Centuries of iron

JONATHAN BOFF is impressed by a comprehensive and insightful military history of Germany and its southern neighbours

- JONATHAN BOFF

Few human works have inflicted as much misery on the world as the German military. The murderous violence it unleashed across two world wars retains all its power to horrify and fascinate, even a century on. The question of why and how German soldiers committed such crimes remains important, and it is inevitably one of the major themes of Peter H Wilson's magisterial new book. His greatest contribution, however, is to remind us that there is more to the military history of the German-speaking peoples than that.