Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying (32 page)

The surveillance protocols document waves of hope and disappointment concerning the V missiles. For example,
First Lieutenant Kostelezky, who was taken prisoner while defending
Germany’s last foothold on the Cotentin Peninsula in Normandy, complained:

Since Nazi propagandists had no pictures of damage in London at their disposal, no one in Germany had much of an impression of the effect of the V1 missiles. While being transported to POW camps, which were all located near London, captured German soldiers all tried to get a look for themselves at their supposed retribution. Kostelezky is obviously disappointed at having seen so little destruction, and the generals who were interned at
Trent Park in July and August 1944 felt the same way.
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Still, the belief that the V missiles could change the course of the war took a while to die. Optimistic voices can be heard in the protocols until mid-July 1944,
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and fresh hopes soon arose concerning the
V2. Expressions of soldiers’ expectations for that missile were almost word-for-word repetitions of the hopes for its predecessor.
Lieutenant Colonel Ocker said in late August of that year: “It’s said, we’ll say, to have fifty times the effect of the ‘V1.’ ”
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Midshipman Mischke hoped to get transferred “to
Canada. I like life too much. If they use the V-2 and we are still here, then we’ll all be killed.”
⁴⁰⁴
Sergeant Kunz of Infantry Regiment 404 was also convinced:

Kunz added that he had witnessed the V2 being tested: “Where the thing has fallen the people were all as though pulverized. It is all as though frozen, that’s what it looks like, and if you touch the man, then he falls to pieces.” On the basis of his “observations,” Kunz concluded that the V2 functioned like a cold bomb that would freeze the enemy. And to back up his wishful thinking about the existence of a German doomsday weapon, Kunz cited a speech by Hitler: “If all should fail, then the most terrible weapon humanity could ever devise will be used. May God forgive me if I use that weapon.”
⁴⁰⁶

Kunz had been captured on October 22, 1944, in fighting around the encircled western German city of
Aachen. The V2 had been in use since September 8, but he seemed unaware of this fact. The hopes Germans placed in the V2 remained unfulfilled, and for that reason, even its propaganda value was scant. The surveillance protocols contain very few mentions of the V2 being used.

Most of the soldiers who spoke of retribution weapons did so under the spell of not just a quasi-religious belief in Hitler but also a comparable faith in technology. They did not doubt for a second that Germany would succeed in developing a super-weapon to turn the tide of the war. Hopes of achieving victory against all odds were directly connected to the conviction that German engineers would make the decisive breakthrough. It was rare for POWs to utter doubts that this would be the case. General
Wilhelm von Thoma was one of the few
Trent Park inmates who engaged in skeptical reflections: “Let a secret weapon make its appearance; it may destroy a few
houses, but that’s all—we’ve got nothing else.”
⁴⁰⁷
A bit later in time, responding to a statement by Göring that retribution was nigh, Thoma was completely dismissive. “A couple of snorters will come across to E
NGLAND
,” he said, and that would be all.
⁴⁰⁸

Just as German soldiers failed to link technology with the way the war was actually progressing, they also largely ignored its deadly character. The concrete effects of weaponry were rarely mentioned. With pilots and crew members, the talk was more about
shooting down planes and
sinking ships, and targeting enemy “material.”
⁴⁰⁹
“I saw myself how my Staffelkapitän,
Hauptmann S
UHR
, brought down a
four-engine aircraft with one shot of his 3cm over
L
INZ
,” reported
Sergeant Gromoll. “He targeted from the front. That’s the craziest thing I ever saw.”
⁴¹⁰
A remark by
First Lieutenant Schlösser is nearly identical: “A 3 cm cannon firing an HE shell. If they hit four-engine aircraft they destroy it completely. There’s nothing left.”
⁴¹¹
The airmen’s enthusiasm for new weaponry completely blotted out the fact that ten
American soldiers lost their lives in the attack. That was typical of the POWs’ general disinterest in the lethal consequences of their actions.

In similar fashion, a
bombardier from a
Ju 88 proudly described sighting his target through a hole in the clouds over
Bristol, England:

The more destructive the weapon, the more enthusiastically POWs talked about it. Sergeant
Willi Zastrau, a radio operator aboard a
bomber, for instance, emphasized the advantages of the new explosive used in 1,200-kilogram bombs: “Triolin is the best explosive in the world.”
⁴¹³
Other crew members were likewise enthusiastic about the latest bombs. “I tell you, those are something special,”
Bomber Gunner Clausz of Bomber Wing 76 raved: “We completely wrecked Bari with them. When they fire into the water just beside a ship, then it goes up, like a fountain, like fireworks! We [destroyed] seventeen ships there, ammunition ships, how they blew up! We were at a height of 2000 m, but I watched it from my under fuselage tunnel, the flames were so high, we passed just over them.”
⁴¹⁴

High-tech weapons weren’t the only ones that could produce results. Low-tech, dirty weapons also had their effect. A bomber pilot praised the new paths being blazed in bomb development:

The
technology with which Luftwaffe and navy soldiers waged war decided whether and how they could carry out their assigned tasks. For that reason, technology was at the center of their own sense of self and exercised tremendous fascination.

If the technology was efficient, then soldiers had fun carrying out their missions. If equipment wasn’t available or was suboptimal, operations not only stood little chance of success, but were far more risky. The soldiers’ obsession with technology had dominated their everyday experience of war, and it remained one of their primary topics of conversation as POWs. Yet as incessantly as the men discussed questions of horsepower, cubic capacity, and radio frequencies, all the more rarely did they ask questions about the overall context. Specialists tend to apply their instrumental reasoning to the precise situation and task they have been given. The topic of military technology once again manifested the deep connection between modern industrial labor and the labor of war. World War II was a war of technicians and engineers, pilots, radio operators, and mechanics. The laborers in this war used what they saw as grand and fascinating tools. Technology was an arena men could both talk about and agree on for hours on end.

Soldiers’
military value systems, their faith in technology, and their immediate social environment were the main factors forming their wartime
frame of reference. Yet this does not mean they were completely unaffected by daily events in combat. Even when individual soldiers were not directly involved in them, victories and defeat were constantly present, be it via newspapers, radio, and tales told by their comrades, and soldiers paid keen attention to reports of distant battles, if only because they themselves could always be transferred. Nonetheless, their own direct, personal experiences of war heavily influenced how they interpreted the pivotal events of the conflict. This section will examine how soldiers saw the general context of what they were doing against the backdrop of their frame of reference.

The militarization of the
German people and in particular German soldiers was one of the most important goals of both the Nazi and Wehrmacht leaderships and went hand in hand with rearmament. Yet notwithstanding their considerable success in instilling the idea that Germany was in dire need of defense from external threats,
⁴¹⁷
few Germans reacted with unrestrained enthusiasm at the
start of World War II in September 1939. It took the quick victories over
Poland,
Norway, and especially France, which no one expected to be vanquished so easily, to unleash true euphoria. The intoxication of victory was then consolidated by German successes in
Africa and the
Balkans.

The mood at this point was especially positive in the Luftwaffe. Conversations between POWs recorded in summer 1940 are dominated
by
expectations that
German troops would soon land in England and free them from captivity. Nearly everyone was certain that ultimate German
victory was imminent: “In a month or 6 weeks the war here will be at an end. I definitely believe that the attack will take place this week, or on Monday next.”
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“I believe the war is already won,” said another POW,
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while a third added, “The chances look very rosy that it won’t last long.”
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One Luftwaffe first lieutenant, who’d been shot down early on in the conflict, even started discussing how, after the German conquest of England, he’d like to have some new suits made by fine English tailors.
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Even as German losses mounted, the
Battle of Britain was lost, and German invasion plans had to be postponed, most captured German pilots remained obsessed by visions of their own country’s might. In spring 1941, political and military expectations were still very positive, and Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union did nothing to change the mood. On the contrary, most POWs expected a quick German victory on the Eastern Front, after which a somewhat more intense struggle would bring ultimate victory in the West as well. In 1941–42, very few flying units were transferred back and forth between the two fronts, so the numbers of airmen in
British POW camps who had served in the East was very small. The surveillance protocols represent an external view of that theater of war. The Wehrmacht’s massive losses in the Soviet Union, German troops’ complete exhaustion in fall 1942, and the murderous following winter are hardly reflected in POWs’ conversations.
⁴²²

Strategic expectations thus remained constant in 1942, as a statement by Sergeant
Willi Zastrau, a W/T operator in Wehrmacht Bomber Wing 2, makes clear:

Only in 1944, when masses of German infantrymen were captured in Italy and France, do the protocols provide valid information about expectations among German army soldiers. A few army troops had been captured as early as 1940, but their numbers were too small to be representative of a specific view of the war. The views that
were recorded on tape basically conform to the picture researchers have reconstructed from other sources. Unlike in the Luftwaffe, the euphoria produced in the army by early military triumphs was seriously shaken in 1941–42. Nonetheless, in February 1942, the
German military leadership believed that “the dip in troop
morale” had been overcome. Examinations of letters sent home had suggested soldiers believed they had “gotten the job done.”
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Surviving the first hardships on the Eastern Front had apparently created a new
confidence among “Eastern fighters,” who continued to believe in their own innate superiority to their Soviet enemies.
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During the Blitzkrieg phase, soldiers conflated larger events in the
war with their own personal experiences to produce a rosy vision of the future. A decisive factor here for both Luftwaffe and German army men was their
faith in their superiority to enemies on all fronts. Setbacks and even being taken as a POW could not shake this fundamental confidence.