Aschmann, Birgit/Behrends, Jan C./Neitzel, Sönke/Pschicholz, Christin (Hrsg.) "When you catch one kill him slowly".

Have specific cultures developed in military units, societies, states or nations that have led to excessive military violence? The articles in this volume examine how specific military cultures of violence developed in the regular armies of the major European powers from the early modern period to the end of the Second World War. They also shed light on the role these cultures played in the use of excessive violence by soldiers. The focus of the volume is on physical violence, which was considered illegitimate by contemporaries in both war and peace. This allows both the standards of legitimacy and illegitimacy of violence and the conditions for their change to be demonstrated. The surprising result is that, despite the specificity of military cultures of violence in European armies in different eras, these had less impact on excessive violence than previously assumed in historical studies.