Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying (7 page)

This sketch of the Nazification of German society may suffice to explain Germans’ growing sense of satisfaction with the system in the years before 1941. Other sources of popular approval were the Nazis’
foreign policy “triumphs” and the “miracle economic recovery,” which, though built on sand, made members of the
Volk
feel as though they were living in a society that had a lot to offer. It was within this
frame of reference, the Third Reich, that German soldiers heading to war ordered their
perceptions,
interpretations, and conclusions. This was the backdrop against which they understood the purpose of
World War II, categorized their enemies, and evaluated victories and defeats. Those soldiers’ experiences of war would go on to modify this frame of reference. As the conflict dragged on, and the prospects of ultimate victory receded, soldiers’ faith in what
Hans Mommsen called “the
realization of the utopian” diminished. But it did not automatically invalidate fundamental ideas about human
inequality, the demands of blood, and the superiority of the
Aryan race. Even less so did it call into question the third-order
military
frame of reference. And that will be the topic of the following section.

The trans
formation of the 100,000-man
German army of 1933 into the 2.6-million-strong Wehrmacht force that attacked
Poland in 1939 was not just an act of material armament. It was accompanied by the consolidation of a frame of reference in which the military acquired positive connotations typical of Germany and the time. The
political and military leadership placed great emphasis on anchoring
military values within the general populace, making the
Volk
fit for battle, and forming a unified and willing “community of
destiny.” Working together, these leaders succeeded in militarizing German society to a high degree.
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Nazi party organizations like the
Hitler Youth, the
SA, and the
SS, along with initiatives like the
Imperial Labor Service (
Reichsarbeitsdienst
) and the reintroduction of
universal conscription in 1935 increased the fighting capacity of the German people to unprecedented levels. The German populace may not have celebrated the
start of World
War II in September 1939 with the same euphoria that they had
World War I in 1914. In fact, the mood was largely somber. But 17 million German men let themselves be drafted without protest into the Wehrmacht during the course of World War II. Without them Germany would not have been able to fight on until 1945. The success with which German society was militarized was less about getting all German men to support the war than about producing a framework within which they shared or at least did not question military value systems. This cannot be explained only with reference to the massive propaganda efforts of the Nazi and Wehrmacht leadership. On the contrary, the Nazis were able to build upon a radicalization of the military sphere that had taken place in decades before the Third Reich.

The
Prussian-led wars from 1864 to 1871 that created the unified German nation had rooted military values deep within German society, and even many of those critical of the state shared them.
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In
World War I, social models of violence and
inequality spread, and the value attributed to qualities like
bravery, daring,
obedience, and sense of duty increased. Among German
military officers, the
ideal of the
heroic death, epitomized by the soldier willing to defend his position to the last bullet, experienced a new renaissance.
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This was a general European development, not a particular German phenomenon. The myth of
Leonidas at the
Battle of Thermopylae and the trope of fighting to the last bullet were also very influential in
Britain and
France.
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During the
Weimar Republic, significant parts of German society propagated the idea of national defense and a state willing to take to battle as an alternative to the
Treaty of Versailles and the perceived impotence of German
democracy.
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Germany was to mentally prepare for wars to come by encouraging
courage, enthusiasm, and
willingness for
sacrifice.
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The literary apostles of “soldierly nationalism,” men like
Ernst Jünger,
Edwin Dwinger, or
Ernst von Salomon, spread a metaphysical, abstract
cult of war among hundreds of thousands of readers, and they were supported in their efforts by a host of right-wing, nationalistic organizations, including the
Stahlhelm (Steel Helmet) association. By the end of the 1920s, war memorials that concentrated on representing grief for soldiers killed in battle had given way to
monuments creating a mystique of brave fighters on the front lines.
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Tributes to battles Germany had won during
World War I and the wars of German
unification became omnipresent. Voices of protest against this romanticizing of the military past and pacifist objectors to the army had increasing difficulty making themselves heard.

The
German army, then still known as the
Reichswehr, profited from this trend, and their demands could count on a broad echo in society as a whole. By 1933, the groundwork had already been laid for German society to be completely penetrated by the idea of Germany’s acute need to defend itself. On May 25, 1934, the president of the German Reich,
Paul von Hindenburg, and his war minister,
Werner von Blomberg, drew up a list of duties for German soldiers. This document located the roots of the Wehrmacht in a glorious past and defined military honor as an unconditional willingness on the part of soldiers to make sacrifices, including their own lives, for their people and homeland. Fighting courage was identified as the greatest virtue a soldier could possess. The list demanded steely determination, decisiveness, and vigor, while
cowardice was dismissed as contemptible, and hesitation unworthy of a soldier. Military leadership entailed an
eagerness to make decisions, measured ability, and tireless care for one’s charges.
Military leaders and troops, the document asserted, had to become an unshakable fighting community of
comrades, and in his
willingness to carry out his duties the soldier was to serve as a
role model of masculine strength for the
German people.
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This catalogue of duties showed that, while the Wehrmacht of the early 1930s positioned itself as a part of German military tradition, it was adopting new accents. The emphasis on “unconditional willingness to sacrifice” and “steely determination” shows how battle was defined as the central element of soldiers’ existence. In keeping with the myths of incredible German
courage on the front lines during
World War I, living up to the demands of battle was the ultimate litmus test of a soldier’s worth, to which all other considerations were subordinate.
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This catalogue of military virtues did not change substantially during World War II.

Admittedly, a paper published by the highest echelons of the military leadership is not necessarily proof that soldiers adopted a specific military value system into their frame of reference, but personnel files often suggest that was indeed the case. Superiors regularly
evaluated every German officer, and the categories the evaluations contained included
personality, strength in the face of the enemy, achievements while carrying out duties, and mental and physical abilities. A glance at this nearly endless and often ignored source reveals that the training desired by Germany’s military leadership had taken root at least in the reference frame of the corps of officers. In the files, a personality of “high military quality” was defined as being energetic and “strong-willed,” “brave and demanding of itself,” “physically adroit, tough and with great endurance.” Courage, energy, toughness, willingness to act, and decisiveness were needed, if the officers wanted to receive a positive evaluation and position themselves for promotion. It was also important for officers to show that they were “crisis-proof.” For instance, a superior wrote of the future lieutenant general
Erwin Menny: “He knows no difficulties.” Likewise General
Heinrich Eberbach was repeatedly praised in the course of his career as a “brisk and prudential tank commander equal to the most difficult situations.… He’s one of our best.” Enumerating his particularly positive traits, a superior characterized Eberbach as “brave, loyal, steadfast.”
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Negative attributes for soldiers were softness, “lack of energy,”
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lack of “resilience,”
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and insufficient “hardness of will and ability to
withstand crises.”
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For instance, in 1944 a superior wrote of Major General
Albin Nake, the commander of the
158th Reserve Division: “A typically East Prussian commander, who does not possess the severity and decisiveness to lead a division in the most difficult situations.”
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General
Otto Elfeldt was criticized for allowing “his sub-commanders too much independence of opinion.”
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A superior wrote of Major General
Alexander von Pfuhlstein: “Pfuhlstein is a pessimist. Probably a congenital one. He lacks the conviction of belief in the National Socialist idea. For this reason, he tends to forgive obvious failure in his troops.”
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After this damning report, Pfuhlstein was relieved of his division command. Colonel
Walther Korfes, the commander of
Grenadier Regiment 726, even became the subject of an investigation as to whether he had been honorably captured or not by British forces. Previously, he had been classified as a “fundamental skeptic and critic.”
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The evaluations contained within the personnel files of Wehrmacht officers also suggest that the ideological changes brought by National Socialism to the
military value system were limited. Significantly the words “sacrifice” and “
fanaticism” do not occur in army files. (The ones from the navy were largely destroyed.) Only SS files contain this sort of vocabulary. For instance, an evaluation of SS Lieutenant Colonel
Kurt Mayer of April 29, 1943, reports that his “massive success … is the result solely of his fanatical willingness to do battle and his circumspect leadership.”
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Willingness to sacrifice and fanaticism were two unquestionable indications of an increasingly ideological system of values. The ideal of the “
political soldier,” ceaselessly promoted by Nazi propaganda, was not only a courageous but a fanatic fighter, willing to sacrifice himself. These terms repeatedly crop up in conjunction with soldiers who were committed National Socialists. One of the most prominent was Admiral
Karl Dönitz. When he assumed command of the
German navy on January 30, 1943, he declared that he planned to lead with “ruthless decisiveness, fanatic commitment and the most iron will to victory.”
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In countless commands, he demanded the same commitment from his troops. And Dönitz was hardly alone. Fanaticism became an omnipresent category in the official correspondence of the military leadership in the second half of World War II.

Nonetheless, it is surprising that “National Socialist attitudes,” which were introduced as an official category in the fall of 1942, did not play a particularly important role in the evaluation of officers.
In much of the army, common sense seems to have dictated that this political category should not be a decisive criterion. The formulae “National Socialist” and “firmly grounded in National Socialism” were used in inflationary fashion. In June 1943 director of
military personnel Lieutenant General
Rudolf Schmundt even complained that the terms were thrown about so cavalierly that “they can hardly yield any sort of evaluation.”
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A glance at the files confirms that firm National Socialist beliefs were attributed even to officers with demonstrable skepticism toward the Nazi system. More reliable conclusions about political attitudes could only be made when the evaluations used stronger language, for example, “a solidly rooted National Socialist who orients his duties as a soldier accordingly” (evaluation of Colonel
Ludwig Heilmann).
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In practice, political orientation never accrued the sort of significance Hitler would have wished for the formation of a “new” Nazi type of soldier. Calls for a fundamental Nazi orientation of troops and the merging of political and military values became a mantra of the Nazi leadership, especially as the war was approaching its
end. Nazi propaganda, of course, consistently featured the image of the
heroic National Socialist warrior. “Here the deployed German soldier goes beyond his limits,” one German newspaper wrote in a report from the front lines on January 16, 1942, “fighting in the way the Führer has commanded: with
fanatic commitment and down to the very last man.”
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The longer the war dragged on, the more propagandists called upon the conflation of politics and fighting: “Unlike all preceding generations, the German soldier today unites the military with the political.”
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Nonetheless, official Wehrmacht reports were written in a different tone. As late as 1944, soldiers’ performance was still being described in the terms laid out in 1934. Authors emphasized “especial
bravery,” “steadfastness,” “toughness worthy of emulation,” “bold activism,” “unshakable fighting spirit,” “brash attacks,” “gutsy close combat,” and “tenacious persistence in almost hopeless situations.”
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Although Hitler’s instructions on how to wage war were full of formulations like “fanatic will to victory,” “sacred hatred” for the enemy, and “pitiless battle,”
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Wehrmacht correspondence rarely reflected that language. It appears there were limits to the extent to which the military frame of reference was “national socialized.”

The German military canon’s orientation around classical martial
virtues also clearly emerges in the culture of
military
medals
, which both continued lines of tradition and also broke new ground where commendations for bravery were concerned. In the Third Reich, unlike in Wilhelmine Germany, officers and everyday soldiers were supposed to meld into a single fighting community. This idea was underscored by the fact that all soldiers were eligible for the same
medals and commendations, regardless of rank. In World War I, the highest medal in the
Prussian military, the
Pour le Mérite, was reserved for the officer corps and awarded almost exclusively to high-ranking commanders: among 533 recipients, there were only 11 company chiefs and 2 patrol leaders, among them a young lieutenant named
Ernst Jünger.
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In recommissioning the
Iron Cross on September 1, 1939, Hitler consciously followed the tradition of the most important Prussian commendation for bravery, which had been commissioned in the wars of 1813, 1870, and 1914. Soldiers were allowed to wear the medal on their uniforms—Hitler himself wore the Iron Cross he had been given in World War I—and a special clasp was designed for soldiers who had received the distinction in both world wars. But the new Iron Cross was an accolade handed out by the Reich, and not by Prussia. In keeping with tradition, there were Iron Crosses of various classes (Second and First Class,
Knight’s Cross, Grand Cross), with the intermediate Knight’s Cross being introduced as an equivalent to the Prussian Pour le Mérite, which was not recommissioned.
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