Philip W. Blood

Philip W. Blood is a historian of war whose work fuses military history, civil-military relations, occupation, and security studies to reveal how conventional tactics evolve into atrocity and how violence shapes collective identity. In Hitler’s Bandit Hunters: The SS and the Nazi Occupation of Europe (2006), he examined how SS security doctrines (Bandenbekämpfung) were adapted to control occupied territories. His later book, Birds of Prey: Hitler’s Luftwaffe, Ordinary Soldiers, and the Holocaust in Poland (2021), used GIS mapping of Luftwaffe war diaries to show how ordinary troops enforced the occupation of the Białowieża Forest. In War Comes to Aachen (2023), he reinterpreted RAF bombing as a form of cultural violence that complicated the Allied occupation of the city. He is currently writing a book on how colonialism influenced Imperial Germany’s occupation of Poland during the First World War.