During the Second World War, Germans fought a “two-front war.” A “community of fate” bound together Germans at home and Germans in uniform who carried the war beyond Germany's borders. “Between 1939 and 1945, there was no doubt that civilians were no longer excluded from the fighting; they found themselves right in the middle of it—as actors, as observers, and as those who bore the suffering” (part 1, p. 2) of the war. The Nazi leadership knew this from the start, and only days after the Nazi invasion of Poland, Hermann Göring was exhorting a factory workforce to remember: “We are now all fighters at the front!”(part 1, p. 8). Jörg Echternkamp reminds us of this in his introduction to this massive two-part volume, the latest installment in the history of Germany in the Second World War that has occupied historians of the Military History Research Office (Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt, or MGFA) for the last twenty-five years. Echternkamp is the editor, and he deserves enormous credit for pulling together a collection of twenty essays—some of which could easily stand on their own as monographs, all of which are grounded in staggering amounts of original research—that not only summarize what we know about the impact of the war on the homefront in Germany, but also add considerably to that knowledge. Previous volumes in the MGFA series (seven of which are available from Oxford University Press in English translation) have focused primarily on the military planning, the war at the front, and the organization of the war economy at home. In the more than 2,000 pages of this two-part volume, contributors turn their attention to the impact of the war on German society. The results are extremely impressive, and what Echternkamp has brought together will be the starting point for anyone who wants to understand the war at home in Germany.

At first glance, Andrew Bergerson's Ordinary Germans in Extraordinary Times appears to be another local study about the rise and legitimation of Nazism, one more addition to an already impressive list of similar undertakings. What distinguishes this work is the author's effort, through ethnography and oral history, to link the everyday neighborly practices of ordinary Germans in the Hannoverian town of Hildesheim to Nazi criminality. The result is an insightful and often provocative analysis of informal and unexceptional social behavior that paradoxically masked the more formal commitments of class, religion, and ideology in the name of civility, while simultaneously deepening those very same divisions.

To date, debates about the identity and motives of perpetrators of German extermination policies have focused on the Einsatzgruppen (mobile squads of the Security Police and the Security Service), concentration camp personnel, and the Order Police. Martin Cüppers now presents the first systematic study of one of the best documented, yet least publicized set of units that participated in the murder of European Jews. He explores three Waffen-SS brigades and some smaller units under the Kommandostab Reichsführer-SS. In some respects, the book's title is misleading. It does not cover the military wing of the SS as a whole and, if anything, it demonstrates that the Kommandostab was of minor importance since it was never really in command of anything. Serving as a transmitter of information and as an organizational tool, it further declined in importance after early 1942. In addition, just as with other perpetrator units, the Waffen-SS brigades did not murder only Jews; the book does deal with the brigades' other victims though the book title does not suggest it.

Clemens August Graf von Galen (1878-1946) is popularly known as the “Lion of Münster” for his resolute opposition to Nazism, notably to Hitler's policy of euthanasia that was to cleanse Germany of the mentally retarded. Von Galen was the Bishop of Münster in Westphalia until he became a cardinal in 1946, shortly before his death. In the summer of 1941, he delivered three powerful sermons against euthanasia and the closing of monasteries. The sermons were secretly copied and distributed and also, much to the embarrassment of the Nazi regime, dropped as leaflets by the Royal Air Force over Germany. It is thanks to these sermons that Bishop von Galen has been widely recognized and indeed celebrated as a resister against National Socialism.

This absorbing and well-researched book presents the story of Berlin's Catholic Church during the Nazi era from the perspective of a deeply committed believer. Professor Kevin Spicer is also Father Kevin Spicer. As such, it offers critics a chance to test their arguments against a serious voice from within the Church. But it also affords more neutral observers a chance to ponder the assumptions behind debates on the churches in the Third Reich, in particular, what acts can be considered oppositional and what drove certain religious believers into resistance.

This concise study of the German army's anti-partisan campaigns on the Eastern Front in World War II provides added detail and nuance to historical understanding of the “war of devastation” launched by the Nazi leadership. While titanic armies clashed on the battlefields, German campaigns in the occupied territories behind the front also took a devastating toll, with “the destruction of more than 5,000 villages and the killing of up to 300,000 mainly civilian Soviet citizens” (p. 27). This brutal treatment was meted out not only by the indoctrinated killers of the SS units, but also by units of the German army (contrary to the idealized depictions of a “fundamentally decent” regular army circulated after 1945). Shepherd aims to reveal the mix of “personal influences and particular conditions” (p. 33) and their interplay in causing the brutalization of the German army, the Wehrmacht. Shepherd states, “the Wehrmacht was the single institution that, more than any other, shaped the lives and actions of ordinary Germans between 1933 and 1945” (p. 28), with eleven million men serving in its ranks in this period.

Weinberg pursues a simple question: What “visions” of the postwar world did the principal leaders of the major belligerent powers develop during the war? Weinberg's unsurpassed mastery of World War II as a global war allows him to pen eight compelling portraits of Hitler, Mussolini, Tojo, Chiang, Stalin, Churchill, de Gaulle, and Roosevelt and their ideas for the future positions of their country. Each essay constitutes a minor masterpiece of concision and erudition in and of itself. My only quibble is that Weinberg exclusively concentrates on the top leadership and ignores the lower working levels of postwar planning—there may have been less “vision” there but most of the “grunt” work was done by those planners. Much information in these portraits is known to specialists, but there are some surprising insights, too.

Andrej Angrick's definitive work on Einsatzgruppe D is more than a history of the mobile killing unit, for the latter did not operate in a vacuum, but cooperated with the German military authorities to realize Nazi occupation policy in the south Ukraine and the Caucasus. In Angrick's words, Einsatzgruppe D was the “first and most radical instrument for the formation of the to-be-conquered Lebensraum” (p. 732). German determination to recast the ethnic composition of the U.S.S.R. was no “desk fantasy,” as reflected in the priority placed on settlement planning, which required the disappearance of Soviet Jews. Unlike Jewish communities in the western U.S.S.R., where survival of some was guaranteed by the need for labor, survivors in areas “worked” by Einsatzgruppe D were “minutely few”(p. 733). Angrick notes that his work is “perpetrator history”: his perpetrators permitted few victims to survive; and those who did were primarily peasants and Red Army soldiers whose stories were not told after the war. Nevertheless, postwar statements of the perpetrators assist the historian to “reconstruct … the internal history of the unit, down to the individual,” although cautions about judicial and historical “truth” should be well taken.

Reading Karel C. Berkhoff's Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine under Nazi Rule reaps reward but also some disappointment. For the general public unfamiliar with the historical issues and intricacies of the Nazi occupation of the Soviet Union, this book contains far more reward as a montage of vivid depictions of everyday life under German domination in the occupied East. But conversely, for those with a more advanced, research-level familiarity with the subject, the results are reversed.

In his examination of the Nuremberg Medical Trial conducted by the American Military Tribunal in 1946, Horst H. Freyhofer has not, in fact, written a book about an important war crimes trial; this is rather a book that ponders whether we can “comprehend” the crimes of Nazi doctors engaged in some of the most heinous medical experiments in history. This is a short volume that tries to cover too much: the Hippocratic oath; the history of human experimentation by doctors; the ethical implications of medical crimes from the beginning of “Western Civilization” to the present; and a theoretical analysis of medical ethics from Goldhagen, to Socrates, to Darwin, to Nietzsche, to Hegel. Freyhofer fails to provide a contextual examination of the medical trial or of Nazi trials in general. The book would have benefited greatly from an examination of the important literature on war crimes trials (Gary Bass, Belinda Cooper, Ian Buruma, Lawrence Douglas, Jörg Friedrich, Michael Marrus, and Mark Osiel, to name but a few). These scholars address key questions about the trope of the trial as a forum for the teaching of history lessons, as a political event, and for its success and failure in seeking justice in cases of mass atrocity. Freyhofer does not explore any of these avenues. Instead, the author's main thesis is that the trial “symbolizes a break, not so much with the image physicians have of themselves, but with the image patients have of themselves” (p. 11). Freyhofer argues that the trial made patients conscious—for the first time—that doctors did not always have their best interests at heart. While this is an interesting observation, it does not suffice to keep the reader engaged in the history of the trial.

In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt used elements of Israeli interrogations and portions of the Jerusalem trial to reconstruct Eichmann's career, his role in the Final Solution, and, in sketchy strokes, the Final Solution itself. She did not cover the trial in detail: In his memoirs, Raul Hilberg even suggested that she did not personally attend Eichmann's testimony. A philosopher by training, she also did not conduct primary source research. She simply read deeply into Eichmann's own version of events, accepting much, questioning some, creating a plausible and readable story that included scenes from the trial.

The Berlin Republic of the twenty-first century, writes W. R. Smyser, is destined to be unlike all previous German states. A status quo power and a stable democracy, it is neither the battleground of others nor dominant over them, neither reticent like Bonn nor arrogant like the Berlin of the late Hohenzollerns. The Cold War was “the essential incubator” of this “new Germany” (p. 402). It provided Germany with the tools of change—a role through which to overcome its past, and time to overcome old wounds. Aiding the incubation were contradictory Communist policies, astute Western statesmanship, and bravely pursued Eastern popular aspirations. Two Germans and two Americans, Smyser avers, stand at the heart of the eventual Communist defeat: East German leader Walter Ulbricht, West German Chancellor Willy Brandt, President Ronald Reagan, and Smyser’s onetime mentor, General Lucius Clay. Mighty assists go to British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, Soviet leaders Joseph Stalin and Mikhail Gorbachev, and the inspirational Polish Pope. Further down this idiosyncratic hierarchy stand Chancellors Adenauer and Kohl and U.S. President George H. W. Bush.