Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying (40 page)

All in all, in terms of soldiers’ mentality, we cannot say that the majority felt they were waging an “eliminatory” or a “racial” war. Above all, they were oriented around a military and wartime frame of reference in which ideology played only a subordinate role. But they also waged war within the frame of reference of their society, a National Socialist one, which in certain situations led them to act in radically inhumane fashion. Nonetheless, to perpetrate atrocities—and this is what is most disconcerting—soldiers did not need to be either racist or anti-Semitic.

Far more important than ideology for soldiers’ perceptions and
interpretations, and thus for their concrete
decisions and actions, was their military value system. It was firmly integrated into their frame of reference. Germany’s militaristic tradition had greatly eased the incorporation of millions of men into the Wehrmacht. They were already familiar with the system of norms that awaited them in the barracks. Although most of them were conscripts, they were more than
willing as a rule to adapt to the military framework and carry out their tasks as well as they could. Skilled carpenters, bookkeepers, and farmers wanted to become good tank drivers, gunners, and infantrymen. This meant learning the concrete basics of the military craft, perfecting the use of weapons, and becoming obedient, disciplined, and hard. They wanted to achieve victories, demonstrate
bravery and a willingness to sacrifice, and
fight down to the last bullet in case of defeat. Ever since the wars of 1864–71 had
unified the German nation, there had been a broad consensus in German society about what soldiers were supposed to be.

Germans’ sense of positive identification with the armed forces was reinforced both by Germany’s military triumphs early on in World War II and by internal structures within the Wehrmacht that promoted
meritocracy. All soldiers were given the same
food to eat, all were eligible for the same
medals, and all were encouraged to take on responsibility, if they demonstrated leadership qualities. The high degree to which soldiers identified with the military is evident in countless conversations among POWs. They loved talking about how their units were structured and armed, how various forms of organization had fared in combat, what sort of training they had received, how their weapons worked, and what sort of promotions and distinctions they had earned. The POWs presented themselves as masters of their trades, committed, proud of their units and weapons, and irritated when things did not go according to plan. The military was viewed as something self-evident, as a world to which one belonged and in which one had found one’s true place.

Nonetheless, soldiers accepted norms and values like
obedience, bravery, and devotion to duty so unquestioningly that they rarely mentioned them explicitly. The only ones who did so were
high-ranking officers who had reason to reflect on general questions about normative issues. Colonel General
Hans-Jürgen von Arnim, for instance, remarked: “A soldier who doesn’t stand firm is no soldier, and the more confused things are around him, the firmer he must stand—mentally.”
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Arnim was referring to the obedience and devotion to duty. These were all the more necessary in difficult times, as he himself had just experienced in the course of German defeat in
Africa. Colonel
Reimann, who was interned with Arnim in
Trent Park, described the Wehrmacht’s mental corset in even more vivid terms: “We would do what our superiors, who have one star more [say]. We would do what our superior officers ordered us.” Reimann added that it was a “racial peculiarity of the Germans, when they are soldiers, that they obey orders.”
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Whether or not Germans were particularly and excessively obedient, though, is an open question.

In any case, obedience was seen as a higher virtue than reflecting on whether
military actions made sense. Captain
Hartdegen, for example, said of his time in the staff of a tank training division in
Normandy in 1944: “We used to sit down together in the evening with the ‘General’ and his senior commanders, and we always used to say: ‘Has the F
ÜHRER
gone mad—these orders which he demands of us.’ We carried them out, just because we had been properly educated.”
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Irmfried Wilimzig, a critic of the Nazis who was interned at
Fort Hunt in the United States, concurred: “Orders are orders, that’s self-evident, especially at the front.”
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Although the Wehrmacht also tried to teach soldiers to think and act for themselves, obedience remained one of its most important norms. Refusing an order was considered an utterly unacceptable deviation, which threatened the very foundation of the army. The imperative to obey bound soldiers together less because they were afraid of being punished than because it was a firmly anchored rule in their frame of reference. Major
Leonhard Mayer told a bunkmate in a U.S. POW camp about the following incident at the
Battle of Cherbourg:

The smartest thing, Mayer asserts, would have been to flee in the face of a hopeless situation. But he had orders to hold his position for three days:

Major Mayer found himself in a moral dilemma, faced with what he calls a “thankless destiny.” He had to choose between following orders and trying to preserve the lives of comrades whom he had known for years and for whom he was responsible. He wanted to be a good commander who stood by his men and shared their suffering, and he realized that more and more of them were being killed because he as a commander refused to break off the one-sided battle. But disobeying orders was out of the question. Obedience and duty were his highest priority. This becomes especially evident in his remark that he would have behaved exactly the same had he been a member of the
Red Army. Only when his troop was down to the last thirty men, Mayer reports later on in the protocols, did he give up the fight. Otherwise, they would have all been simply slaughtered. It was impossible for him to violate orders until his unit had, for all practical purposes, ceased to exist and his own life was jeopardized. Technically speaking, though, he had not followed instructions down to the letter. For that reason, he thinks he could theoretically be brought up for court-martial.

We do not know the details of how Mayer’s unit really behaved in battle in June 1944. It’s possible that he also suffered pangs of conscience because in reality some of his men had deserted or surrendered long before he was down to his last thirty
soldiers, as he claimed. Nonetheless, his anecdote is an example of the immense importance that the officer corps, in particular, attached to obedience and duty. Only in extreme emergency situations, at the very last second, one could say, was it possible for them to break free from this reference frame. Interestingly,
politics had very little influence on the
attitudes of men like Mayer. There was no shortage of critics of the regime who complained about the misfortune the Nazis had brought down upon Germany and yet were outraged when infantrymen surrendered without any stiff resistance.
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In soldiers’ frames of reference,
bravery was just as universal a virtue as obedience and sense of duty. Bravery was the primary reflection of an individual’s performance insofar as most soldiers, unlike Luftwaffe pilots, could not measure themselves on the basis of enemies killed or tanks destroyed. Land warfare was the sum of many smaller
parts, and there were no concrete results of individual actions. Bravery was the only criterion. The standard against which infantrymen were judged was their ability to keep fighting and carry out their tasks under the most difficult circumstances.

For example, a
First Lieutenant Gayer reported about his deployment on the
Italian Front:

Gayer’s story contrasts the behavior of his own soldiers with that of the Italians, among whom even the
lieutenant
ran away. By contrast, the Germans, if Gayer is to be believed, held out for ten days before the unit was wiped out by murderous artillery fire. The image of soldiers courageously fighting on under the most difficult, deadly conditions recurs throughout the surveillance protocols.

Combat soldiers, especially those who had been part of elite units, told these sorts of stories most frequently. One of the most drastic narratives came from SS Standartenführer
Hans Lingner, one of the few high-ranking SS officers to be captured by the Allies during the war. He reported proudly about the deeds of an Untersturmführer in his division:

The norm of fighting bravely on instead of surrendering can also be identified among noncombatants from the Wehrmacht. For instance,
the POWs who complained most vehemently about the quick
German capitulation in
Paris on August 25, 1944, were army administrators.
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Bravery,
obedience, and devotion to duty were the major determining factors of how soldiers’ behavior was perceived,
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and this matrix of values remained stable over the entire course of the war. Individual biographical and political elements played almost no role whatsoever.
Military values were just as important to those with Ph.D.’s in philosophy as to people who had worked in banks or bakeries—and just as significant for committed Social Democrats as for passionate Nazis. As much as the 17 million members of the Wehrmacht may have differed from one another socially, they consistently shared the same military value system during their time of service.

There were, however, interesting nuances between various branches of the military and soldiers who used different sorts of weaponry. Conversations between
navy men emphasized bravery, pride, hardness, and discipline more than talk between airmen and army men did. First Lieutenant
Hans Jenisch reported about the loss of
U-32 in October 1940: “When our U-boat sank I heard a few shouts of ‘Heil Hitler,’ and some cheering in the distance, but some cried pitifully for help. Horrible! But there are always one or two who do that.”
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A private told in the same vein of the sinking of the blockade runner
MS
Alstertor
: “During the fight we had some prisoners down under one of the hatches, and a guard was posted outside the door with pistol drawn and commanded not to open the door till the order was given. The officer who was to give the order was killed. The ship keeled over, but the guard remained standing there at his post, and neither he nor any of the prisoners got out. That’s what’s called doing one’s duty!”
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