Soldaten

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.”⁶⁷ 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).⁶⁸

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.”⁶⁹ 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.”⁷⁰

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.”⁷¹ 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,”⁷² 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.⁷³ 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.⁷⁴