Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying (59 page)

    
1.
The research group worked under the direction of Dr. Christian Gudehus and consisted of Dr. Amedeo Osti Guerrazzi, Dr. Felix Römer, Dr. Michaela Christ, Sebastian Groß, and Tobias Seidl. More detailed analyses can be found in Harald Welzer, Sönke Neitzel, and Christian Gudehus, eds.,
“Der Führer war wieder viel zu human, viel zu gefühlvoll!”
(Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 2011).

    
2.
SRA 2670, 20 June 1942, TNA, WO 208/4126.

    
3.
SRA 3686, 20 February 1943, TNA, WO 208/4129.

    
4.
A further influence on the concept of the frame of reference was the work of French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, who was murdered in the Buchenwald
concentration camp. He pointed out the formative influence of the social framework (“cadres sociaux”) in memory.

    
5.
It is unclear precisely how many people panicked.
The New York Times
ran a story on 31 October 1938 entitled “Radio Listeners in Panic, Taking War Drama as Fact,
”
and reported on various incidents, in which an entire block’s worth of people fled their apartments. The article did not use the phrase “mass panic,” although a significant number of people certainly did mistake fiction for fact.

    
6.
Gregory Bateson,
Ökologie des Geistes
(Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1999).

    
7.
Alfred Schütz,
Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt: Eine Einleitung in die verstehende Soziologie
(Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1993).

    
8.
Erving Goffman,
Rahmenanalyse
(Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1980), p. 99.

    
9.
Kazimierz Sakowicz was a Polish journalist who began documenting the mass murder of Lithuanian Jews in 1941. Rachel Margolis and Jim Tobias, eds.,
Die geheimen Notizen des K. Sakowicz: Dokumente zur Judenvernichtung in Ponary, 1941–1943
(Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 2005), p. 53.

  
10.
Williamson Murray and Allan R. Millet,
A War to Be Won: Fighting the Second World War
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 360.

  
11.
Norbert Elias,
Was ist Soziologie?
(Munich: Juventa, 2004).

  
12.
Cited in Rolf Schörken,
Luftwaffenhelfer und Drittes Reich: Die Entstehung eines politischen Bewusstseins
(Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta Verlag, 1985), p. 144.

  
13.
Raul Hilberg,
Täter, Opfer, Zuschauer: Die Vernichtung der Juden, 1933–1945
(Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 1992), p. 138.

  
14.
Martin Heinzelmann,
Göttingen im Luftkrieg
(Gottingen: Die Werkstatt, 2003).

  
15.
Norbert Elias,
Studien über die Deutschen
(Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1989).

  
16.
Michel Foucault,
Überwachen und Strafen
(Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1994).

  
17.
Erving Goffman,
Asyle: Über die Situation psychiatrischer Patienten und anderer Insassen
(Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1973).

  
18.
Rolf Schörken recalled of his experiences as a sixteen-year-old assistant antiaircraft gunner: “In the school classes of this age group, pupils who displayed a mixture of intelligence, sporting prowess and social skills normally had the most say.… Now, the antithetical type of pupil took control: those who had grown more quickly and were simply more physically powerful than the others. Intelligence of the sort promoted in school, to say nothing of being educated, almost became negative traits and were punished with ridicule and scorn. Anyone who dared read a serious book or listened to serious music was a lost cause.… These new shapers of opinion create a pressure, indeed a compulsion to conform that knew no corrective limits. The fact that we were all part of the Wehrmacht did little to counteract this. In reality, being connected to the Wehrmacht was what enabled people to completely let themselves go in battle.” See Schörken,
Luftwaffenhelfer und Drittes Reich
.

  
19.
Harald Welzer, “Jeder die Gestapo des anderen: Über totale Gruppen,” in
Stadt der Sklaven/Slave City,
Museum Folkwang, ed. (Essen, 2008), pp. 177–90.

  
20.
Room Conversation, Schlottig–Wertenbruch, 10 August 1944, NARA, RG 165, Entry 179, Box 540.

  
21.
Raul Hilberg,
Die Vernichtung der europäischen Juden
(Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 1990), p. 1080.

  
22.
Karl E. Weick and Kathleen M. Sutcliffe,
Das Unerwartete managen: Wie Unternehmen aus Extremsituationen lernen
(Stuttgart: Schaeffer-Poescher, 2003).

  
23.
Gerhard Paul,
Bilder des Krieges, Krieg der Bilder: Die Visualisierung des modernen Krieges
(Paderborn: Schoeningh Verlag, 2004), p. 236.

  
24.
SRM 564, 17 June 1944, TNA, WO 208/4138.

  
25.
Wolfram Wette, ed.,
Stille Helden—Judenretter im Dreiländereck während des Zweiten Weltkriegs
(Freiburg: Herder, 2005), pp. 215–32.

  
26.
Harald Welzer,
Täter: Wie aus ganz normalen Menschen Massenmörder werden
(Frankfurt/Main: Fischer Verlag, 2005), p. 183.

  
27.
GRGG 217, 29–30 October 1944, TNA, WO 208/4364.

  
28.
There has been much written about the fact that more than 60 percent of the participants in the Milgram experiment were willing to subject what they believed was a fellow participant to a presumably lethal dose of electricity. The experiment was duplicated in more than ten other countries, and the results remained comparable. What has attracted less attention is the fact that the percentage of people who blindly obeyed instructions sank when the experiment was varied. This strongly suggested that social immediacy has a strong influence on obedience. If there was contact between the “learner” and the “teacher,” for instance, if they were in the same room or the “teacher” had to press the “learner’s” hand onto an electrified surface, the percentage of those who blindly followed instructions sank to 40 and 30 percent respectively. The significance of social proximity also emerges when “teachers” and “learners” were friends, acquaintances, or family members. In these cases, the percentage of blind obedience dropped to 15 percent, and “disobedient” subjects tended to break off the experiment significantly earlier than in other variations of the Milgram test.

  
29.
Edward A. Shils and Morris Janowitz, “Cohesion and Disintegration in the Wehrmacht in World War II,”
Public Opinion Quarterly
12, no. 2 (Summer 1948).

  
30.
Morton Hunt,
Das Rätsel der Nächstenliebe
(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Taschenbuch, 1988), p. 77.

  
31.
Cited in ibid.

  
32.
Sebastian Haffner,
Geschichte eines Deutschen. Erinnerungen, 1914–1933
(Munich: Der Hoerverlang GmbH, 2002), p. 105.

  
33.
Harald Welzer, Sabine Moller, and Karoline Tschuggnall,
“Opa war kein Nazi”: Nationalsozialismus und Holocaust im Familiengedächtnis
(Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 2002), p. 75.

  
34.
Sebastian Haffner also wrote: “The strange and disheartening thing was admittedly that, beyond the initial shock, the first grand announcement of a new mood of murder in all of Germany occasioned a flood of discussions—but about the ‘Jewish question’ and not the anti-Semitic question. It was a
trick the Nazis also used successfully in a number of other ‘questions.’ By publicly threatening someone else—a country, a population or a group of people—with death, they prompted a general discussion of the other’s right to existence instead of their own. Such discussions actively questioned the value of others’ lives. Suddenly, everyone felt competent and justified in having and spreading an opinion about Jews.” Haffner,
Geschichte,
p. 139ff.

  
35.
Welzer,
Täter,
p. 161ff.

  
36.
Peter Longerich,
Davon haben wir nichts gewusst! Die Deutschen und die Judenverfolgung 1933–1945
(Munich: Siedler, 2006), p. 25ff.

  
37.
Saul Friedländer,
Das Dritte Reich und die Juden: Die Jahre der Verfolgung 1933–1945
(Munich: Deutsche Taschenbuch Verlag, 1998), p. 24.

  
38.
Michael Wildt,
Volksgemeinschaft als Selbstermächtigung: Gewalt gegen Juden in der deutschen Provinz, 1919–1939
(Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2007).

  
39.
Peter Longerich,
Politik der Vernichtung: Eine Gesamtdarstellung der nationalsozialistischen Judenverfolgung
(Munich: Piper Verlag, 1998), p. 578.

  
40.
Raphael Groß,
Anständig geblieben: Nationalsozialistische Moral
(Frankfurt/Main: Fischer Verlag, 2010); Welzer,
Täter,
p. 48ff.

  
41.
Saul Friedländer,
Das Dritte Reich und die Juden: Die Jahre der Verfolgung, 1933–1945
(Munich: Deutsche Taschenbuch Verlag, 1998), p. 24.

  
42.
The average age of the leaders within the party and the state was thirty-four and forty-four respectively. See Götz Aly,
Hitlers Volksstaat: Raub, Rassenkrieg und nationaler Sozialismus
(Frankfurt/Main: Fischer Verlag, 2005), p. 12ff.

  
43.
Ibid. The quote is from the English translation,
Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War and the Nazi Welfare State
(New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007), p. 11.

  
44.
See Lutz Niethammer and Alexander von Plato,
“Wir kriegen jetzt andere Zeiten”
(Bonn: Dietz Verlag J. H. W. Nachf, 1985); Harald Welzer, Robert Montau, and Christine Plaß,
“Was wir für böse Menschen sind!” Der Nationalsozialismus im Gespräch zwischen den Generationen
(Tübingen: Edition Diskord, 1997); Welzer, Moller, and Tschuggnall,
Opa
; Eric Johnson and Karl-Heinz Reuband,
What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany
(London: Basic Books, 2005), p. 341; Marc Philipp,
Hitler ist tot, aber ich lebe noch: Zeitzeugenerinnerungen an den Nationalsozialismus
(Berlin: Bebra Verlag, 2010).

  
45.
Aly,
Volksstaat,
p. 353ff.

  
46.
Hans Dieter Schäfer,
Das gespaltene Bewußtsein: Vom Dritten Reich bis zu den langen Fünfziger Jahren
(Gottingen: Wallstein, 2009), p. 18.

  
47.
Ibid., p. 12.

  
48.
Wolfram Wette et al., eds.,
Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg,
Vol. 1 (Stuttgart: Metzler Verlag, 1991), p. 123ff.

  
49.
For an international comparison of militaristic discourse from the mid-eighteenth century to the outbreak of World War II, see Jörn Leonhard,
Bellizismus und Nation: Kriegsdeutung und Nationsbestimmung in Europa und den Vereinigten Staaten, 1750–1914
(Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag, 2008).

  
50.
For a concise account, see Brian K. Feltman, “Death Before Dishonor: The Heldentod Ideal and the Dishonor of Surrender on the Western Front, 1914–1918
,
” lecture manuscript (University of Bern, 10 September 2010). See Isabel V. Hull,
Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005); Alan Kramer,
Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Alexander Watson,
Enduring the Great War: Combat, Morale and Collapse in the German and the British Armies, 1914–1918
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

  
51.
Watson,
Enduring
, p. 3. The trope of fighting to the last bullet was very powerful throughout the nineteenth century. It is reflected in the 1873 painting
Les Dernières Cartouches
by Alphonse de Neuville, which heroically stylized the defense of the Bourgerie in Bazeilles near Sedan and was enthusiastically received all over France.

  
52.
Rüdiger Bergien,
Die
bellizistische Republik:
Wehrkonsens
und “Wehrhaftmachung”
in
Deutschland, 1918–1933
(Munich: Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, 2010). For the international context, see Stig Förster, ed.,
An der Schwelle zum Totalen Krieg: Die militärische Debatte um den Krieg der Zukunft, 1919–1939
(Paderborn: Schoeningh, 2002).

  
53.
Jürgen Förster, “Geistige Kriegführung in Deutschland 1919 bis 1945,” in
Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg,
Vol. 9/1, Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt, ed. (Munich: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2004), p. 472.

  
54.
Sabine Behrenbeck, “Zwischen Trauer und Heroisierung: Vom Umgang mit Kriegstod und Niederlage nach 1918,” in
Kriegsende 1918: Ereignis, Wirkung, Nachwirkung,
Jörg Duppler and Gerhard P. Groß, eds. (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1999), p. 336ff.

  
55.
Karl Demeter,
Das Deutsche Offizierskorps, 1650–1945
(Frankfurt/Main: Bernard & Graefe, 1965), p. 328.

  
56.
See also Christian Kehrt,
Moderne Kriege: Die Technikerfahrungen deutscher Militärpiloten, 1910–1945
(Paderborn: Schoeningh Verlag, 2010), p. 228.

  
57.
Sönke Neitzel,
Abgehört: Deutsche Generäle in britischer Kriegsgefangenschaft, 1942–1945,
4th edition (Berlin: List Taschenbuch, 2009), pp. 452, 456, 435, 449, 440.

  
58.
BA/MA, Pers 6/6670.

  
59.
BA/MA, Pers 6/9017.

  
60.
Neitzel,
Abgehört,
p. 457.

  
61.
BA/MA, Pers 6/770. Freiherr von Adrian-Werburg received a similar evaluation; see 2 September 1943, BA/MA, Pers 6/10239.

  
62.
Neitzel,
Abgehört,
p. 442.

  
63.
Ibid., p. 468.

  
64.
BA/MA, Pers 6/6410.