Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying (57 page)

Today, a German captain serving with the
373rd Paratroopers Battalion in Kunduz says: “At the start, we wanted to achieve something, for example, taking some territory from the enemy. But after the death of my men, we sometimes ask ourselves whether it’s worth it. Why risk our lives, when the Taliban will immediately reappear as soon as we’re gone? We’re fighting for our lives and our mission, if we even still have one. But in the end in Kunduz, we’re above all fighting for sheer survival.”
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Soldiers’ statements about their experience of war frequently show strong similarities and points of overlap.
Andrew Carroll, the founder of the
Legacy Project, a volunteer initiative aimed at collecting and preserving correspondence by U.S. veterans of all foreign wars, has said that the similarities and not the differences stand out when one compares letters by American soldiers with correspondence written by their German, Italian, and Russian counterparts.
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At the beginning of World War II, German soldiers were far less prone to see the conflict as senseless. Quick German victories were followed by relatively long periods of respite, and Wehrmacht soldiers thought that they would personally benefit from Germany’s war of conquest.
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But by fall 1941, when success stories became rarer and long, drawn-out battles increasingly taxed German troops, “worldview” rationales and motivations declined in importance. The predominant feeling among soldiers was that they had been abandoned to a monotonous endeavor which had little to do with their own lives, although their own survival depended on it. There is not one sociological study of World War II that fails to emphasize the relatively minor role played by ideology and abstract convictions in the daily practice of war. Group dynamics,
technology, space, and time set the parameters that mattered to soldiers and allowed them to orient themselves. Given the dominance of the here-and-now, the only difference between what soldiers did and what people in modern societies always do, when confronted with a task that they are supposed to carry out, was the fact that the former entailed life or death. If you work for an energy, insurance, or chemical company, “capitalism” as such does not help you perform your job, and if you’re a policeman handing out a speeding ticket or a court bailiff repossessing a flat-screen television from a debtor, you don’t think that you are upholding the values of freedom and democracy. You’re only carrying out a duty you have been charged with. Soldiers do their jobs in war using violence. That’s all that distinguishes their actions from those of other workers, employees, and government officials. The results of soldiers’ work are also different: casualties and destruction.

The immediate social environment, the modern work ethic, and fascination with technology may indeed yield something like a “universal
soldier.” At the same time, different perspectives exist on war and violence, and we can identify nationally specific elements in the formation of military
frames of reference. For the
Wehrmacht in World War II, these elements included concepts of
honor,
toughness, and
sacrifice to a degree that no longer applies within today’s German military.
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Even World War I did not see such an extreme emphasis on the idea of being duty-bound.
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Although the dividing lines may be blurry,
Wilhelmine Germany, the
Weimar Republic, the
Third Reich, and today’s
Federal Republic all featured different sets of military values.

The differences are even greater in the international arena, as our brief comparison of Nazi Germany, Fascist
Italy, and Imperial
Japan showed. The central values for Wehrmacht soldiers were bravery, obedience, devotion to duty, and emotional hardness. Those were the key factors determining how soldiers perceived and evaluated their own behavior.
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This frame of reference, already in place during peacetime, remained remarkably stable throughout World War II.

But even though soldiers began with this core set of values, they arrived at differing views on the ultimate sense of the war. A committed Nazi saw things differently than a former communist, and the same was true for a fifty-two-year-old general and a twenty-three-year-old lieutenant. Their basic understanding of the military, though, remained the same, and in battle it was irrelevant how soldiers’ individual values had been formed, as long as they stuck to the core virtues as a guide for their interpretations and actions. Men like
Axel von dem Bussche and
Otto-Ernst Remer, both highly decorated battalion commanders, hardly differed in terms of their military ethos, even though the former was a major figure within the German resistance, and the latter was responsible for smashing the anti-Nazi opposition in
Berlin.

The consequences that emerged from this positively charged canon of values were far-reaching. Few people seriously questioned either the Wehrmacht or the war itself, even if they believed Germany was heading for defeat or were outraged by atrocities. The idea that a soldier had to do his duty under all circumstances was so firmly anchored in soldiers’ frame of reference that it could only be shaken by the immediate prospect of death or complete military defeat. The imperative to act according to military norms only ended when the Wehrmacht order collapsed and soldiers could no longer see any sense in sacrificing their lives for a lost cause. Self-sacrifice for its own sake was never a part of the classic military canon of values, and the Nazi
leadership had little success over the course of the war in radicalizing soldiers’ attitudes.

Biographical factors no doubt influenced how individuals interpreted the war. But quantitatively speaking, such differences were marginal and got smoothed over by the daily experience of battle in much the same way as differences in social class. Only at the core of the left-wing and Catholic milieus did the military canon of values possess less appeal.
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Far more influential in shaping individuals’ attitudes and behavior were military formations. Elite units, for instance, had their own variations on the military frame of reference, although they affected perceptions of the war far less than soldiers’ actions and consequences. What mattered for elite soldiers was action. An elite fighter was supposed to prove his mettle in battle, and not just talk about it. In each branch of the military and each class of weaponry, specific identities crystallized. They in turn were heavily influenced by concrete events and experiences. The trope of fighting to the death, for instance, was interpreted in significantly different ways by an infantry soldier, a fighter pilot, and a submarine helmsman.

Violence is practiced by all groups, men and women, educated and uneducated people, Catholics, Protestants, and Muslims, if cultural and social situations make it seem sensible. Exercising violence is a
constructive
social act. That is to say, perpetrators use it to achieve goals and create realities. They compel others to bend to their will, distinguish those who belong from those who are excluded, increase their own power, and take possession of the property of those vanquished. Violence is also destructive, of course, and not just for its victims.

Yet none of this argues for the persistent myth that violence is always bubbling, waiting to be released, just below the thin crust of civilization. All these reflections imply that groups of human beings have perennially chosen the option of violence when it seemed likely to promote their own survival. In fact, civilization is not some sort of thin crust. Ever since modern nations introduced the principle of a state monopoly on the legitimate use of force, meaning that every private act of violence can be punished, the use of violence has dramatically declined. This bit of progress brought on by civilization has
allowed for the level of freedom enjoyed by the citizens of democratic societies today. Yet that does not mean violence has been eradicated. It has only taken on a different form. It does not mean that individuals or groups never violate the state’s monopoly or that democratic states per se refrain from exercising violence. The
frame of reference for violence in the modern age is different from that in nonmodern cultures—that is all. The question is not one of violence and its absence, but of its proportions and the means by which it is regulated.

A sufficient reason for people to decide to kill other people can be the feeling that their existence is threatened, that violence is being legitimately demanded of them, or that it makes some sort of political, cultural, or religious sense. This applies not just to violence in the course of a
war, but to other social situations as well. For this reason, the violence practiced by
Wehrmacht soldiers was not as a rule more “National Socialist” than the force used by
British or
American soldiers. The only cases in which the violence can be seen as National Socialist were those instances where it was directed against people who could under no circumstances be seen as a military threat: the murder of Soviet POWs and, above all, the extermination of European Jews. War, as is the case with all genocides, created the framework in which the constraints of civilization were revoked. It also created the large number of Wehrmacht soldiers who would eventually serve as “assistant executioners.” The
Holocaust did not define the character of World War II. Nonetheless, as the most extreme form of violence in human history, the Holocaust has influenced and formed people’s views of that war. This historically unique crime still dominates our understanding today of history’s most deadly war, an exorbitant explosion of violence that claimed 50 million lives. Yet the majority of the victims died in the violence of World War II, not as a result of the Holocaust. All the wars waged in the meantime have shown that it is inappropriate to show outrage or surprise that people are killed and maimed when there is war. If there is war, that’s the way it is.

It would be more productive to ask whether and under what circumstances people can refrain from killing. That would put an end to the ostentatious demonstrations of horror at the crimes and violence against innocent
civilians every time states decide to wage war. Civilian casualties are inevitable because the frame of reference “war” promotes actions and creates temporary structures in which violence, in either a total or partial sense, can no longer be constrained and limited.
Like every form of social behavior, violence has its own specific dynamic. This book is full of illustrations of what that dynamic is.

Will it ever be possible for a historical or sociological analysis of violence to develop the sort of moral neutrality a quantum physicist maintains toward an electron? Will such analysis ever be able to describe violence as a social possibility with the same detachment as political scientists approach elections and parliaments? As products of the modern age, history and social sciences are duty bound to follow certain basic assumptions. That’s why they encounter such difficulty when confronted with phenomena that challenge those assumptions.

If we cease to define violence as an aberration, we learn more about our society and how it functions than if we persist in comforting illusions about our own basically nonviolent nature. If we reclassify violence in its various forms as part of the inventory of possible social actions among communities that have come together for mutual survival, we will see that such groups are also always potential communities of annihilation. Modernity’s faith in its own distance from violence is illusionary. People kill for various motives. Soldiers kill because it’s their job.

For as long as there have been wars, combatants have tried to spy on their enemies to gain a decisive advantage. By the late nineteenth century, the world was becoming ever more interconnected, and technological revolutions in transportation and the media increased the possibilities for human knowledge to the extent that surveillance work was professionalized. The first modern secret service arose in Britain, and the world’s other major powers were quick to establish intelligence agencies of their own. During
World War I, complexly structured institutions began collecting and evaluating information from a broad variety of sources. That entailed decoding radio messages, carrying out aerial surveillance, and interrogating POWs. Classic forms of spying temporarily faded in significance.

Learning from past experience, the
British War Ministry began in March 1939 to set up special interrogation centers for POWs in case the country had to go back to war.
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For the first time, it was planned to bug POWs’ cells and systematically eavesdrop on what they said. The idea wasn’t new. In 1918, an interrogation center with hidden microphones was ready to go operational, before being halted by the armistice that ended World War I. With the establishment of the
Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre (CSDIC) on September 26, 1939, the idea was revived. After being temporarily located in the Tower of London, the center moved to the estate of
Trent Park in the north of Britain’s capital.
Latimer House and
Wilton Park were added as facilities in 1942. In July of that year, the entire CSDIC moved to Latimer House. Wilton Park was used to house
Italian POWs.
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Trent Park became a long-term internment facility for German staff officers.
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