Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying (53 page)

Ideological conditioning helped create the sense that one was part of “the Führer’s elite troop” with a duty “to set a good example to the army.”
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The older generations of SS “Führer corps” made sure this spirit was transferred to the new recruits in 1943. Even if the armored grenadier divisions “Reichsführer SS” and “Götz von Berlichingen” were far from elite fighting units, their officers did succeed in molding an SS spirit renowned for its extreme brutality. The
“Reichsführer SS” division made its name with a number of
massacres in Italy,
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while “Götz von Berlichingen” left behind a trail of blood in France, when it executed 124 civilians in the village of
Maillé on August 25, 1944.
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The division was also responsible for numerous other atrocities, including the execution of
American POWs on the command of Oberscharführer
Fritz Swoboda.

The Waffen SS was a heterogeneous institution, encompassing both the Dachau commandant and later general
Theodor Eicke as well as the future Nobel Prize laureate author
Günter Grass. There is evidence of internal criticism, particularly from the lower ranks, as well
as occasional proof that SS officers refused to carry out particularly gruesome orders. Obersturm
führer
Woelcky was one example of the latter. Another was twenty-four-year-old Obersturmführer
Werner Schwarz, the company commander of the 2nd Company of the SS Panzergrenadierregiment “The Führer.” As a POW, he told an army first lieutenant:

Schwarz may, of course, have been trying to cover his tracks, but there are some indications that his story was true. In summer 1944, Schwarz’s division was indeed ordered to carry out reprisals against civilians. But the battalion commander passed that task on to another division, perhaps after Schwarz’s protest.
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Yet despite the presence of men like Woelcky and Schwarz, assuming their self-descriptions were accurate, the general tendency was that the core of
Waffen SS leaders and officers were more radical than their Wehrmacht counterparts. Another indication of this is the fact that they maintained
faith in ultimate
German victory far longer than their regular army equivalents. An example is
Untersturmführer Pflughaupt of the
“Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler” division, who was captured by the
British in fierce fighting around
Caen in July 1944. He was deeply impressed by British artillery superiority, yet believed nonetheless that “the F
ÜHRER
needs four to six weeks for mounting the reprisal
weapon, which can fire accurately, so as to eliminate the (enemy) artillery, and that we must just hold out that long, and then we could go over to the attack.”
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Although he himself had seen how an offensive by three SS divisions was stopped within a kilometer, he
could not imagine that the Führer would not have an ace up his sleeve. Given that he had experienced the massive
British counteroffensive
Goodwood, it is hard for us to see how he could conclude: “As soon as the English artillery is eliminated … the English retreat.”

By this point in the
war, no Wehrmacht officer was comparably optimistic.
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Indeed, of the eighty
Waffen SS officers interned in British and
American POW camps, none thought the war had been lost before February 1945. Nor did they make any remarks critical of Hitler or his regime. Even more remarkably, none of the two hundred SS men of all ranks who were interned ever made critical statements about Wehrmacht
war crimes, even though that sort of criticism hailed down in the other direction. It is hardly plausible that members of the SS knew nothing of Wehrmacht atrocities—the two wings of the military worked together far too closely for that. It appears that the frame of reference for what was considered normal, necessary, and encouraged differed from one group to the other. Within the Wehrmacht, there was a consciousness that certain acts were criminal, although that knowledge was not sufficient motivation for refusing to carry them out. There were a number of social and pragmatic reasons for continuing even when one realized standard boundaries were being transgressed. As a result Wehrmacht soldiers developed a number of social and personal strategies for reducing the resulting cognitive dissonance.

Within the core units of the Waffen SS, we find a unique amalgamation of
racism, callousness,
obedience,
willingness for personal sacrifice, and
brutality. Individually, all these elements can be identified within the Wehrmacht as well. It is easy to identify a rabid
anti-Semite such as
Gustav von Mauchenheim, the notorious commander of the
707th Infantry Division, who murdered some 19,000 civilians in the Soviet Union in 1941.
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One can also prove that individual Wehrmacht units, particularly
elite ones, were responsible for numerous atrocities. The
1st Mountain Division or the
4th Tank Division, for instance, executed large numbers of prisoners and civilians.
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Additionally, there were plenty of units that defended their positions down to the last man. But in the Wehrmacht, instances of radicalism never coalesced into a stable, coherent whole. Regular army units were more heterogeneous in their perceptions and actions than the Waffen SS. It was only isolated regiments and battalions in specific phases of the war that stood out as excessively brutal. The political spectrum within
the Wehrmacht was also broader than in the
Waffen SS. In the elite division “Grossdeutschland,” committed
Nazis like Major
Otto-Ernst Remer fought side by side with men like Colonel
Hyazinth von Stachwitz, apparently a critic of the Nazi system.

The units of the Wehrmacht that most closely resembled the Waffen SS were the paratrooper divisions.
⁸⁴²
They put on similar elitist airs, were distinguished from the rest of the Wehrmacht by their
uniforms, had numerous committed Nazis in their ranks, and tended toward radicalism.
⁸⁴³
Recalling his experiences in
Normandy in 1944,
Colonel Kessler described paratroopers as virtual barbarians whose excesses were covered up by the military brass: “The SS and the paratroops, too, behaved
like swine
. Back at
A
VRANCHES
they blew up the jewellers’ safes with hollow charges.”
⁸⁴⁴
Yet even paratroopers paled in comparison to the Waffen SS in terms of their use of violence against women and children, their belief in final German victory, and their willingness to keep fighting down to the last round of ammunition.
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Ultimately, in comparison to the Wehrmacht, the Waffen SS was not only comprised of different sorts of people with a manner and a frame of reference all their own. It also had a different relationship to the most extreme sorts of violence.

Before we turn to the question of how National Socialist the Wehrmacht’s war really was, let us summarize the key points of individual soldiers’ frame of reference. The
decisive factors in their
basal
orientation
—the way in which they
perceived and interpreted events—were the military value system and their immediate social environment. Differences of ideology, background, education, age, rank, and branch of service mattered little on this level. The exceptions were the differences just discussed between the Waffen SS and regular Wehrmacht soldiers.

Cultural ties
reinforce this conclusion. These include, above all, ties to a canon of military virtues, the accompanying official and perceived responsibilities, and the accolades one could receive for carrying out one’s duty. As we saw in our brief comparison of German,
Italian, and Japanese soldiers, each group had a specific national frame of reference. This helps explain why some German soldiers continued to fight even after they knew the war was lost.

On the other hand, soldiers in the concrete situations in which they had been deployed often
did not
know that the war was lost, or if they did, were unable to comprehend what defeat meant. Moreover, the issue of whether the war was still winnable was sometimes irrelevant to soldiers trying to carry out a specific task, be it holding their position, avoiding capture by the enemy, or saving the lives of subordinates. Knowledge of the larger context does not automatically rule out actions independent of that knowledge. As a general rule,
interpretations and decisions in concrete situations are usually made without reference to the “big picture.” Thus, it is not surprising that most of the soldiers whose voices we encounter in the surveillance protocols seem ignorant of the larger context.

Disorientation results when things run contrary to their
expectations,
for example, when enemy success stories dispelled Germans’ initial euphoria after their easy early triumphs and their premature fantasies about final victory, and their confidence began to erode. Yet
as we have seen, disappointments scarcely altered soldiers’ desire to perform their
military tasks. The futility of the endeavor as a whole did not change the frame of reference, in which individuals’
roles and responsibilities were defined. On the contrary, complaints about the inadequacy of the military leadership and the material at their disposal grew precisely because soldiers continued to
want
to do their jobs well.

As we observed in examples of extreme violence, sexual attacks, racist convictions, and quasi-religious
faith in the Führer,
temporally specific contexts of perception
influenced the perspective,
interpretations, and actions of soldiers. This is why, from today’s vantage point, soldiers related and listened to stories of the most extreme brutality with such nonchalance. Understanding the context also helps us understand why many German soldiers maintained such a seemingly irrational faith in the Führer so late in World War II.

Role models and the desire to set a good example
influenced soldiers’ behavior perhaps more than any other factors. Indeed, we almost have to conclude, tautologically, that “soldierliness,” as it was imagined and enacted in group practice, directed individual perceptions and actions. That is the reason foot soldiers subjected their superiors’ behavior to such close scrutiny and vice versa. The internalized canon of military virtues provided the matrix for a subtle, continual evaluation of one’s own behavior as well as that of comrades and enemies.

War-specific
interpretive
paradigms
—for example, the ideas that war is hell, casualties are inevitable, and different rules obtain in combat than in civilian life—are omnipresent. War was the arena in which soldiers existed, and it was from within this world that they perceived POWs, civilian populations, partisans, forced laborers, and everyone else they encountered. As we saw with the examples of mass
execution of supposed partisans, there was often no clear distinction between soldiers’ interpretations of their situation and their justifications for their actions. The violence of war opened up an interpretive and behavioral freedom that did not exist in civilian life. The power to kill and rape others, to be cruel or merciful, as well as all the new possibilities soldiers had, can be traced back to the opening of an arena of violence and its accompanying interpretive paradigms.

Official duties
were a decisive influence on soldiers’ lives and behavior, as we saw with deserters late in the war, who still felt the need to justify what from our perspective seems like a perfectly rational
decision. The same holds true of
social duties
. Frontline soldiers felt an almost exclusive sense of duty to their comrades and their superiors who formed their social units. What girlfriends, wives, or parents thought of what soldiers experienced and did was irrelevant. Soldiers’ immediate social environments compelled them to act in certain ways. Abstract concepts like a “global Jewish conspiracy,” “
Bolshevist promotion of genetic
inferiority,” or even the “National Socialist
Volk
community” played only an ancillary role. As a rule German soldiers were not “
ideological warriors.” Most of them were fully apolitical.

Personal dispositions
no doubt played a role in how soldiers saw, evaluated, and dealt with events, but the specific details are only visible in individual case studies, which are beyond the scope of this book. Initial studies of this sort suggest that soldiers’ perceptions were heterogeneous. This is true even of generals, who because of their long military service were often seen as a homogeneous group.
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Nonetheless, soldiers’ diverse and often diametrically opposed views of the war were rarely reflected in their actions. In war, soldiers tended to behave alike, regardless of whether they were Protestants or Catholics, Nazis or regime critics, Prussians or Austrians,
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university graduates or uneducated people.

In light of these findings, we should be even more skeptical of intentionalist explanations of Nazi atrocities. Studies devoted to collective biography may highlight motivations,
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but they also tend to exaggerate the formative role of ideology at the expense of actual practice. Group-specific practices are a much more enlightening source for explaining extremely violent behavior by soldiers than cognitive rationale and personal categories.