Soldaten

Every policeman charged with keeping order could become a guard in a ghetto or for a rail transport. Every lawyer at the Main Office for Imperial Security was a candidate for taking over a task force; every finance specialist at the Department of Economic Administration was seen as a natural choice for serving in a concentration camp. In other words, all necessary operations were carried out using the personnel that was available at the time. Wherever one chooses to draw the border with active participation, the machinery of annihilation represented an impressive cross-section of the German populace.²¹

Applied to war, that would mean: every mechanic could repair bombers whose deadly payloads killed thousands of people; every butcher could, as a member of a procurement enterprise, be complicit in the plundering of occupied areas. During World War II, Lufthansa pilots flew long-range sorties in their Fw 200s not to transport passengers, but to sink British merchant ships in the Atlantic. Yet because their activity in and of itself didn’t change, those who played these roles rarely saw reason to engage in moral reflection or to refuse to do their jobs. Their basic activity remained the same.

INTERPRETIVE PARADIGM: WAR IS WAR

Specific interpretive paradigms are tightly connected with the sets of demands that accompany every role. Doctors see an illness differently than do patients, just as perpetrators view a crime differently than do victims. The paradigms that direct these interpretations are, in a sense, mini frames of reference. Every interpretive paradigm, of course, includes an entire universe of alternative interpretations and implies nonknowledge. That is disadvantageous in situations so new that previous experience does more to hinder than to help our ability to deal with them.²² Paradigms are effective in familiar contexts since they remove the need to engage in complex considerations and calculations. One knows what one is dealing with and what the right recipe is for solving a problem. As predetermined, routinized frames for ordering what is happening at a given moment, interpretive paradigms structure our lives to an extraordinarily high degree. They range from stereotypes (“Jews are all…”) to entire cosmologies (“God will not permit Germany’s demise”), and are both historically and culturally very specific. German soldiers in World War II typecast their enemies according to different criteria and characteristics than soldiers in the Vietnam War did, but the procedure and function of the typecasting are identical.

Interpretive paradigms are especially central to how soldiers in World War II experienced others, their own mission, their “race,” Hitler, and Jews. Paradigms equip frames of reference with prefabricated interpretations according to which experiences can be sorted. They also include interpretations from different social contexts that are imported into the experience of war. This is especially significant for the notion of “war as a job,” which in turn is extremely important for soldiers’ interpretations of what they do. This central role can be gleaned from phrases like the “dirty work” or the “fine job” done by the Luftwaffe that recur in the soldiers’ conversations. The interpretive paradigm from industrial society for how soldiers experienced and dealt with war also informs philosopher Ernst Jünger’s famous description of soldiers as “workers of war.” In Jünger’s words, war appears as a “rational work process equally far removed from feelings of horror and romanticism” and the use of weapons as “the extension of a customary activity at the workbench.”²³