed Untermensch (sub-humans), from the large group of forest settlements. In the third stage, Göring’s plan called for the settlement of ethnic Germans, mostly repatriated from the east. Hitler’s invasion of Soviet Russia complicated this plan, slicing through the former Pale of Settlement from Tsarist times, a vast territory that was still homeland to several millions of Jews.
The problem I had to overcome concerned the relationship between the Landser and the environment. How did 650 German soldiers effectively secure 256,000 hectares of Nazi-occupied Białowieźa? The command and control of space or terrain have always been a strategic concern of nations, colonisers, army commanders, and security forces. During the Iraq insurgency (2003–11), the American army was forced to adopt a ‘population-centric’ strategy.2 For this research, the first step was to recognise that the expansion of the Białowieźa Forest, by the Nazis, was the creation of a frontier security zone. I called this frontier security zone the Białowieźa arena, to reflect the full extent of Göring’s territorial ambitions in this region. This arena was secured on the basis of a ratio of one soldier per 1.52 square miles. How did the Germans fill the command and control of space, and was it effective? These questions challenged my research because they fundamentally alter our understanding of how Nazi occupation and colonisation was practised. In 2010, the research began the application of Historical GIS to solve these challenges and look afresh at how the Germans organised security. Consequently, this chapter is an aide-mémoire to the GIS maps that were generated and are included in full within the narrative.
I. The Nazis and military geography
Nazi aspirations were particularly focused on the frontier of East Prussia. Following an ultimatum to Lithuania, in March 1939, Memelland (today—Klaijpéda in Lithuania) was annexed, an area covering 3,000 square kilometres.3 After Memelland, there were more acquisitions of former Polish territory in the south-east, named Regierungsbezirk Zichenau. This added