Das Reich: The Military Role of 2nd SS Division

Lucas, a prolific British writer of popular military history, proposes to tell the story of the Reich's 2nd SS Panzer Division by relying heavily on personal accounts and an unofficial divisional archive. The book substantiates the familiar datum that the elite division of the Waffen SS were both skilled soldiers and formidable warriors. But Lucas fails to develop the forces behind this behavior. He eschews serious discussion of recruitment, training and, above all, ideology. He attempts to justify this by stressing the division's military role, but the Waffen-SS were not ``soldiers like all the rest.'' They were instead shock troops of an ideological war. By ignoring this dimension of his subject, Lucas gives us Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark. A history of this kind need not focus entirely on the atrocities committed by the Waffen-SS. But a courageous, fair-minded treatment of the role of Nazi ideology in shaping the 2nd SS Panzer Division as a military instrument would have done much to make the book something other than a one-sided, misleading apologia for its subject. Photos. (Apr.)