Birds of Prey

At the heart of this book is the German soldier—the Landser—the common soldier. The motivation behind this book was to understand who they were and how they were—in effect, a socio-cultural military history. Scholars and writers have reflected on who they were, why they fought for Hitler, and remained faithful to the bitter end; but the soldiers themselves have remained aloof, distant, and impenetrable. During the war, British military intelligence examined German fighting traits through PoW interrogations.36 US Army intelligence carried the subject into a wider analysis of military methods and innovation.37 After the war, civil-military relations scholars applied the interrogation reports to a ‘cohesion and disintegration’ thesis (1947). The authors identified a ‘primary group’ concept, which claimed to hold the fighting or combat troops together. The article also cited an interrogation report of a captured German NCO about the political opinions of his men—the reply was instructive:

When you ask such a question, I realise well that you have no idea of what makes a soldier fight. The soldiers lie in their holes and are happy if they live through the next day. If we think at all, it’s about the end of the war and then home.38

The timeless words of veterans’ attitudes from all armies. The article was widely read but with a limited appeal. A general perception of the German soldier remained of the well trained and highly disciplined soldier. Nazism had socialised the soldiery, which tightly bound the myths of the Landser during the war. In the postwar age, Germans grappled with the uncomfortable realities of the war. In the 1950s, foreign observations, like that of The Scourge of the Swastika, were directed at German society struggling to come to terms with the war and Nazism.39 From the 1980s, scholarship began to follow an empirical/analytical path, while popular genres embellished uncontested German veterans’ anecdotes which has continued to this day.40 In 1983, a study compared the respective performances of the German Army and US Army during the war.41 Omer Bartov published his research of Hitler’s soldiers, which adapted the ‘primary group’ thesis to German fighting formations.42 I was fortunate to be placed in London at a time when several leading scholars discussed their ideas about common soldiers and war. Following a London University German history seminar in May 1997, there was a discussion with Bartov. He believed there was a shortfall of records, in particular the German NCOs, thereby reducing the prospect for serious research.43 In a subsequent conversation with Joanna Bourke, following a lecture at the Wiener Library, she argued men killing in war, stripped of military identity and political ideology, could be the basis for a comparative study.44 Bourke’s impressions closely matched the acts of men in Białowieźa. However, the resort to public killings by the Germans represented extreme exemplary violence, which placed them in a separate category of Second World War belligerents.45 This basic idea for comparative analysis, however, never entirely disappeared.

The Landser, as portrayed in this book, emerged from scholarly engagements with German colleagues. Following discussions with the late Professor Wilhem Diest and Professor Stig Förster at conferences, a different path of research was set emphasizing the interactions of social class.46 An impression drawn from conversations with German veterans about their impressions of ‘combat’, ‘fire-fights’, and their sense of gratification from memories of being soldiers.47 In lengthy discussions with Professor Jochen Böhler, about German soldiers and their private letters, a richer impression of the Landser emerged. The culmination of the research identified the Luftwaffe soldiers as either reservists (mostly officers with civilian professions) or conscripts (mostly ORs from the lower classes). The only professional soldiers were the senior NCOs (no more than six), and none of their papers has survived. If these men were judged by their careers, they cut a cross-section of Third Reich society: farmhands, industrial workers, clerks, low-skilled technicians, tradesmen, trainees, beat police, and junior civil servants. They were a rag-tag collection of men mustered into small units. They did not represent the cream of the crop, and even Göring held little sway over manpower selection at the point of recruitment. They were poorly organized and were turned into cannon-fodder—even the non de plume ‘the poor bloody infantry’ did not describe their circumstances. They were not particularly well-armed; their first weapons were captured enemy booty from the Great War. Neither unit colours and class identity, nor duty and discipline, explained their motivations. They performed occupation security as dedicated perpetrators, but then gave a reasonable account of themselves as German soldiers in retreat. The fog of war.

Terminology

Some issues remained unresolved. There was evidence of Polish collaboration with the Germans, especially in hunting and as forest guides. Identifying those persons was impossible as Germans reports did not include names. The problem of confused languages was an added complication. German soldiers, usually clerks in headquarters, compiled combat reports that struggled with Polish and Russian names. In Białowieźa, the occupation bureaucracy cast transliterations of Polish and Russian. Today, the only impact of this chaos is to cause confusion to researchers. An example: the Polish town of Hajnówka was translated by the Germans as Gainovka during the Great War, and Hainowka under the Nazis. The Germans translated Białowieźa as Bialowies in both world wars. Pruzhany in Belarus was Pruzhany when it came under Poland before 1939, and Pruzana under German occupation. The GIS maps adopted the German and narrative took the present-day Belarus form. The other prominent towns including Narewka, Topiło, Czolo, and Popielewo, Suchopol, Bialy Lasek, and Kamieniec-Litewski have remained unchanged. The Germans referred to Narewka Mala in their reports and that name is used throughtout the manuscript in accordance with the German records. Many villages disappeared and their names later replicated far beyond the original site. Others cannot be identified on any maps and the reader has to accept that some villages are now lost from record and memory.

Since the war, there have been several changes in the political boundaries of the region adding further confusion to place names. To identify such places, the original name is adopted, but in brackets the present name and nation: for example, Nassawen, East Prussia (Lessistoje: Kaliningrad Oblast). Any faults in translations are of course mine. Time was also a critical factor in this book, because a certain level of real-time has been restored to events. The 24 hours clock regulated military life, with the Luftwaffe reports adopting that time system, but which time zone were they working towards—Berlin or Moscow? The Białowieźa occupation was a confusion of time. The Germans imposed curfews between dusk and dawn, which the partisans and Jews ignored. Luftwaffe patrols rarely began before dawn or continued after dusk; the partisans attacked when there were no patrols. The atmospherics of darkness and lightness is better reflected by am/pm, which is adopted throughout the book.

In principle, the citations for the archival sources follow the original text. However, certain sources the shortand, the notes and the unclear dates led me to anglicize dates and document pages to ensure clarity. For example, this German citation include document number in the diary and the anglicized date: “BArch, RL 31/2, document 3, Wehrmacht-kommandantur Bialowies Tgb.Nr 686/42, An des Lw.Sicherung-Batl. z.b.V. Bialowies, 29 July 1942.” Words can have legal implications for academic research in Germany. In 1992, Christopher Browning accepted the restrictions of Federal German laws for data protection on the use of names of individuals. Those laws are still in force at the time of writing, and I also agreed to abide by the strict code of privacy. In an article about Białowieźa from 2010, I adopted pseudonyms.48 Since then, several German books have placed the names of many individuals that were assigned to serve in Białowieźa in the public domain. My research database is more extensive than those books, and so I adopted a mix of anonymity and openness. For those persons not yet published in the public domain and in the interests of anonymity, I have adopted the first name with the first letter of the surname followed by two **—for example, Rudolf F**. The names of men already published remain in full—for example, Walter Frevert. The ranks of those from criminal organisations, such as the Nazi Party and the SS, have been kept to the original.

1 Christopher Hale, Hitler’s Foreign Executioners: Europe’s Dirty Secret (Stroud, 2011).

2 Jeff Rutherford & Adrian E. Wettstein, The German Army on the Eastern Front, (Barnsley, 2018), p. 41. They refer to Auftragstaktik as ‘Mission Command’, a commander ordered a mission, arranged forces and set the goal but then left it to a junior officer or NCO to complete the mission as they saw fit.

3 Michel Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: The Power and Production of History, (Boston, 1997), p. 1.

4 Blood, Hitler’s Bandit Hunters, passim.

5 NARA, RG165 721A, Seventh Army Interrogation Center APO 758, Final Interrogation Report, Historical Section of the OKL, Ref. No. SAIC/FIR/51, 3 October 1945.

6 Philip W. Blood, ‘Bandenbekämpfung, Nazi occupation security in Eastern Europe and Soviet Russia, 1942–45,’ PhD diss. (unpublished), Cranfield University, 2001.

7 Hans-Ulrich Rudel, Stuka Pilot, (Exeter, 1952), p. 36.

8 NARA, RG319, Winiza (sic) massacres, September–October 1952, 66 Counter-Intelligence Corps Detachment, 17 October 1952.

9 Autorenkollektiv, Bilanz des Zweiten Weltkrieges – Erkenntnisse und Verpflichtungen für die Zukunft, (Oldenburg, 1953).

10 H. Boog, Die deutsche Luftwaffenführung 1935–1945, (Stuttgart, 1982); W. Murray (1996), The Luftwaffe 1933–45: Strategy for Defeat, (Washington DC, 1996); J.S. Corum, The Luftwaffe: Creating the Operational Air War, 1918–1940, (Kansas, 1997).

11 Omer Bartov, The Eastern Front, 1941–45, German Troops and the Barbarisation of Warfare, (New York, 1986), p. 3.

12 Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, (New York, 1998).

13 Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung (Hg.), Vernichtungskrieg. Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941 bis 1944, (Hamburg, 1995). Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung (Hg.), Verbrechen Der Wehrmacht: Dimensionen Des Vernichtungskrieges 1941–1944, (Hamburg, 2002).

14 Hannes Heer, Tote Zonen: Die Deutsche Wehrmacht An Der Ostfront, (Hamburg, 1999).

15 Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, (New York, 1985 revised).

16 Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, (New York, 1996).

17 Yitzak Arad, Shmuel Krakowski, Shmuel Spector, The Einsatzgruppen Report, (New York, 1989).

18 Father Patrick Desbois and Paul A. Shapiro, The Holocaust by Bullets: A Priest’s Journey to Uncover the Truth Behind the Murder of 1.5 million Jews, (New York, 2009).

19 Shmuel Krakowski, The War of the Doomed: Jewish Armed Resistance in Poland, 1942–1944, (London, 1984).

20 Christian Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde: Die deutsche Wirtschafts- und Vernichtungspolitik in Weissrussland 1941 bis 1944, (Hamburg, 1999).

21 Mark Mazower, Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe, (London, 2008), pp. 153–4.

22 William Sheridan Allen, The Nazi Seizure of Power: The Experience of a Single German Town 1922–1945, (London, 1984).

23 Browning, Ordinary Men, passim.

24 Eric Hobsbawm, On History, (London, 1997), p. 201.

25 Sigurdur Gylfi Magnusson and István M. Szijártó, What is Microhistory? Theory and Practice, (London, 2013), p. 164 and p. 166.

26 Claire Zalc and Tal Buttmann (ed), Microhistories of the Holocaust, (New York, 2017).

27 Tomasz Samojlik, Conservation and Hunting: Białowieźa Forest in the Time of Kings, (Białowieźa, 2005), Bogumila Jedrzejewska and Jan M. Wójcik, Essays on Mammals of Białowieźa Forest, (Białowieźa, 2004); see also Jan Walencik, The Last Primeval Forest in Lowland Europe, (Białowieźa, 2010).

28 Simon Winder, Germania: A Personal History of Germans Ancient and Modern, (London, 2010), p. 17.

29 Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory, (New York, 1995), pp. 75–120.

30 Barbara Ehrenreich, Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War, (London, 2011).

31 Simon Harrison, Dark Trophies: Hunting and the Enemy Body in Modern War, (New York, 2014).

32 See Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. A.M.Sheridan Smith, (New York, 1994).

33 Richard Holmes, Riding The Retreat: Mons to the Marne—1914 Revisited, (London, 2007), p. ix.

34 Peter Hennessey, The Junior Officers’ Reading Club: Killing Time and Fighting Wars, (London, 2010).

35 Thomas Kühne, Kameradschaft: Die Soldaten des nationalsozialistischen Krieges und das 20. Jahrhundert, (Göttingen, 2006). See also Kühne, Belonging and Genocide. Hitler’s Community 1918–1945, (New Haven, 2010) and ‘Kameradschaft – “das Beste im Leben des Mannes”, Die deutschen Soldaten des Zweiten Weltkrieges in erfahrungs- und geschlechtergeschichtlicher Perspektive,’ Geschichte und Gesellschaft 22 (1996) S.504–529, and Kühne, The Rise and Fall of Comradeship: Hitler’s Soldiers, Mass Bonding and Mass Violence in the Twentieth Century, (Cambridge, 2017).

36 TNA, WO 208/3608 CSDIC SIR 1329, Establishment of a Jgdko by Secret order of the Befehlshaber Südost, interrogation of UFF’S Kotschy and Boscmeinen, 13 December 1944. WO 208/3979, A Study of German Military Training, Combined Services, May 1946.

37 TNA, WO 208/3000, ‘The German Squad In Combat, Military’, Intelligence Service, US War Department, Washington DC, 25 January 1943. WO 208/3230, US Army Pamphlet 20-231, ‘Combat in Russian Forests and Swamps’, Department of the Army, July 1951. Military Intelligence Service, No.15, The German Rifle Company, (Washington DC, 1942), 1942, partial translation of Ludwig Queckbörner, Die Schützen-Kompanie: Ein handbuch für den Dienstunterricht, (Berlin, 1939).

38 Edward A. Shils and Morris Janowitz, ‘Cohesion and Disintegration in the Wehrmacht in World War II,’ The Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 12, No. 2 (Summer, 1948), pp. 280–315.

39 Lord Russell, of Liverpool, The Scourge of the Swastika, (London, 1954); Russell was a judge advocate officer and had worked on numerous war crimes trials.

40 For example, Max Hastings, Overlord, (London, 1986).

41 Martin van Creveld, Fighting Power: German and U.S. Army Performance 1939–1945, (London, 1983).

42 Bartov, Barbarisation, passim.

43 Institute of Historical Research: School of Advanced Study, University of London, German History seminar, Professor Omer Bartov, 21 May 1997.

44 The Wiener Holocaust Library, lecture ‘Intimate Killing’, 26 February 1999 presentation of Joanna Bourke, The Intimate History of Killing, (London, 1999).

45 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, (London, 1991).

46 Arbeitskreis Militärgeschichte e.V., Essen conference, August 1999.

47 In particular: Henry Metelmann (panzer—Guildford), Heinrich Schreiber (infantry-Aachen), Paul S** (Luftwaffe-Magdeburg), Frederich Baumann (infantry-Berlin) and Boso L**(Waffen-SS).

48 Philip W. Blood, ‘Securing Hitler’s Lebensraum: the Luftwaffe and the forest of Białowieźa 1942–4’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, (Oxford, 2010).

An Aide-Mémoire:
Reading Maps Like German soldiers

A.J.P. Taylor once wrote: ‘Every German frontier is artificial, therefore impermanent; that is the permanence of German geography.’1 The Luftwaffe’s mission in Białowieźa was part of a policy of erecting a permanent frontier on the eastern borderlands. Beyond this ‘new’ frontier lay Belorussia, Soviet Russia, and Ukraine, in effect Hitler’s Lebensraum empire. A permanent eastern frontier represented a geopolitical goal for the Nazis. Göring’s three-part plan to bring this about included racial population engineering in Białowieźa. The first and fundamental goal was to bring about the eradication of Eastern European Jewry. The second goal involved the reduction and deportation of Slavs, dubbed Untermensch (sub-humans), from the large group of forest settlements. In the third stage, Göring’s plan called for the settlement of ethnic Germans, mostly repatriated from the east. Hitler’s invasion of Soviet Russia complicated this plan, slicing through the former Pale of Settlement from Tsarist times, a vast territory that was still homeland to several millions of Jews.

The problem I had to overcome concerned the relationship between the Landser and the environment. How did 650 German soldiers effectively secure 256,000 hectares of Nazi-occupied Białowieźa? The command and control of space or terrain have always been a strategic concern of nations, colonisers, army commanders, and security forces. During the Iraq insurgency (2003–11), the American army was forced to adopt a ‘population-centric’ strategy.2 For this research, the first step was to recognise that the expansion of the Białowieźa Forest, by the Nazis, was the creation of a frontier security zone. I called this frontier security zone the Białowieźa arena, to reflect the full extent of Göring’s territorial ambitions in this region. This arena was secured on the basis of a ratio of one soldier per 1.52 square miles. How did the Germans fill the command and control of space, and was it effective? These questions challenged my research because they fundamentally alter our understanding of how Nazi occupation and colonisation was practised. In 2010, the research began the application of Historical GIS to solve these challenges and look afresh at how the Germans organised security. Consequently, this chapter is an aide-mémoire to the GIS maps that were generated and are included in full within the narrative.

I. The Nazis and military geography

Nazi aspirations were particularly focused on the frontier of East Prussia. Following an ultimatum to Lithuania, in March 1939, Memelland (today—Klaijpéda in Lithuania) was annexed, an area covering 3,000 square kilometres.3 After Memelland, there were more acquisitions of former Polish territory in the south-east, named Regierungsbezirk Zichenau. This added another 12,000 square kilometres. Further annexations increased the state’s landmass to 52,731 square kilometres (5,270,000 hectares), with a total population of 3,336,771. In July 1941, three forests became the anchors for further expansions. The Elchwald (Elk forest) designated Forstamt Tawellningken (due west of Tilsit and running north/south along the Kupisches Haff) was expanded to 100,000 hectares with localized annexations. The Kaiser’s former hunting estate at Rominten was increased to 200,000 hectares with Polish acquisitions. The third was Białowieźa forest, a trophy from the Nazi invasion of Soviet Russia in June 1941. Between 1915 and 1939, the approximate forest area was 160,000 hectares. Göring’s plan required an increase of 90,000 hectares, increasing the gross area of the forest to 256,000 hectares. One hectare is equivalent to Trafalgar Square (London) or the area of an American football stadium. Shenandoah National Park boasts 200,000 acres, which converts to 81,000 hectares. This brought the eastern forest plan to a gigantic total of 560,000 hectares. In forest mass alone, East Prussia’s 1933 borders had increased by twenty-five per cent.4 This occupation area, including Białowieźa, was designated Bezirk Bialystok and administered from Königsberg as domestic territory.

Where this expansionism was leading is not altogether clear, since Nazi dogma, strategic ambitions, and geopolitical annexations were all at odds. Erich Koch, as ruling Nazi Gauleiter of East Prussia, not only presided over all these expansions but was also gifted with the Reichskommissariat Ukraine. Koch was turned into an overlord of a racialized colonial frontier. In effect, East Prussia and Bezirk Bialystok symbolised the fulfilment of the eastern frontier of the Greater German Reich—virtually replicating the brief existence of New East Prussia (1795–1806). The annexation of Ukraine, however, represented a fulfilment of Hitler’s Lebensraum ambitions. Thus, Bezirk Bialystok was also a geopolitical land bridge between Nazi Lebensraum and an Imperial style Greater German Reich. The creation of a colossal forest wilderness, dubbed an Urwald (primitive forest), also had strategic and cultural implications. There was a belief in the defensive military qualities of forest wilderness, which will be discussed later. Culturally, the creation of a massive forest pointed to the recreation of the ancient forests of Germania. In parallel, there were biological-zoological ambitions to recreate long-extinct animals, like the Aurochs that once roamed the ancient forests. In effect, Zoologists had institutionalised the notion of the racialized game. These mindsets lay behind the German occupation’ transformation of Białowieźa into a wilderness arena, however, even this story was loaded with contradictions.

In the military context, the expansion of the eastern frontier produced significant security administration requirements of a colonising scale, rather than for a political annexation. The challenge for the military-security services was to meet the Nazi goal. To excel in military geography was the German officers’ mantra. Field Marshall Schlieffen’s staff rides, his battlefield tours, were lessons in reading maps to better understand the nature of battle.5 Göring’s fitness for command could be partly gauged by his map skills and understanding of the terrain. In the first instance, he had acquired knowledge as a user of military geography. As an officer cadet, he was schooled in terrain and geography; as an airman-observer, he was an expert of map interpretation; and as a squadron leader conducted his command through maps—but was he suited to command-control Białowieźa from the comfort of Rominten? In the Second World War, German military cartographers not only plotted the movements of armies and the positions of enemies, but also the distribution of populations and strategic raw materials. The search and acquisition of local information were paramount to military and civilian occupations. Consequently, the daily production of maps was essential to both warfare and racial engineering. By 1942–43, it is estimated were that the armies in the east were printing and distributing upwards of 25,000 maps per day.6

German military geography was not well documented to assist this research,7 but an indication of the German cartographical system can be located in other sources. In July 1945, British Army intelligence interrogated a senior NCO from the Wehrmacht’s military geography branch. His interrogators isolated the German administration of military geography as the focus of their questions. They learned that Lieutenant General Gerlach-Hans Hemmerich (1879–1969) was reactivated in October 1936 as Chief of Abteilung für Kriegskarten- und Vermessungswesen, the Mapping and Surveying department within the Chief of Staff of the Army (OKH). He remained chief of army mapping until April 1945. The department was designated MIL-GEO, with its head office in Berlin and with smaller satellite departments dispersed throughout the army. Maps remained its primary mission throughout the war.8 Following the outbreak of war, MIL-GEO’s offices and personnel expanded through the conscription of elderly professors and civilians with geographical expertise. The Berlin university system was particularly important in providing staff. Professors also recommended good students for staff posts, and the army designated them Heeresbeamter, a military-civil service rank. This process of conscription was later extended to geography schoolteachers and local government surveyors. Following Germany’s early conquests, the MIL-GEO established outposts in most occupied cities. The scope of their work extended to gathering information recorded on a card index system. The breadth of data collected included physical geography, economics, water sources, traffic routes, roads, and anything deemed essential to military operations. Once compiled into maps and reports, they were packaged in comprehensive volumes and distributed to the higher commands as topographical intelligence. In effect, each high command of the army received a collection of detailed maps and cartographical information to conduct operations.

The British interrogators also raised questions about (Lw) Lieutenant Otto Schulz-Kampfhenkel (1910–1989), chief of the Forschungstaffel zbV des OKW. They learned that Schultz-Kampfhenkel was a geographer and was Göring’s special advisor on political-military geography. Before the war, he founded Forschungsgruppe-Schultz-Kampfhenkel, a consultancy with a reputation for applying a ‘total approach’ to explorations and surveys. He led an anthropological-cartographical expedition to Amazonia (1935–37) in a joint venture organised by the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut für Biologie and Brazil’s National Museum.9 The expedition’s mission was to examine Urwald and understand its special qualities. During the war, his Forschungstaffel was turned into a small office, attached to the OKW, and called Sonderkommando Dora.10 Schulz-Kampfhenkel was also tasked with exploring and surveying parts of North Africa. As the chief exponent of Urwald, Schultz-Kampfhenkel advocated the incorporation of forests into the German national defence system. While there was a sacred relationship between the German hunt and Urwald, Schulz-Kampfhenkel’s ideas for a forested border in the east gained a powerful grip on Nazi homeland security. Schulz-Kampfhenkel’s ‘hidden-hand’ was behind Göring’s plans for Białowieźa. In effect, the forest was set to become part of Germany’s national boundaries, and with a central strategic purpose of defence.

Map 2: Bezirk Bialystok circa 1944.

The area within the black box approximates to the Białowieźa security arena discussed in this book.

Source: Wikicommons|Public Domain

The Luftwaffe’s Białowieźa operation’s map the Karte des Urwaldes Bialowies is held by the Bundesarchiv-Militarärchiv. The map has a 1:100,000 scale and was produced in digital format of six sections. When put together they filled a small lecture room. The map had a legend that included the positions of troops, strongpoints, command posts, and wireless posts. During the war, the map was arranged as a single item on a large map-table in the Tsar’s former hunting palace, that served as the battalion’s headquarters. Trying to reconstruct the battalion’s cartographical activity was impossible: trying to locate the position of companies and squads beyond the major towns was a ‘hit and miss’ exercise. A conundrum materialized that came from not being able to integrate the map with the documents. The operational administration and orderly filing of the Luftwaffe combat reports contrasted with the content of the reports, that implied random, haphazard, and chaotic killing. Actions were too far at odds with reporting. The actions in the combat reports did not reflect the known understanding of the German way of war or small-unit actions. The maps were the primary form of command and control for German operations, and were pertinent to the Białowieźa story. Reports without the maps were largely incoherent beyond killing, fighting, or deporting. If the behaviour of the Germans was deliberate, it could only be proven by unlocking the map codes. A neutral, and important, issue within the documents, was the geographical references buried within the combat reports. These references could not be disputed. Attempting to reconstruct cartographical movements with this map approved impractical with marginal results. This confirmed Hobsbawm’s dictum that grassroots history has its challenges: it ‘doesn’t produce quick results, but requires elaborate, time-consuming and expensive processing.’11