Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying (35 page)

In early 1945, there was a further decline in
morale, as can be traced in the American surveillance protocols.
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And official army reports described units openly talking about being “sick and tired” of the war.
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The reluctant insight that the war was in fact lost also affected German soldiers’ behavior, particularly in the West, where many tried to get captured.

However, indications of a general decline in morale should not obscure the fact that there was a small group who believed in final victory right up until the very end. They tended to be higher officers or members of special units, for example, veteran
fighter pilots. On March 18, 1945, First Lieutenant
Hans Hartigs, who had already been imprisoned for two and a half months, asked newly arrived POW Lieutenant
Antonius Wöffen from
Luftwaffe Fighter Wing 27:

German soldiers’ interpretations of how the war was going generally followed the major milestones: the
Blitzkrieg victories, the Battle of
Stalingrad in 1942–43, and the Allied landing at Normandy in 1944. Yet interestingly, different branches of the military arrived at different interpretations. Put in simple terms: the Luftwaffe was more optimistic than the navy, while the army was, at least by 1944, the most pessimistic.

Luftwaffe pilots were a relatively small group of elite fighters who went to battle convinced of their superiority over the enemy. Despite all the difficulties of their mission, they led a pretty good life. Particularly in France, pilots enjoyed amenities foot soldiers could only dream of. Moreover, even if the qualitative and quantitative advantages of the Allies began to show as of 1943, Luftwaffe pilots could still celebrate individual triumphs in 1944–45. Fighter pilots still
shot down enemy aircraft, and crews aboard
bombers still dropped their deadly payloads on cities, ships, and troops. Navy men necessarily viewed the
war more skeptically because they had been fighting a far stronger enemy ever since September 1939.

The army soldiers who experienced the fighting at Normandy and the collapse of the front in France are the most disillusioned group in the protocols. Examples of individual successes, such as enemy soldiers killed or tanks destroyed, play hardly any role in their conversations. Instead their discussions are full of everyday experiences of powerlessness at facing a materially far better equipped foe. The overarching mood of futility is impossible to ignore.

Today, it may seem surprising that soldiers only dared to believe in the downfall of the Third Reich as of mid-1944. Why did it take them so long to arrive at this conclusion when, from a military perspective, the war had likely been decided by the end of 1941 at the latest? A particular form of perception is part of the explanation. Someone with a high-paying job rarely thinks about the structural problems of the global economy, and even when he does, he does so calmly. People who have a certain task in a war behave similarly. As long as the war continues, the task remains. For that reason, people only saw that
Germany was headed for defeat when they experienced it personally. Ahead of the disastrous summer of 1944, many German soldiers still had reason to hope. At that juncture, Germany still
occupied half of Europe, and Allied aerial bombardment was restricted to German cities. Thus, German troops in
Italy could maintain, with a certain justification, that they would stand their ground against the
Allies. The same was true, incidentally, for soldiers in
Army Group Center on the Eastern Front.

Without doubt, it would have been possible for German soldiers to view their own experiences and the war in general more critically. They could have asked themselves: what did it say about the war effort when Germany had to postpone the ground invasion of England, when the Wehrmacht failed to end the Russian campaign as promised in fall 1941, when the
United States with its huge economic potential entered the fray, or when German troops retreated ever closer to the homeland? Anyone who read
newspapers, listened to the
radio, watched the weekly newsreels, or simply discussed the situation with comrades, friends, and family, could have realized where things were headed without overtaxing his brain. Yet like most other people in most other
situations, German soldiers were strictly bound to the necessities of their immediate social environment. As long as major
historical events do not have direct personal consequences, they do not fundamentally change
perceptions,
interpretations, and
decisions. Human beings think in concrete, not in abstract, terms. What in retrospect may seem to be an increasingly obvious
reality remains irrelevant for an individual acting in real time, as long as he himself is not directly caught up in the looming disaster. There are notable exceptions,
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but most people only notice the coming of a flood when the first story of their house is already submerged. And even then, hopes persist that the water level will recede.

Germans lost hope in increments during World War II. If Germany was not able to achieve final victory, they told themselves, at least it could force an honorable peace settlement. Giving up every last bit of hope would have invalidated all the effort and emotions they had invested in the war with one fell swoop. People typically cling to hopes and instances of wishful thinking that, with the benefit of hindsight, appear completely irrational. Why do workers fight to save a company that has no realistic chance of surviving on the market? Because they have invested all their energy, dreams, hopes, time, and opportunities in it. And this characteristic is by no means restricted to “everyday people.” The higher their
status, the less people are able to acknowledge failure. General
Ludwig Crüwell put it this way. In November 1942, shortly after receiving word that the
6th Army was surrounded at Stalingrad, he retorted: “Are hundreds of thousands of men to be killed in this way again for nothing? That’s unthinkable.”
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Shortly before the end of World War II, Colonel
Martin Vetter, the commander of Paratrooper Regiment 17, and fighter pilot Anton
Wöffen from
Luftwaffe Fighter Wing 27 had a discussion about National Socialism. Both men had been captured a few days earlier in two separate towns in Germany. For them, the war was over, and it was time for a general evaluation:

This excerpt is an extraordinary document. Adolf Hitler—or the “leader,” as he is termed throughout the surveillance protocols—is simultaneously deemed Germany’s great benefactor and its grave-digger.

How could these two contradictory positions coexist? Were the POWs schizophrenic? Most certainly not. On the contrary, this short dialogue illustrates the diverse aspects of Germans’ faith in the Führer. Wöffen and Vetter’s conversation took place in March 1945, when it was obvious Germany was crashing to defeat. Doubts about Hitler’s military acumen had been growing since 1943. Nonetheless, despite Germans’ dissolving confidence in final victory, their belief in their Führer and the cult of personality surrounding Hitler remained intact for an astonishingly long time. Not even the imminent demise of the Third Reich could shake this quasi-religious faith. This may seem incomprehensible, but it can be explained if one considers what were perceived as Hitler’s enormous triumphs in Germany and abroad. That fed into the stylization of the Führer as a divine savior who negated the perceived injustice of the
Treaty of Versailles and allowed (non-Jewish) Germans to once again feel proud of their country.

On March 7, 1936, slightly more than three years after becoming German chancellor, Hitler held a speech in the
Reichstag in which he claimed that in the short time of his reign, Germany had regained its “
honor,” having “rediscovered a faith, overcome its greatest economic crisis and finally begun a new cultural renaissance.”
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In an
election twenty-two days later, the Nazi Party received 98.9 percent of the votes. Even though the polling was by no means democratic, there was no doubt, as historian
Ian Kershaw writes, that the majority of Germans stood behind their Führer. Even today, people who experienced Hitler recall the prewar years of Nazi Germany as a “good” or “pleasant” time. And the concrete, palpable achievements credited to Hitler were indeed impressive. Kershaw writes: “To most observers, both internal and external, after four years in power the Hitler regime looked stable, strong, and successful.”
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POW Vetter was referring to precisely these qualities. The fact that the Third Reich was collapsing did not automatically diminish
Hitler’s
status. He remained the primary figure with whom
Germany
identified precisely because they
distinguished
him from
National Socialism and the other party elites. Vetter articulated the entire emotional power carried by the Third Reich—everything non-Jewish Germans saw in the National Socialist project and were prepared to invest in it emotionally. Germans’
faith in their own greatness, which Hitler personified, seemed to pay dividends even up until the final days of World War II.

Vetter and Wöffen weren’t the only POWs to judge the historical achievement of the Führer independently of Germany’s defeat and collapse. SS Brigadeführer
Kurt Meyer, for instance, proclaimed:

This sort of emotional investment yielded fine returns—at least until the first deadly wartime winter in Russia in 1942. Feelings of national greatness based on the seeming and empirical triumphs of the Nazi regime were a fantastic payoff on the
emotions and energy Germans invested in the Third Reich. Author
W. G. Sebald wrote of such feelings “in August 1942, as the vanguard of the
6th Army reached the Volga River and more than a few Germans dreamed of settling after the war in the cherry gardens of an estate alongside the quietly flowing Don.”
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The emotional component involved in the proposition of a better future thanks to the National Socialist project explains why trust in the system and faith in the Führer grew continually until the system began to break down.

German national pride entailed faith in a rosy future and an assertion about Germans themselves, embodied by the Führer and the Nazi project, which united people to the extent that even those who initially had been critical or skeptical of the project were gradually integrated into the community. Psychologically, any misgivings about
having chosen the wrong leader and system would have meant devaluing oneself. Thus faith in the Führer persisted even as hopes for final victory disappeared. Moreover, we can observe the same dialectic principle of self-reinforcing conviction in Adolf Hitler himself. His initial succe
sses caused him to believe that he was indeed appointed by divine providence to lead Germany to the global dominance it was predestined to achieve by the laws of nature and race. Hitler, to follow
Kershaw, increasingly became the victim of the myth of his own significance, and Hitler’s
Volk
set such extraordinary
emotional stock in its faith in the Führer and itself that, as though on the commodities market, it had difficulty finding an exit strategy when its stock began plummeting. Just as the cult of personality surrounding the Führer exempted Hitler from any sort of criticism and transformed him into a superhuman savior, the German populace believed itself capable of anything under his leadership.

For that reason, the faith in the Führer that POWs articulated in the surveillance protocols was far greater than their trust in the system, and many of the prisoners drew the same sort of seemingly contradictory distinctions as Vetter and Wöffen.
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The notion that much of what went on in the government and particularly in the war happened behind the Führer’s back and against his will allowed soldiers to maintain their belief in Hitler even as the Nazi system eroded and the war was being lost. This perspective still persisted after the war. Even today, some three generations after 1945, every banal incident in the Führerbunker has the status of a historical event. Moreover, soldiers saw the personnel surrounding their leader—
Himmler,
Göring,
Goebbels,
Julius Ley, and
Martin Bormann—as much the same circle of sometimes ridiculous characters we do today. Himmler was perceived as a demonic figure, whose SS succeeded in gaining a fatal influence over the system and the war. Göring, mostly referred to as “Hermann,” was a familiar, reliable fellow who acted on his convictions and, in most soldiers’ eyes, had lamentably little clout with Hitler. Goebbels was alternately the “imaginative
politician” or “the cripple” with an impressive intellect. Ley was seen as a dilettante, bigoted, corrupt profiteer, while Bormann appeared as an inscrutable but definitely threatening gatekeeper controlling access to Hitler. This is more or less how all these men continue to be seen.