The German‐Soviet War: Combat, Occupation, and Legacies by JeffRutherford and RobertvonMaier, eds. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2025. 600 pp. $59.95. ISBN 978‐1‐5017‐8108‐7

This book is a significant collection of research articles by some of the leading scholars of the Eastern Front. The authors are a mixture of authorities in the field with multiple books, established scholars, and emerging scholars. The German-Soviet War: Combat, Occupation, and Legacies is almost six hundred pages long and contains sixteen articles. Although some chapters have a more traditional military focus, most authors in the collection tend to focus on the war and society, issues of occupation, motivations, atrocities, and the treatment of prisoners of war. Jeff Rutherford’s introduction does an excellent job of providing a synopsis of the Soviet-German War, focusing on all of the key facts that highlight the centrality of the Eastern Front to World War II. He also does an outstanding job of covering all the major historiographic developments since 1945. I have been looking for a great introduction to the war and an updated overview of the literature of the Soviet-German War to assign to my undergraduate students, and I found it with Rutheford’s introduction. The sixteen chapters are organized into three parts. Part I deals with Germany’s war of annihilation. David Stahel focuses on Hitler’s “Halt order,” issued to the Army Group Center in December 1941 when the Soviets had launched a counterattack around Moscow. He argues that Hitler’s order undermined the autonomy of the commanders in the field, making it harder for them to fight a defensive operation. Edward B. Westermann makes an important historiographical argument about the center versus the periphery in Holocaust studies. Using the case of the murder of Jews in Liepaja, Latvia, he contends that the notion of “center” was relative from the perspective of perpetrators in Liepaja. David A. Harrisville argues that the Wehrmacht propaganda aimed at its troops operated at two levels. On the one hand, it persistently relied on Nazi ideology and Nazi morality (that is, everything that advanced the interests of the superior Aryan race was inherently positive, and anything contradicting these interests should be avoided). On the other hand, the Wehrmacht also deployed the language of traditional morality in its wartime messaging, including the concepts of good and evil, justice and injustice, as well as honor and dishonor. Maris Rowe-McCulloch’s chapter discusses, almost uniquely in the field, the experiences of Soviet POWs in German camps on Soviet soil from late 1941 through 1943. She finds that the German mistreatment of POWs was not just a function of the chaotic early phases of the war but continued well into 1943. Part II deals with German and Soviet allies, helping fill an important gap in the scholarship. Nicolas G. Virtue’s well-organized and fascinating contribution discusses the Italian Expeditionary Corps’s occupation of parts of what is today Donetsk Province between November 1941 and July 1942. Virtue concludes that the Italian occupation was relatively restrained compared to the general tendencies of the German occupation in the East. Interestingly, he also finds that the Italian occupation of Soviet territory was much more restrained than Italian occupation policy in Yugoslavia or Africa because Rome did not have imperial ambitions in the Soviet Union. Dallas Michelbacher’s chapter is a welcome contribution on the Soviet prisoners of war in Romanian POW camps. Michelbacher argues that the Romanians treated the Soviet POWs more correctly than the Germans, partially because Antonescu’s regime recognized the potential labor value of Soviet prisoners from the start of the war. However, he also notes that the far higher percentage of Soviet POWs died in Romanian camps, compared to Romania’s British, American, and Italian captives. Nina Janz’s contribution focuses on the Luxembourgers who served in the Wehrmacht and SS on the Eastern Front. Keith Hann’s chapter explores the sizable Soviet-made Polish People’s Army. He argues that the mostly Polish-language historiography does not do justice to this formation, as it was too exalting under Communism, whereas the post-1989 accounts were too simplistic in depicting the soldiers as Stalin’s victims deprived of agency. Valeriy Romanenko and Ilya Grinberg’s chapter on the role of Lend-Lease Aircraft in the Soviet liberation of right-bank Ukraine in 1944 is a well-researched and balanced contribution. The authors rely on the Soviet sources to assess how the Western aircraft were incorporated into battle and to analyze their impact in the campaign. Lend-lease is a popular topic among students of World War II in the West, both inside and outside academia. However, individuals interested in Lend-Lease often lack the expertise in the Red Army, or they cannot access the Soviet-era sources, or they do not have the Russian language skills. Thus, they cannot tell the story of how the American and British supplies and equipment impacted the battlefield. Romanenko and Grinberg persuasively argue, using Soviet sources and situating their arguments largely in the Russian-language historiography, that the effect of the American aircraft on Soviet air operations in the liberation of Ukraine was profound. The third part deals, generally, with the German occupation policies and postwar Soviet reconstruction efforts. Jennifer Lauren Popowycz examines the Nazi forced-labor policy in territories that constitute Ukraine today as well as the experiences of Ukrainians deployed in the Third Reich. Jeff Rutherford discusses the German army’s scorched-earth retreats between 1943 and 1944 as part of the German war of annihilation. Adrian E. Wettstein continues to explore the theme of brutal evacuations, focusing on Kharkiv. Bastiaan Willems considers the German army’s radicalized attitude toward German civilians as they retreated into the Third Reich, pointing to continuities between the behavior of German soldiers in the Soviet Union and in Germany. Susan C. I. Grunewald’s chapter is the third contribution to focus on the prisoners of war in the collection, and she examines Soviet policy toward German prisoners of war. Travis Gray explores the reconstruction of Smolensk after the liberation of the city. He concludes that the reconstruction was painfully chaotic and slow, while Moscow was unable to play a central role in the process to use it to legitimize Soviet power. Ian Garner also broaches the topic of reconstruction, focusing on Stalingrad. His approach is different, as he examines textual and cinematic works of the reconstruction to argue that the rebuilding was conceived of as the building of utopia and not merely recreating the old Stalingrad. In sum, the range of topics covered in The German-Soviet War: Combat, Occupation, and Legacies is very wide. The articles are based on outstanding research. The book is a must-read for all scholars interested in World War II in general, and the Eastern Front in particular.