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In recent years, mostly in Anglophone circles, there has been a discussion regarding a "German Way of War". According to this thesis, the German Empire embarked on a military "Sonderweg" [special path] in contrast to other states. This was supposedly particularly evident in a more radical form of warfare exhibited during colonial wars and the First World War. This view postulates a continuity of German military culture between the First and the Second World War. The present article tests this thesis by means of an examination of the Eastern Front during the First World War and concludes that the supposition of a specifically German military culture during the German Empire and a continuity between the form of warfare practised on the Eastern Front of the First World War and "Operation Barbarossa" often bears the markings of a backward-looking projection. In comparison to the Austro-Hungarian as well as the Russian Army, the German military was the most restrained until late 1917. Ultimately the success of Bolshevism since late 1917 led to a radical mental change; the state of command now exasperated, as the counterinsurgency in Ukraine in 1918 demonstrated. Simultaneously the German Army also largely tried to go easy on the civilian population. A further surge of radicalisation was revealed in the conflicts in the Baltic States in 1919. These may have possessed a formative character for the later Nazi movement, but not for the military, who saw the "Baltic fighters" as "undisciplined rabble". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Brest-Litovsk Peace Agreement was supposed to be a grand solution. Germany and Austria-Hungary, under increasing domestic pressure, wanted to create facts on at least one front and demonstrate to the world at large their willingness to accept peace. In reality, the German Supreme Army Command's main goal was to bring large parts of Eastern Europe under German control and permanently weaken revolution-torn Russia. Since late 1917, Ukraine appeared to be the key to controlling the entire region: it was considered the ‘breadbasket’ of the former Russian Empire, it possessed heavy industry in the East and it offered access to the Black Sea. But the Brest Treaty proved to be brittle and the contracting states showed themselves to be either politically unstable (Ukraine) or unreliable (Bolshevik Russia). Additionally, Ukraine was not even remotely capable of fulfilling its economic pledges. Furthermore, the ‘dictated peace’ proved to the entente that there could be no negotiated peace with Germany and that fighting would have to continue until the capitulation of the Central Powers. This article will analyse, first, the position of Ukraine within the Central Powers' foreign-policy and military-strategic conception until the invasion in early 1918; second, the occupation policies of 1918; and, third, the Ukrainians' own perception of the Central Powers. The Ukrainian ‘failing state’ exemplifies, with particular clarity, the Central Powers' strategic overstretch and their ill-considered policy in Eastern Europe at the end of the First World War. Finally, this essay will place the wartime conduct of the Central Powers in Ukraine into the larger scholarly discussion of the ‘German Way of War’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article investigates the massacre of French civilians by forces of the German Schutzstaffel (SS) on August 25, 1944, in the village of Maillé, France. On that date, as the surrender of Paris was being signed, German soldiers murdered 124 town residents and leveled the village. A nearly total lack of documentary sources on those events is noted, as is the unknown identity of the SS division participants and the eventual fate of the German commander Lieutenant Gustav Schlüter, who was condemned in absentia to death by a tribunal in Bordeaux.

The article presents the summary of a conference that focused on the history of the Waffen-Schutz Staffel (Waffen-SS), a Nazi national military force of the Third Reich in Germany. It was held from May 6-7, 2011 in Würzburg, Germany. Topics under discussion at the conference included the recruitment tactics of the Waffen-SS, the interactions between the Waffen-SS and the Wehrmacht defense forces during the battle in Ardenno, Italy, and the contributions of the SS to the Jewish Holocaust.