Continuity and Change in Wehrmacht Anti-Partisan Warfare

The Example of the XVIII Mountain Corps in Yugoslavia and on the Arctic Karelian Front

Abstract

Based on the archival finding of a German suggestion for the deportation of the Karelian inhabitants of Finnish occupied Russian Karelia to concentration camps, this article discusses how the anti-partisan warfare policies of a mountain corps changed while being deployed in the Balkans and the Arctic Circle. This finding is contextualised with the different forms of cooperation and collaboration with the national socialist Third Reich and its genocidal agenda in Serbia and Finland vis-à-vis military circumstances. While highlighting the nexus between anti-partisan warfare and the Holocaust, the finding is that where there has been no automatic road from anti-partisan warfare to genocide, like in Finland, anti-partisan warfare could still have served as a cover and facilitator for the Holocaust—but, even under political pressure, that did not happen. By focusing on the operative level in one special case, the article again opens the field of the history of warfare to questions related to genocide and Holocaust studies in order to get a deeper understanding of the mechanisms and (in)human decisions which have led to mass murder under conditions of war.