Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying (38 page)

Higher-ranking officers, for example, Major General
Gerhard Bassenge, were particularly concerned about being held responsible for the things that had been carried out with or without Hitler’s knowledge:

Soldiers’ disappointment that the future was almost certainly not going to be as bright as had been promised revealed the emotional
significance of the National Socialist project and their faith in the Führer. Colonel
Reimann, for instance, was clearly frustrated:

After the
6th Army capitulated in Stalingrad in February 1943, doubts began to multiply as to whether final victory was still possible. Even if the majority of soldiers did not point the finger of blame at Hitler, the number of statements critical of him grew. “I must admit that A
DOLF
isn’t all he should be, for instance, his treatment of the Jews isn’t right,” a
Private First Class Harnisch complained.
⁵²¹
Colonel
Helmuth Rohrbach even believed: “Apparently the F
ÜHRER
doesn’t listen to our generals, it’s lamentable. One man can’t be a politician, a statesman and a general at the same time. That’s madness.”
⁵²²

In 1944,
Sergeant Doetsch and First Sergeant Bräutigam arrived at a remarkable conclusion considering their socialization as young fighter pilots:

Of course, most of the critical remarks about Hitler contained remnants of personal sympathy and traces of
faith. For instance, a sharpshooter named
Caesar pondered what he would do if he were to encounter the leaders of his country:

Two recent master’s theses that have analyzed the statements of POWs of all ranks interned at
Fort Hunt in the United States have come to another conclusion.
⁵²⁵
Faith in the Führer tended to recede drastically among the lower ranks after Normandy while generally being maintained further up the
hierarchy. This is another indication that the personal
identification and
emotional investment stabilized people’s trust in Hitler. But these indices need to be pursued. The reverse and difficult-to-grasp side of faith in the Führer is what does
not
occur in the POWs’ conversations: political reflection about what went wrong. In fact, the
depoliticization of German soldiers would seem to be one of National Socialism’s most lasting achievements.

Soldiers tended to see what was happening as not their affair, but the business of their omnipotent Führer and his circle of helpers, whom the soldiers saw alternately as philistine, corrupt, incompetent, or criminal. They did not, in the main, have a political opinion on the National Socialist state, the dictatorship, or the persecution of Jews. The criticism they put forth was aimed at the personal traits of Nazi bigwigs and occasionally at individual policies. But it was very rare for the POWs to engage in political debates about decisions or perspectives. Clear differences in position or opinion seldom emerge. This is one of the central results of totalitarian rule. It creates a mental
lack of alternatives and makes people fully
dependent on the charismatic leader, to whom they stay true even when their mutual downfall is inevitable. As the protocols reveal especially with respect to higher-ranking officers, politics is replaced by faith. And since
faith in the Führer was simultaneously a faith of Germans in themselves, every threat to positive images of Hitler was also a threat to the project in which people had invested so much energy and emotion. The fear was that this project would turn out to be utterly worthless.
⁵²⁶

The laconic nature of the above exchange is what makes it so remarkable. While Bassus looks for reasons for the destruction of European Jews, Lieutenant Thöne repeatedly points out that the phenomenon needs no justification. Hatred is enough of a spark, without any further motivation such as the alleged danger represented by Jews or their purported hatred for
Germans. Even more astonishing is Thöne’s assertion that German hatred is not a reason, but a sheer fact. It’s hard to imagine a clearer formulation of what
autotelic violence is, and it points up one finding about the deep psychological effect of National Socialist ideology on the soldiers subjected to surveillance. Ideology was not prominent among the things that occupied soldiers’ minds. Many soldiers may have been perfectly willing to use violence to solve the alleged “
Jewish question,” but an astonishing number of them were explicitly against it. But for all of them, the existence of the question was a given, regardless of whether they as individuals thought the Nazis’ anti-Jewish policies were good or bad, right or wrong.

In April 1943, after reading the nineteenth-century German poet
Heinrich Heine,
First
Lieutenant Fried remarked: “They say that the Jews weren’t able to master the
German language in literature and so on. But the ‘
Journey through the Harz’ is marvellous.”
⁵²⁸

A few months earlier a low-level officer named
Wehner* declared: “When I meet a Jew I could shoot him out of hand. The number
of Jews we killed in
P
OLAND
! We did them in mercilessly.”
⁵²⁹

Both statements were made around roughly the same time by two members of the same branch of the military, the Luftwaffe. So is it fair to say that Fried represented humanistic Germany whereas Wehner was an
anti-Semitic
ideological warrior? Our material provides no evidence that enjoying Heine’s “Journey Through the Harz” was any indication of whether or not someone was capable of murdering Jews. Conversely, of course, we can conclude that Wehner was fanatic enough to refuse to read books by Jewish authors (his other statements confirm this). The juxtaposition of these two excerpts indicated the spectrum of opinion expressed in the protocols about
Jews and
racism in general. On the one hand, the transcripts contain praise for Heine and Jewish doctors, chemists, and physicists as well as
emotional rejections of the
Holocaust and the persecution of Jews in general.
⁵³⁰
On the other, the protocols are also full of theories about a global Jewish conspiracy, including “Jewified” England and America, as well as tales of glee after killing Jews.
⁵³¹
In short the transcripts contain just about everything under the sun. Moreover, contradictory opinions were not only expressed by two or more POWs in dialogue. As we saw in the section on the Holocaust, single individuals often used seeming mutually exclusive arguments and expressed diametrically opposed perspectives. “The Nazis are worse swine than the Jews,”
⁵³²
remarked one POW, while another opined, “The
Japanese are the Jews of the east.”
⁵³³

Some statements indicate how far the anti-Semitic imagination was given free rein:

Other utterances were nothing short of absurd: “I am the ping-pong champion of Western
Germany. But I am out of practice. I gave up the game after a typical Jew-boy—sixteen years old—had beaten me. Then I said to myself: ‘That is certainly not real sport!’ ”
⁵³⁵
Conversations about racial issues or “the Jews” have the same basic structure as other exchanges. Remarks are interjected, and stories told, before the POWs change the subject. Such conversations aimed primarily at establishing consensus and did not admit of one side insisting on a point, doggedly asking questions, or arguing. In the main, a unity of perspective and
political evaluation was quickly established, and in any case soldiers did not see topics dealing with Jews as particularly important. If the topics were broached, soldiers usually had an opinion, but no one seems to have been particularly eager to bring them up.

That impression is confirmed by a detailed analysis carried out by
Alexander Hoerkens, who examined the role of ideology in two thousand pages of transcripts from the protocols. He determined that less than one fifth of the excerpts concerned political, racial, or ideological topics.
⁵³⁶
The everyday routine of the war was far more important to POWs. With a few notable exceptions, the “
Jewish” topic was just another subject of conversation, and it was treated as such by both hard-core anti-Semites and enthusiastic exterminators and those who were generally repulsed by Nazi crimes. When the talk did turn to the mass executions, the conversation was often about fears of reprisals: “Don’t you think that the
shooting of all those Jews, of women and children, will be avenged? My brother, who is an infantryman, has told me a lot about how they were pushed into the
graves before they were really dead.”
⁵³⁷

Just as there were some committed National Socialists who thought the persecution
of Jews was a historical mistake, there were also clear anti-Nazis who thought anti-Semitism was the party’s only reasonable policy. Two soldiers, for instance, got quite hot under the collar when discussing “the Nazis”: