Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying (42 page)

In his account, Gundlach continued to fight regardless of whether he could actually inflict any damage on the enemy. After the
British began using flamethrowers and soldiers started passing out due to the heat and lack of oxygen, though, he felt he had done his duty. Gundlach fought up until a recognizable point, the moment when his men became incapable of defending themselves, before saying “No, we can’t have that.”
Private First Class Lorch of the
266th Infantry Division tells much the same story about his capture near
Saint-Lô in mid-July 1944. Initially his unit was forbidden to surrender. But “when our ammunition ran out,” Lorch related, “our commander said: ‘Now they can go kiss our asses.’ ”
⁵⁹⁵

Conversations among POWs taken captive during the German defense of Cherbourg in late July 1944 illustrate the relevance of the “fighting-to-the-bitter-end” idea as a norm for action. The soldiers knew that the loss of the city meant a huge setback for the Wehrmacht. And they repeatedly insisted both that the stronghold could not be defended by a ragtag and poorly equipped force, and that they themselves were not to blame for its
rapid
fall. Instead soldiers accused others of not fighting until the end. Colonel
Walter Köhn, for example, said:

The surveillance protocols are not the only source in which members of the Wehrmacht speak with outrage at the behavior of German soldiers at Cherbourg as a violation of
military norms. With obvious annoyance, the port commander navy captain
Hermann Witt relayed to
Paris that a Major General
Sattler had needlessly surrendered with four hundred men.
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What irritated Witt was not capitulation in and of itself, but the fact that Sattler allegedly gave up without a compelling reason. For Witt, that was a sign of a total
moral collapse. “It was
J
ENA
and
A
UERSTÄDT
all over again,” he complained a short time later as a POW, referring to
Prussian troops’ historic defeats in the
Napoleonic Wars.
⁵⁹⁸
Saving soldiers’ lives in a lopsided battle was of no concern to many officers in Cherbourg. It was noted with satisfaction that the unit under the command of First Lieutenant
Hermann Keil had held out to the very end at
Cap de la Hague: “One can only say that our troops behaved in a most exemplary manner right to the last moment; their morale and behaviour were excellent.”
⁵⁹⁹

Most soldiers showed at least a theoretical desire to hold out to the last. Nonetheless, situational factors, personal dispositions, and group dynamics often led to flexible interpretations of what that meant. Witt, the last man to surrender at Cherbourg, claimed he had fulfilled this ideal, as did Brigadier
Botho Elster, who surrendered together with his twenty-thousand-strong troop at the Loire bridge in
Beaugency on September 16, 1944, without firing a shot. Elster argued that he and his men had done everything they could to push through to the east, and that failings by the military high command had left him with no means of waging an honorable battle against the enemy.
⁶⁰⁰

Regardless of how they had actually behaved, soldiers stylized their actions as fighting to the bitter end. One example of this is the bold tones used in
radio messages by high-ranking officers to their superiors,
shortly before they capitulated. The verbal noise such exchanges produced allowed both sides to tell themselves they were conforming to norms. And in fact, some of the men involved received coveted medals or promotions for their behavior.
⁶⁰¹

The need to depict one’s own conduct as
honorable automatically led soldiers to differentiate their own behavior from that of others. Soldiers occasionally accused comrades from other branches of the military, or those of different ranks, of cowardice. One private, for instance, complained in July 1944: “The officers at C
HERBOURG
were a cowardly lot. One of them was to come before a court-martial of Naval Civilian officials because he intended deserting. They never even got as far as the proceedings because those officers were in their shelters and hadn’t the nerve to come out. The whole thing was dropped on that account. They had, however, the nerve to issue orders like: ‘We’ll fight to the last man!’ ”
⁶⁰²
The private blamed the officers for his unit’s defeat: “At C
HERBOURG
our officers had packed their trunks days beforehand in readiness to be taken prisoner. If our officers hadn’t been such cowards, C
HERBOURG
would never have fallen the way it did.”
⁶⁰³
Officers, of course, put things precisely the other way around. Colonel
Köhn, for instance, complained, “When the CO and the officer were there the men held out, but the moment they had gone …”
⁶⁰⁴
After the Wehrmacht rapidly lost
Paris, some officers carped that they, the officers, had been the only ones who defended German control of the city. They, in the officers’ own accounts, could at least say with good conscience that they had fought to the last.
⁶⁰⁵

The arguments used were similar throughout the ranks, but the surveillance protocols demonstrate that the need to portray one’s own conduct as conforming to military norms increased the higher ranked an individual was. As a POW, Witt even used letters to his wife to report in secret codes to Grand Admiral
Dönitz about his battle on the breakwater at Cherbourg.
⁶⁰⁶
Other high-ranking officers boasted that their troops had been the last ones to capitulate.
⁶⁰⁷
Major General
Erwin Menny, who was captured by
Canadian troops in
Falaise and sent to a U.S. POW camp, noted in his diary in November 1944:

In Menny’s eyes, generals were subject to special rules of conduct. A general was supposed to fight to the last, preferably with a weapon in his hand, and seek out death rather than being captured. If he capitulated at all, then only after being wounded. Menny added with pride that he had refused to raise his hands when he surrendered.

Generals Thoma and
Crüwell, despite being diametrically opposed in their politics, reacted with similar outrage when they read in
Trent Park of Field Marshal
Friedrich Paulus allowing himself to be taken prisoner in
Stalingrad. “I should have blown my brains out. I am bitterly disappointed, bitterly disappointed!” Crüwell fumed, before adding, “I think the fact that you and I were captured is a different matter and there is no comparison.”
⁶⁰⁹
Both men stress that they battled to the end before falling into enemy hands. Thoma reported that gunfire had forced him out of his tank and that an enemy bullet had passed through his cap. But the fashion in which Paulus had surrendered had nothing heroic about it. In Thoma’s and Crüwell’s minds, Paulus had violated the norm in two respects. Thoma opined:

But the two men agreed that Italian generals had behaved far more disgracefully at the battle of
El Alamein. Whereas Thoma claimed to have barely escaped from his tank with bullet holes in his uniform, the Italian generals “arrived in full dress with all their baggage. The
English officers in
C
AIRO
laughed at them. They arrived looking like C
OOK
’s tourists with their luggage containing their peacetime uniforms. They immediately put on their peacetime uniforms. I immediately said: ‘Please don’t put me with them.’ ”
⁶¹¹

The expectation that high-ranking officers would lead by example and fight to the death also recurs throughout official Wehrmacht daily reports. On July 3, 1944, for example, one report read: “In heavy defensive fighting, the commanding generals,
Lieutenant General Martinek and
Artillery General Pfeiffer, together with
Major General Schünemann, fulfilled their duty and died a hero’s death, fighting at the vanguard of their troops.”
⁶¹²

Significantly, soldiers’ reflections on this topic rarely, if ever, include thoughts about whether their behavior was useful in an operative sense. Thoma never paused to consider what benefit it would have for him as a commanding general to be present on the most advanced line, and Menny never mulled over the question of whether his attempted escape was sensible or whether it merely condemned more of his men to death. Nor did
Captain Gundlach ponder whether holding out in his bunker near
Ouistreham did anything to delay the advance of
British forces. Fighting sui generis needed no justification. Those who conformed to the norm, or at least told themselves they did, could feel good about themselves as soldiers and avoid recriminations following defeat.

Germany’s worsening fortunes only began to influence standards of normal soldierly behavior late in the war. The crushing defeat at
Normandy may have convinced many soldiers that the war was lost, but they continued to believe that soldiers should fight bravely down to the very end. Only after the failed
Ardennes Offensive did this imperative lose currency, as most soldiers realized that unconditional surrender was the only option, and
Hitler largely lost his mythic aura.
⁶¹³
Masses of soldiers commenced a “tacit strike,” as General Edwin Graf von
Rothkirch reported on March 9, 1945, in
Trent Park: “They just sit there and do nothing when the Americans arrive.”
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This tendency should not, however, obscure the fact that some soldiers, depending on their situation and personal disposition, did put up fierce resistance to advancing Allied troops well into April 1945. If the social fabric of a combat unit remained intact, and if the soldiers felt they were still well equipped, they fought far more fiercely than one would expect in the final days of a lost war. An example was the
performance of
2nd Navy Infantry Division south of
Bremen in April 1945. The division consisted of leftover ships’ crewmen with little combat experience. Badly trained and equipped, they nonetheless fought with great energy and absorbed huge losses.
⁶¹⁵

The higher an individual was ranked, the more difficult it was for him to divorce himself from the framework of military values. In
Trent Park,
German generals argued quite emotionally about what the Wehrmacht should do in the face of the catastrophic military situation. In late January 1945, General
Heinrich Eberbach concisely summed up the basic poles of opinion:

Admittedly, once the Allies succeeded in crossing the
Rhine in late March 1945, most soldiers distanced themselves from the idea of fighting with
honor down to the final bullet. “I used to think it was wrong to lay down your arms, that it would cause a crack in popular morale that would bode ill for the future,” admitted General
Ferdinand Heim in late March 1945. “But now it has to end. It’s simply insanity.”
⁶¹⁷
Heim reached this conclusion in the relatively idyllic surroundings of Trent Park. Generals at the front may have had similar thoughts, but their subjective perceptions of how much room for maneuver they enjoyed varied, so they did little to resist the apocalyptic fantasies of the military high command. The fact that Germany’s collective military suicide was only partial came down to the reality that fighting to the last man presumed that one was capable of fighting at all. No one, neither the troops nor the officers, wanted to face tanks with only rifles in their hands. If there were no effective means to combat the enemy, German soldiers simply stopped fighting. They did this in Russia in 1941, in
Normandy in 1944, and in the
Rhineland in 1945.