Soldaten

Our aim in this book is to reconstruct and describe these frameworks in order to understand what the soldiers’ world was like, how they saw themselves and their enemies, what they thought about Adolf Hitler and Nazism, and why they continued fighting, even when the war seemed already lost. We want to examine what was “National Socialist” about these reference frameworks and to determine whether the largely jovial men in the POW camps were indeed “ideological warriors” who set out in a “war of annihilation” to commit racist crimes and stage massacres. To what extent do these men conform to the category, popularized by Daniel Goldhagen in the 1990s, of “willing executioners”? Or, alternatively, do they more greatly resemble the more differentiated, morally ambiguous picture of Wehrmacht soldiers that has emerged from the popular historical exhibits by the Hamburg Institute for Social Research and countless historical examinations? Today’s conventional wisdom is that Wehrmacht soldiers were part of a gigantic apparatus of annihilation and thus were participants in, if not executioners of, unparalleled mass murder. There is no doubt that the Wehrmacht was involved in criminal acts, from the killing of civilians to the systematic murder of Jewish men, women, and children. But that tells us nothing about how individual soldiers were involved in such criminality, or about the relationship they themselves had toward their deeds—whether they committed crimes willingly, grudgingly, or not at all. The material here gives detailed information about the relationships between individuals and their actions and challenges our common assumptions about “the Wehrmacht.”

One fact needs to be acknowledged. Whatever they may encounter, human beings are never unbiased. Instead, they perceive everything through specific filters. Every culture, historical epoch, or economic system—in short every form of existence—influences the patterns of perception and interpretation and thus steers how individuals perceive and interpret experiences and events. The surveillance protocols reflect, in real time, how German soldiers saw and commonly understood World War II. We will show that their observations and conversations are not what we would usually imagine—in part because they, unlike we today, did not know how the war would end and what would become of the Third Reich and its Führer. The soldiers’ future, both real and imaginary, is our past, but for them it was an unfinished book. Most of the soldiers are scarcely interested in ideology, politics, world orders, and anything of that nature. They wage war not out of conviction, but because they are soldiers, and fighting is their job.

Many of them are anti-Semites, but that is not identical with being “Nazis.” Nor does anti-Semitism have anything to do with willingness to kill. A substantial number of the soldiers hate “the Jews” but are shocked at the mass executions by firing squads. Some are clear “anti-Nazis” but support the anti-Jewish policies of Hitler’s regime. Quite a few are scandalized at hundreds of thousands of Russian POWs being allowed to starve to death, but do not hesitate to shoot POWs themselves if it seems too time-consuming or dangerous to guard or transport them. Some complain that Germans are too “humane” and then tell in the same breath and in great detail how they mowed down entire villages. Many conversations feature a lot of boasting and chest-puffing, but this goes well beyond today’s males’ bragging about themselves or their cars. Soldiers frequently seek to rack up points with tales of extreme violence, of the women they raped, the planes they shot down, or the merchant ships they sank. On occasion, we were able to determine that such stories were untrue and intended to make an impression, even by relating, for instance, how they sank a ship that was transporting children. That is beyond the pale today, but the parameters of what could be and was said then were different from what obtains today, as are the things which they hoped would elicit admiration and respect. Acts of violence, back then, belonged to that category. Most of the soldiers’ stories may initially seem contradictory, but only if we assume that people act in accordance with their “attitudes,” and that those attitudes are closely connected with ideologies, theories, and grand convictions.

In reality, people act as they think is expected of them. Such perceived expectations have a lot less to do with abstract “views of the world” than with concrete places, purposes, and functions—and above all with the groups of which individual people are a part.