Read Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying Online
Authors: Sonke Neitzel,Harald Welzer
Luftwaffe airmen were confronted with different sorts of dangers in the various places and situations in which they were deployed. That emerges clearly from a conversation between two Luftwaffe lance corporals from October 1942. They discuss the toll that the enemy’s
numerical superiority could take on soldiers’ nerves:
B
ÜCHER
: There are 180 fighters in the W
ASH
alone. Here round
L
ONDON
there are at least 260 aircraft. If you came along with twenty aircraft you are sure to have two or three
night fighters making for you! I can tell you, you have to twist about like mad. No, it’s no joke flying here.
We had some crews back from
S
TALINGRAD
with “88’s.” We came back from S
TALINGRAD
, too, to help a bit over E
NGLAND
.… Night raid on C
AMBRIDGE
. They had nothing more to say when they got back again. Two had been
shot down. They didn’t say a word. They were glad to get away again.
W
EBER
: In R
USSIA
the flying is—
B
ÜCHER
: Easier, I tell you! We did some flying in R
USSIA
! That was fine. But here it’s just suicide.
301
Those remarks echoed the confession of a German airman in October 1940:
H
ANSEL
*: During the last six weeks we always had to be in readiness. My nerves are done for. When I was shot down, my nerves were in such a state that I could have howled.
302
Comrades whose planes had been shot down were one of the recurring topics in
Luftwaffe POWs’ conversations. But the speakers usually tried to avoid explicitly referring to death. The airman cited above who confessed his fear of being burned
alive was the exception to the rule.
Instead, POWs remained abstract when they talked about lost crews, omitting names and causes of death. Why? Talking about death was thought to bring bad luck, as a
bomber pilot named
Schumann revealed when relating the heavy losses suffered within his crew: “Our
morale was … low. As we were climbing into the aircraft the W/T operator said: ‘Get ready to die.’ I’ve always said it’s wrong to talk like that.”
303
When soldiers did discuss the psychological strain that resulted from extreme
stress and fears for one’s life, they often used comrades as surrogates for expressing what were likely their own emotions:
F
ICHTE
*: Six crews have been lost within three months. You can imagine what sort of effect that has on the crews which are
left. When they climb into their aircraft they all think: “Are we going to get back?”
304
These remarks were recorded in March 1943. That same month, a bomber observer named
Johann Maschel reported about a comrade whose nerves were completely shot after flying seventy-five missions:
M
ASCHEL
: I have been in the Staffel for a month and a half. We had night crews. From February 15th to March 24th, four crews were lost.
H
ÖHN
: And from January until February 15th you lost only two crews?
M
ASCHEL
: But perhaps they didn’t fly so often, only every third day. The weather was only favourable latterly—no fog or anything.
Altogether we had two old and six new crews and of the six new ones three have already crashed … and it won’t be long before the other new ones do, too—
H
ÖHN
: Surely more new crews are coming along?
M
ASCHEL
: Yes, that’s true, but they are all greenhorns, who have only made three or four operational flights. That’s the reason why I always used to fly a few times with the old crews, otherwise I should only have made four operational flights, too. And the new ones.… We had an N.C.O. crew which hadn’t got any aircraft and now … have already gone, three crews. Now it’s our turn.… We’ve got an old observer in the Staffel, who is still flying, he has been [in] seventy-five operations over P
OLAND
, he’s completely finished.
H
ÖHN
: How old is he?
M
ASCHEL
: I believe he is twenty-three or twenty-four and he’s lost his hair. He’s practically bald, like an old man. He’s hollow-cheeked, he looks terrible. He once showed me a picture of himself as a recruit, when he first joined up—he had a face full of character and looked so fresh. When you talk to him he is so nervous, he stutters and can’t get a word out.
H
ÖHN
: Why does he still fly operations?
M
ASCHEL
: He
has
to.
H
ÖHN
: But people must see that he’s done for.
M
ASCHEL
: Then they will probably tell him … to pull himself
together. The crew he used to have doesn’t fly any more. The pilot was … into a sanatorium—then he was allotted to the other crew.
305
Maschel, who had ejected from his burning
Dornier 217 over Scotland on March 25, 1943, was a member of
Luftwaffe Bomber Wing 2, one of the few units to continue flying
bombing raids against Britain after the summer of 1941. The wing suffered heavily in their attempt to take aerial warfare to enemy territory, losing 2,631 men, of whom 507 were killed in 1943 alone.
306
Statistically, the unit was exhausted, and the psychological consequences of such heavy losses, as this conversation shows, were dramatic. The members of the unit were all too aware that it was only a matter of time until they, too, were
shot down. The
Luftwaffe did not have the sort of rotation system used by the British and American
air forces, in which bomber crews were withdrawn from the front after flying twenty-five sorties.
To numb their growing fear as German prospects deteriorated during World War II, more and more soldiers turned to
alcohol, drinking “like mad.”
307
Staff Sergeant Nitsch of Bomber Wing 100 admitted in September 1943 that they also took
stimulants like
Pervitin: “We had terrific drinking bouts before each sortie. We had to get up our
courage. However drunk I am, I can always fly. The only thing is, if I get tired. But then I just took one of those tablets and was then as refreshed and cheerful as if I’d been drinking champagne. The things really have to be prescribed by a doctor but we always had some with us.”
308
Surprisingly, though, the protocols do not bear out the idea, postulated by historians, that German fighting
morale declined toward the end of the war.
309
Airmen who were shot down in 1945 do not talk any more frequently about being afraid to die than those captured earlier. Instead, they still proudly recount their triumphs and engage in specialist discussions about the technical details of their aircraft.
It was rare for them to reflect on the personal consequences of their deployment in battle. One of the few exceptions came in June 1942,
before
the Luftwaffe had suffered any major defeats:
L
ESSER
: I was a
decent boy when I joined the G.A.F., and they’ve made a swine of me. After being on the
Eastern Front, I was broken in body and soul; at home they had to comfort me.
310
In many respects, narratives about extreme personal burdens are the mirror image of the tales of adventure, conspicuous in their brutality, that highlighted the sporting side of aerial warfare. The former reveal that war did indeed encompass many emotions, including
stress, worry, and fear for one’s own life that POWs tended not to talk about, especially to one another. Just as captured soldiers could not bolster their
status among their peers by citing attempts at anti-Nazi resistance or expressions of
sympathy with the victims of executions or enemy prisoners, there was little to be gained from revealing one’s own vulnerability. Stories about “nerves being shot” needed to be told via a surrogate in order to be deemed acceptable. Communicatively, showing any sort of weakness seems to have been perceived as dangerous.
The causes of this communicative block are not solely psychological. The military frame of reference in general, as we can see from statements made by soldiers in the Iraq or
Afghanistan wars, does not admit conversations about death, dying, or present-tense fears. Today, we talk about soldiers’ suffering from
post-traumatic stress disorder, but this diagnosis did not exist during World War II. The military frame of reference left no room for physical weakness—to say nothing of psychological vulnerability. In this respect, no matter how thoroughly they were integrated into the
total group of their commando or unit, soldiers were psychologically alone. This helps us understand an otherwise cryptic remark made by a German POW in 1941:
B
ARTELS
: Those who are dead are better off than we are. We shall have to kick our heels around for God knows how long.
311
Among the infrequent statements that concern soldiers’ own
fears were tales about how their aircraft were shot down or their ships sunk. Whereas the
hunting tales were characterized by an absolute lack of differentiation vis-à-vis the victims and their
suffering, these narratives are extremely detailed. A German sailor, for instance, told of the
sinking of the armed merchant cruiser
MS
Penguin
in the
Indian Ocean in May 1941:
L
EHN
*: One (shell) ripped open one side of the deck. At the same instant one hit the bridge. One direct hit was sufficient—steel plates went flying over the ship. A large number of men jumped into the sea. The hatch covers were blown into the sea and afterwards bounced up again. An “Obermaat” jumped in front
of me into the water; when I jumped in myself, he was no longer there—drowned. Many of them were drowned like that.
B
LASCHKE
*: Did they all have life jackets on?
L
EHN
: All of them, yes. A good many, who were standing on the side deck jumped into the sea together, and then flying pieces of metal fell on them. While the ship was sinking, a shell from the first forward
gun went off, or perhaps it was another hit? Her (the C
ORNWALL’S
) gunnery was very bad. The shells were dropping 100 metres over and 100 metres short, but never scored a hit.
312
This is what war looked like from the losing perspective—although even such stories were told by survivors and thus transmitted only a part of the terror that must have been involved. Dead men, as the cliché goes, tell no tales.
Soldiers rarely spared any thoughts for those
wounded. This is one of the few exceptions from the protocols:
A
BLER
: What did they do when the first wounded men arrived from R
USSIA
; what did they do to those who were half crippled or had been shot in the head; what did they do to them? Do you know what they did to them in the
hospitals? They gave them something so that by the next day they were put to sleep; they did that in scores of cases, specially those coming back from F
RANCE
or from R
USSIA
.
K
UCH
: They went out as sound men to defend their fatherland, had bad luck, were shot in the head or something, became completely incapacitated, and (they said) they are eating the bread out of our mouths, they can’t do any more good, they will have to be looked after all their lives, men like that have no need to live—so that’s the end of them. They died on the quiet—died of wounds! A thing like that will be avenged; the English don’t need to avenge it, the Supreme Power will take vengeance.
313
This dialogue not only shows what the soldiers considered to be in the realm of the possible. It also hints at the fears which they maintained but could only be discussed in stories about the fates of others. This was apparently one way to express one’s feelings without talking about them directly.
War does not just consist of violence perpetrated and witnessed—the
shooting down of planes, the
gunning down of enemies,
rape,
plunder, and
mass murder. It also consists of violence suffered. Yet that category carries far less communicative weight among soldiers, and different individuals experience it in different ways. Life during wartime is differentiated and multifaceted. How soldiers experience war depends on factors like place, rank, time,
weaponry, and
camaraderie. Empirically speaking, what we conceive as the total experience of war can be broken down into a kaleidoscope of diverse, more or less happy or terrible experiences and actions. War is only a total experience insofar as the group, commando, or unit forms the social frame for what soldiers have to endure. That situation does not change in a
POW camp. The normal civilian world exists only as the subject of melancholic longing. Or as one soldier put it: “Life is cruel. When I think of my wife—!”
314
“I was in an SS quarters … [In a] room, there was an SS man lying on the bed, without his tunic but with his pants still on. Next to him, on the edge
of the bed, was a very pretty young woman, and I saw her stroke the SS man’s chin. I heard her say: “You’re not going to
shoot me, are you Franz?” The girl was still very young and spoke
German without an accent … I asked the SS man whether this girl … was really going to be taken out and shot. He answered that all
Jews were going to be shot. There were no exceptions … He also said something to the effect that it was a bitter reality. Sometimes they had the chance to hand over these girls to another execution commando, but mostly there wasn’t the time. They had to do it themselves.”
315
This is an excerpt from testimony in a postwar investigation of the crimes of the SS. It depicts how SS men exploited the situation of a war of extermination to commit acts of
sexual violence. Wehrmacht soldiers of all stripes were also interested in exploring various sexual opportunities.