‘One senses danger from all sides, especially from fanatical civilians’: The 121st Infantry Division and Partisan War, June 1941–April 1942

On the second day of Operation Barbarossa, Lieutenant E. of the 121st nfantry Division raged against apparent irregular forces who ‘seemingly shot out of every house’ in the Lithuanian village of Vilkoviszki. Members of his 405th Infantry Regiment responded in the heavy-handed manner called for by Nazi doctrine: ‘As every house which the devious guerrillas shot from was set on fire, nearly the entire town was burning by evening’. 1 In many ways, this diary passage encapsulates what has become the dominant image of the Wehrmacht in the recent historiography: a brutal force, employing the utmost in violence to sweep away all real and imagined resistance. 2 And though elements of this image certainly ring true, closer analysis also reveals a wider range of attitudes and behaviours that fail to correspond to this picture of a marauding Wehrmacht. The following examination of the 121st Infantry Division during the period from the beginning of the invasion of the Soviet Union to the end of the ‘Winter Crisis’ in April 1942 highlights the various ways in which the division both at the institutional and individual levels dealt with the partisan threat during the first stage of the Soviet-German War. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.