Occupation and Insurgency: A Selective Examination of the Hague and Geneva Conventions on the Eastern Front, 1939-1945

Occupation and Insurgency details German policies towards civilians and captured military forces in the Soviet Union from 1941-1945 and examines them in the context of the laws of war. The results of these policies illustrate how an occupying force can establish a sense of legitimacy or spur a stronger resistance among the local citizens. While focused upon World War II, the book is very relevant to today's war on terror and the handling of current counterinsurgency scenarios. Evaluating certain actions by the Germans in the USSR from the standpoint of The Geneva and The Hague Conventions, the book also studies many actions that, while morally egregious, did not qualify as war crimes under the law. Some of the events analyzed prompted the 1949 revision of The Geneva Convention. The German actions, as well as the Soviet responses, lend themselves to discussion as related to international law and military actions. There is no other book that uses chronicled events to address both the international legal conventions and analyzes these events in both a legal and historical paradigm. The book is closely documented, including 20 photographs and numerous interview segments with SS officers, resistance fighters, and other primary persons involved in the war, and it provides as well the perspectives of other historians regarding the critical issues discussed. Occupation and Insurgency is a book that will appeal to all levels of academia, as well as the general public with regard to general history, World War II, and legal studies. It complements and goes beyond works such as Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men, Omer Bartov's Hitler's Army: Soldiers, Nazis and War in the Third Reich, Arad, Kurowski and Spector (eds), The Einsatzgruppen Reports, and Richard Rhodes' Masters of Death.