Read Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying Online
Authors: Sonke Neitzel,Harald Welzer
Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying (46 page)
Very few soldiers articulated any doubts at all about the war itself or Germany’s attacks upon its neighbors. Even a deserter like
Alfred Andersch, later a well-regarded German author, who abandoned his post near Rome on June 6, 1944, displayed a thoroughly positive attitude toward the Wehrmacht and military virtues.
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That shows how deeply even those men who had the courage to break free from the framework of the Wehrmacht had internalized the military value system. It was only as of spring 1945 that increasing numbers of soldiers dared to speak frankly and unashamedly about desertion:
T
EMPLIN
: All people can talk about these days is taking off, whether you can just run away and how best to do it. The afternoon we were taken captive, we were sitting in a basement waiting. There was a lot of shooting nearby, and at any moment, we
thought a shell will hit the basement. We were 15 men, and we were just sitting there, and no one dared to say: We’ll just sit here and wait to be taken prisoner. But the Americans simply wouldn’t come. And that evening some infantrymen showed up and said, “Come on, you can leave here now.” And we had to follow them. Otherwise we would have taken off. The infantry, the lieutenant were already gone by the afternoon. They blew up the bridge, but we just sat there. I wasn’t afraid at all.
F
RIEDL
: Yes of the
Germans, but not of the Americans. The Germans, that was a lot worse, the uncertainty. Everyone thinks differently about how he acts. Everyone thinks: “If only the time would come,” and then comes the officer, and you carry out orders just so. That’s what’s tragic about the situation.
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The official punishment for showing cowardice in the face of the enemy or
for desertion was, with very few exceptions, death, and German military tribunals were not shy about enforcing this rule. Some 20,000 German soldiers were given the death penalty—about the same number as in Imperial
Japan. By comparison, only 146 American soldiers were put to death, while it is estimated that 150,000 Soviet ones were
executed.
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The number of men executed as deserters increased as final defeat began to loom, rising dramatically in fall 1944. Up until that point, soldiers seemed to have accepted the death penalty as a perfectly normal punishment for desertion or even cowardice in the face of the enemy. In December 1943,
Lieutenant Hohlstein of
15th
Tank Division talked about his experiences two years previously in Russia. His bunkmate
First Sergeant von Bassus inquired about the conditions surrounding the winter of crisis before the gates to Moscow in 1941–42. Hohlstein pointed out that there had been deserters:
H
OHLSTEIN
: Yes. There are always some individual cases. People who had been in the fighting in R
USSIA
right from the beginning and had marched most of the time in the swamps and forests and mud and everything, who had been through that dreadful autumn and then experienced the cold and then the Russian break-through, of course became pessimistic and said: “It’s all up now, now, our number’s up.” In order to get to the rear more quickly, several men threw away their arms, their
rifles and so on, which is in itself not very serious, but they were condemned to death. They had to be, because it just had to be made clear to them that a thing like that simply couldn’t be done.
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Bassus was astonished that Wehrmacht soldiers had
deserted as early as 1941. Both men consoled themselves with the idea that these had been only isolated cases, and they agreed that deserters definitely deserved the death penalty.
The protocols contain numerous first- and secondhand descriptions in the period up until late 1944 of executions of soldiers who had supposedly shown cowardice or deserted. As was the case with reports about the executions of partisans, the tales rarely called forth astonishment, outrage, or negative reactions. Listeners were mostly interested in gory or unusual details. Otherwise, the stories were part of the everyday realities of war. Several generals tried to prove their toughness by describing how they lined up soldiers “against the wall” at the front. These officers were by no means fanatic Nazis. Lieutenant General
Erwin Menny reported about his assignment in Russia in 1943:
M
ENNY
: I had just taken over a “Division” there, which had newly come from N
ORWAY
, so that it was as yet fresh, and still good. The enemy broke through, simply because a few fellows had run away. Immediately I insisted on fetching the deputy judge advocate general from the Staff at the rear and brought him to the front—his knees were knocking together with fright—and we tried the men directly behind the place where the enemy had broken in and sentenced them immediately and shot them at once, on the spot. That went round like wildfire and the result was that the main defensive line was in our hands again at the end of three days. From that moment on there was quite good order in the “Division.” It acted as a deterrent, at any rate no one else ran away
unnecessarily
. Of course a thing like that is contagious, it is demoralizing when everyone runs away.
The only response from Menny’s interlocutor,
Schlieben, was a question: “Where was that?”
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Of the 17 million men who served in the Wehrmacht, around 80 percent of them were directly involved at some point in the fighting. Nonetheless, not every one of them had the same opportunity to demonstrate heroism, achieve a great victory, or be part of a battle. There were large numbers of radio operators, fuel coordinators, and airplane mechanics—an infantry division even included bakers, butchers, and medical orderlies, who never fired a shot. Their lives were fundamentally different from those of an infantry foot soldier, tank driver, or fighter pilot. Wehrmacht soldiers wanted one thing above all: to be able to do their jobs well, whatever they were. A mechanic who worked on submarines or a sapper in
Stalingrad wanted to perform as well as he had in civilian life as a bookkeeper, farmer, or carpenter. And the ethos of wanting to do good work wasn’t the only thing these men transferred to their military lives. They also maintained the same tendency as in any
organization to criticize poor working conditions or senseless procedures and orders.
In this sense,
Major
Alfred Gutknecht complained about administrative inefficiencies that hindered him in his function:
G
UTKNECHT
: It was the same on the
C
HANNEL
I
SLANDS
, that was enough to make anyone despair too; there was an incredible number of vehicles there—in the first place there were private cars, on the islands in any case. That’s beyond me, for the islands are only small. There weren’t so many lorries. Then each of them, the army, the GAF, the navy and the “Todt” Organisation, brought their lorries to the islands. So I suggested that they should be combined, that’s to say that armed forces transport pools should be formed, including the “Todt” Organisation. It was not possible, and even
Feldmarschall von R
UNDSTEDT
did not assert his authority.
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One spoke in much the same tones about fighting on the front—only there, inefficiency could be fatal for large numbers of soldiers. Major
Frank from the
5th Paratrooper Division, for instance, objected to the conditions under which his battalion had to attack during the
Ardennes Offensive:
F
RANK
: Right on the very first day of the offensive we stormed F
ÜRDEN
, it was a fortified village. We got to within 25 m. of the “Bunker,” were stopped there and my best “Kompaniechefs” were killed. I was stuck fast there for two and a half hours, five of my runners who returned were all shot. Then, for two and a half hours, always on my stomach, I worked my way back, by inches. What a show for young boys, making their way over a plain and without support of heavy weapons! I decided to wait for a forward observation officer. The “Regimentskommandeur” said: “Get going, take that village—there are only a few troops holding it.” “That’s madness,” I said to my “Regimentskommandeur.” “No, no, it’s an order. Get going, we must capture the village before evening.” I said: “We will too. The hour we lose waiting for the forward observation officer I will make up two and three times over afterwards.” Then there were assault guns available. I said to him: “At least give me the assault guns, to come in from the north and destroy their ‘Bunker.’ ” “No, no, no.” We took the village without any support and scarcely were we in it when our heavy guns began firing into it. I brought out one hundred and eighty-one PW altogether. I rounded up the last sixty and a salvo of mortar shells fell on them from one of our mortar “Brigaden,” right into the midst of the PW and guard troops. After twenty-two hours our own artillery was still firing into the village. Our liaison was a
complete
failure. We had tanks as well, they were
never
used in conjunction with the infantry, all the tanks were recklessly thrown away. On the one hand the tanks were thrown away, on the other hand the assault guns were thrown away, and the infantry too, but if there had been a little co-operation, if those one or two hours had been allowed each time to prepare it, then it would have been wonderful.
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Major Frank craved success. He wanted to conquer
Fürden as quickly and with as few losses as possible and then press on westward. Bad coordination, he felt, doomed those ambitions. Yet although he characterized the attack on Fürden as “insanity,” Frank followed orders
and carried it out. The alternative was simply unthinkable. And he described taking the village, “without any support,” and capturing 181 POWs as a personal triumph. He had
successfully carried out his mission, even if the Ardennes Offensive as a whole failed, with German forces suffering heavy casualties. The fault, however, wasn’t Frank’s, but rather that of the “mid-level leadership.” If Frank had been allowed to do things his way, everything would have been “wonderful.”
There are countless tales in the surveillance protocols in which speakers emphasized their own achievements within the overall context of a catastrophic defeat. They occur with roughly the same frequency with which stories about the company or the boss crop up in everyday peacetime conversations. Narratives of this sort do not just document the role played by the ideal of “doing a good job” in the perceptions and interpretations of historical actors. They also show that professionalism was a major factor in how soldiers positioned and saw themselves. Civilian and wartime jobs were structurally and psychologically similar. In their narratives, soldiers cited concrete results to reinforce the proposition that they did a good job. Indicators of military success were the number of POWs captured, as in Major Frank’s story, as well as tanks and planes destroyed, ships sunk, and enemies killed. The head of the
German navy’s coastal battery at
Longues-sur-Mer,
Lieutenant Herbert, waged a hopeless battle against the invading Allied armada on June 6 and 7, 1944. Just four days later, in a POW camp, he encountered Colonel
Hans Krug, who had led an army regiment in the same episode of the
war:
H
ERBERT
: I should like to report to you, sir, that I have sunk a cruiser.
K
RUG
: Hearty congratulations!
H
ERBERT
: I am extremely proud of having achieved that before being taken prisoner. I didn’t know it myself. But I have had it confirmed from three sides here.
K
RUG
: Has the “Batterie” been taken?
H
ERBERT
: Yes, the “Batterie” has gone. They shot up one gun after the other from the sea. But I still kept firing with one gun at the end … I had a splendid Flak “Zug” there. My Flak “Zug” shot down sixteen aircraft.
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In Herbert’s mind the success of having sunk a cruiser, of having kept on
fighting down to the last gun, and of having achieved sixteen hits
outweighed the fact that the Wehrmacht’s most modern shore battery had not been able to hinder the landing of
British troops. Indeed, the battery was destroyed by one British and one French cruiser. We have no way of reconstructing why Herbert thought he had sunk a cruiser. It is possible that the British spread misinformation that the lieutenant gladly used, or he may have just been lying in an attempt to impress his interlocutor. In reality, he had not even managed to hit either warship. In addition, we know from British sources that this shore battery surrendered on June 7, 1944, after barely putting up a
fight. Herbert’s claim to have fought to the last was pure fiction.
Through the protocols, the narrative tendency is to describe surrounding conditions as particularly dire in order to make one’s own deeds seem more significant. A
Lieutenant Simianer asserts that an irresponsible regiment commander had deployed his battalion without heavy artillery and sent them to battle British tanks in July 1944. Yet although his unit had only four bazookas, Simianer claimed that he and his men had destroyed four tanks, and he himself two—which was no doubt considered a notable achievement.
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The upshot of the story was that, although Simianer was burdened by an incompetent superior officer and insufficient equipment, he still did his duty with aplomb.
Stories of this sort served two functions: to vent frustration with the inadequacies of
military leadership and military material while raising one’s own
status as someone who had achieved
success despite
inauspicious circumstances. Such narratives are by no means unique to the military. Similar tendencies of perception and presentation can be found in all
work situations.
ECORATIONS
Medals and awards were even better evidence of one’s own achievements than wild adventure stories. As we have seen, Hitler and the leadership of all three branches of the armed forces created the most varied system of military honors among all the nations involved in World War II, establishing a
hierarchy of status within the Wehrmacht. Frontline fighters, whose medals and badges made them instantly recognizable as such, enjoyed the highest social prestige. This system of incentives, an extension of its predecessor from World War I, was firmly anchored in the frame of reference of soldiers of all disciplines
and ranks and had significant impact on what they perceived as
success. In soldiers’ conversations, people were often identified by the
medals they had been awarded, along the lines of: “Have you heard anything of
Oberst B
ACHERER
, the holder of the Knight’s Cross?”
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