Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying (36 page)

As the
psychological warfare specialists who interviewed German POWs in the 1940s discovered, this basic constellation of Nazi leadership figures with its
stereotypes and images already existed before the
war was lost and set the tone for how
Goebbels and company were viewed after the war.
⁴⁸⁴
It is astonishing, when one reads the surveillance protocols, how constant the clichés about the other leading Nazis remained before and after
German military defeat.

Not surprisingly, in quantitative terms, the person POWs talked about most often in the protocols was Hitler, followed by
Göring,
Himmler, and Goebbels, and then at some remove
Ley,
Baldur von Schirach,
Walter von Brauchitsch, and others. In this regard, the protocols reflected the amount of popular attention the individual leadership figures commanded during the Third Reich. Moreover, faith in the Führer is a running trope in the POWs’ conversations. “There is only one H
ITLER
and whatever he wants will be done,” pledged one soldier,
⁴⁸⁵
while another intoned, “If H
ITLER
no longer lived then I should not desire to live.”
⁴⁸⁶
Soldiers’ trust in their Führer was blind and boundless. “If the Führer has said it, you can rely on it,” one POW assured his listeners. Another asserted: “H
ITLER
has done it wonderfully. He has kept all his promises. We all have the fullest confidence in him.”
⁴⁸⁷
In November 1940, a lieutenant said: “I am perfectly convinced that we’ll win the war. Absolutely certain. H
ITLER
will not tolerate
B
ERLIN
being bombed by American a/c [aircraft].”
⁴⁸⁸
And a private confessed that when confronted with bad news: “I console myself with the words of the Führer, he has taken everything into account.”
⁴⁸⁹

Germans had emphatic faith not just in the Führer as a person but in the predictions he made. “I am not a rabid National Socialist,” said one Luftwaffe first lieutenant in 1941, “but when H
ITLER
says that the war will end this year, then I believe it.”
⁴⁹⁰
Even Stalingrad, as doubts first emerged in Germany’s ability to achieve final victory, did not dispel Germans’ trust in Hitler. For example, a low-level officer named
Leska complained, “The outlook for us isn’t rosy,” whereupon his interlocutor,
Private Hahnfeld, responded, “Yes, but the F
ÜHRER
has always known that it is a struggle for our very existence.”
⁴⁹¹
A conversation between two
sergeants was very similar:

Regardless of rank and function, German soldiers’ faith in the Führer seems to have been genuine. Often their statements give the impression that the speaker feels he has a personal relationship to
Hitler. That is not unlike today’s pop stars, who seem beyond reach and blessed with something extraordinary, yet still remain strangely familiar and intimate. The
propagandistic staging of Hitler’s public appearances, indeed the presentation of the whole National Socialist system, was thoroughly modern. It’s hard to imagine
Winston Churchill receiving thousands of
love letters, as Hitler did, or getting 100,000 congratulatory telegrams, as was the case when Göring’s daughter was born.

The myth of the simple-hearted, benevolent, and yet mysterious and omnipotent Führer was bolstered and updated by countless rumors. Hitler also cultivated the image of the diva with his screaming style of oratory, his ascetic eating and drinking habits, and his legendary outbreaks of temper, which allegedly once included biting a hotel carpet.
⁴⁹³
POWs who could boast of special proximity to the Führer, for example, those who were once seated near him or called to report directly to him on military matters, described those encounters in immense detail and always with reference to Hitler’s special qualities. Those stories were intended to imply an intimate familiarity with the Führer, and news about Hitler, whether first- or secondhand, was a topic that guaranteed a rapt audience. One recurring trope was Hitler’s
hypnotic ability to put others under his sway.

A somewhat different picture emerges from actual encounters with the Führer, such as related by
Ludwig Crüwell, the commander of the Wehrmacht’s Panzer Army
Africa, to an eagerly attentive stool pigeon:

In addition to being deeply impressed with Hitler, Crüwell offers evidence for his personal acquaintance with the Führer by using the sort of details that can only be observed in proximity, and those details, the general asserts, were different than he had imagined. In Crüwell’s tale, the
personal Führer
is even more fascinating than the
hypnotic one. The story is unintentionally comic in the sense that Crüwell denies falling under Hitler’s hypnotic spell while describing the Führer as if he were the savior incarnate. Crüwell’s narrative is one of expectations and how they were surpassed. Hitler is not only astonishing; he is astonishing in an unexpected way.

Telling stories of this sort was a way for the speaker to distinguish himself as someone special who had been allowed to come so close to the Führer. Crüwell’s interlocutor offers a relatively sober commentary:

Crüwell immediately recognized this as a challenge and responds:

Crüwell interprets Hitler’s tendency to follow his gut instincts as a sign of authenticity and a part of what makes him convincing. The general
then continues his narrative with intimate details about the Führer’s ostentatiously displayed asceticism and humility. Excerpts like this make it clear how much Hitler’s reputation for charisma programmed people’s encounters with him, and how the unexpected impression the Führer made fueled further stories. Encounters with Hitler were self-fulfilling prophecies; faith in the Führer, an emotional perpetuum mobile.

The significance of Hitler as a public figure who was alternately regarded as a savior and something of a pop star became particularly apparent when
Germany celebrated
France’s capitulation. The official festivities in
Berlin were supposed to commence at 3 p.m. on July 6, 1940. Hundreds of thousands of people had been waiting for hours to give the Führer a rousing reception. The crowds constantly urged Hitler that afternoon to appear on his balcony. It was the height of his military success and his fame, and he was the embodiment of the German
Volk
’s inflated self-image: “ ‘If an increase in feeling for Adolf Hitler was still possible, it has become reality with the day of the return to Berlin,’ commented one report from the provinces. ‘In the face of such greatness,’ ran another, ‘all pettiness and grumbling are silenced.’ Even opponents of the regime found it hard to resist the victory mood. Workers in the armaments factories pressed to be allowed to join the army. People thought final victory was around the corner. Only
Britain stood in the way. For perhaps the only time during the Third Reich there was genuine war-fever among the population.”
⁴⁹⁶

Two years on, the euphoria was over. The campaign against Britain had proven much more difficult than anticipated, and the invasion of the Soviet Union had not only ratcheted up the brutality of the fighting, but pushed the prospect of a rapid end to the war into an indeterminate future.
German
defeat at Stalingrad only reinforced the nascent doubts Germans had begun to feel. What if the war should be lost?

The continuation of Waldeck and Crüwell’s dialogue makes it clear that the latter sees the Führer’s historical importance as distinct from the outcome of the National Socialist project. But for others, faith in the Führer served as an antidote to doubts about whether the war would end happily for
Germany.
Colonel Meyne, for instance, asserted in June 1943: “The F
ÜHRER
is a man of genius, he is certain to find some way out down there.”
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Statements like these were, of course, inspired by the belief that the war could still be won, and the speculations many soldiers engaged in were above all concerned with
when
that victory could be expected. This sort of
confidence increasingly crumbled after Stalingrad, yet that didn’t affect people’s faith in Hitler. “The F
ÜHRER
said: ‘We shall take S
TALINGRAD
,’ ” asserted a
Sergeant Kotenbar on December 23, 1942, at a point when the
6th Army had been surrounded for more than a month, “and you can depend on it, we shall take S
TALINGRAD
.”
⁴⁹⁹

Others, for instance,
Sergeant Wohlgezogen, were finding it difficult by this point to maintain their faith in final victory. His statements continually hint at doubts:

Two aspects of Germans’ faith in Hitler are clearly recognizable in statements like these.
Responsibility for one’s own welfare is delegated to a person who knows how to achieve the desired end and possesses the means and the lack of scruples to do so. And, perhaps more interestingly, the figure of the omnipotent Führer serves to dispel the doubts the speaker otherwise would have.

Wohlgezogen is on the verge of articulating doubts about Germany’s prospects of victory before brushing them aside by reflexively summoning up a mythic image of the Führer: “A
DOLF
won’t give in!” This excerpt and others manifest the
cognitive dissonance that arises when
events deviate from expectations.
Emotionally, cognitive dissonance produces deep feelings of dread, if events are negative and unchangeable. Since such feelings are hard to bear, and
reality itself cannot be altered, the only way to correct the dissonance is to change one’s
perception and
interpretation of reality.
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This basic need is quite commonplace. People who live near nuclear power plants, for instance, tend to regard atomic energy as less dangerous than people who live at a greater distance. Smokers who are well aware of the health risks they are subjecting themselves to develop theories as to why the personal danger is not so great. They tell themselves that they are really moderate smokers, or that their father lived to the age of eighty-six, or that people die of other things besides lung cancer. These strategies of minimizing dissonance allow people to live with situations that are other than what they would prefer.

Germans’ maintenance of their faith in the
Führer was just such a means of reducing dissonance, but it also required a continuous level of emotional investment. The more dubious Germany’s prospects looked, the more intense Germans’ belief in their leader had to be. Conversely, the psychological significance of the Führer figure showed how much Germans had already invested in such belief. Doubting the ability and power of the Führer would have devalued that investment. For this reason, Germans tended to conflate the destiny of their leader and their own fates: