Soldaten

The material, psychological, and social integration of the majority, together with the simultaneous deintegration of those excluded from the Volk, fundamentally changed social values. In 1933, the majority of German citizens would not have been able to conceive that a few years later, with greater or lesser participation by the majority, German Jews would be stripped of their rights and worldly possessions, and then deported to extermination camps. We can sense the enormity of the change in social values, if we imagine what would have happened if the deportations had commenced in February 1933, immediately after Hitler assumed power. The deviation from the accepted norms of the majority would have been too severe to proceed smoothly. Indeed, Nazi ideologues had yet to even formulate the sequence: exclusion—loss of rights—disappropriation—deportation—extermination. In 1933, this sequence may well have been unthinkable. Yet eight years later, such inhuman treatment of others had become part of what ordinary Germans expected, and thus few found it exceptional. People collectively—each in his own individual, more or less committed, skeptical, or disinterested way—produced a common social reality.

Changes in social practice were a major driving force. There were no public protests against the Nazis’ anti-Jewish policies, nor was there significant popular complaint at the concrete discrimination suffered by German Jews. This does not mean that most Germans approved of anti-Semitic repression, but Germans’ passivity, their toleration of repression, and their restriction of criticism to the private realm of their peers translated politically initiated discrimination into everyday social practice. It would overestimate ideology and play down the practical participation of ordinary community members if we were to reduce the changes in the mentality structure within Nazi society to the propagandistic, legislative, and executive acts of the regime. The active interworking of political initiative, private adaptation, and practical realization was what allowed the National Socialist project to engender such surprisingly rapid consensus. The Third Reich could be called a participatory dictatorship, in which members of the Volk community cheerfully did their bit, even if they weren’t committed Nazis.

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.

FRAME OF REFERENCE: WAR