Elite Units of the Third Reich: German Special Forces in World War II

by Matthew Hughes

-- Includes training techniques of Third Reich Special Forces.
-- Includes previously unseen photographs from Nazi archives.
-- Analyses Nazi Special Forces battle tactics.
-- Includes a chapter on the Condor Legion in Spain.
-- The exploits of Otto Skorzeny covered in full.The German Army of World War II has been recognized as one of the greatest fighting formations in military history, ranking alongside Caesar's Legions and Napoleon's Grande Armee. Elite units of the Third Reich is an analysis of German specialist units during World War II, formations such as the Brandenburgers, specially trained commandos who infiltrated behind enemy lines dressed in civilian clothes or uniforms of the enemy, and who seized important river crossings and disabled explosive charges placed on bridges and railways.

Illustrated throughout by photographs showing the personnel of these units in training and in action, Elite Units of the Third Reich also studies the specialist formations that endeavored to stave of military defeat during the last two years of the war, describing the composition of these units, their tactics and hardware. A whole chapter is devoted to the activities of perhaps the most famous Nazi commando: Otto Skorzeny, nicknamed "Scarface," the man who rescued the Italian dictator Mussolini in 1943. Elite Units of the Third Reich is an illuminating study of the crack formations of Hitler's military machine.

192 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 2002

About the author

Dr Matthew Hughes is Professor of Military History at Brunel University London, in England.

Hughes studied at the School of Oriental and African Studies and at the London School of Economics. He completed his ESRC-funded PhD in 1995 under the supervision of Professors Brian Bond and Brian Holden Reid in the Department of War Studies, King’s College London on the strategy surrounding the British campaign in Palestine in the First World War in Palestine. He has a PGCE in History from Cardiff University. After working as an intern with the International Institute for Strategic Studies, Professor Hughes lectured at the universities of Northampton and Salford before coming to Brunel University in 2005. Professor Hughes has been a British Academy funded visiting fellow at the American University in Cairo, the American University in Beirut, and at Tel Aviv University. He spent two years as the Marine Corps University Foundation-funded Maj-Gen Matthew C. Horner Distinguished Chair in Military Theory at the US Marine Corps University, Quantico, 2008-10. His latest monograph on British counter-insurgency in Palestine in the 1930s entitled Britain's Pacification of Palestine: the British Army, the Colonial State, and the Arab Revolt, 1936-1939 (2019) was published with Cambridge University Press. He was the editor of the Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research (2004-8). He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a former Chair of Council of the Army Records Society (2014-18), and is a judge for the Society for Army Historical Research's annual Templer Medal prize (2003-4, 2007-8, 2018-). He sits on the editorial boards of the British Journal of Military History and Middle Eastern Studies and is a judge for the latter's annual Elie Kedourie prize. He is currently an external examiner for the Higher Diploma awarded by Maynooth University to the Junior Command and Staff Course with the Military College, Irish Defence Forces, and a Visiting Lecturer and examiner at the University of Buckingham.