Soldaten

The laconic nature of the above exchange is what makes it so remarkable. While Bassus looks for reasons for the destruction of European Jews, Lieutenant Thöne repeatedly points out that the phenomenon needs no justification. Hatred is enough of a spark, without any further motivation such as the alleged danger represented by Jews or their purported hatred for Germans. Even more astonishing is Thöne’s assertion that German hatred is not a reason, but a sheer fact. It’s hard to imagine a clearer formulation of what autotelic violence is, and it points up one finding about the deep psychological effect of National Socialist ideology on the soldiers subjected to surveillance. Ideology was not prominent among the things that occupied soldiers’ minds. Many soldiers may have been perfectly willing to use violence to solve the alleged “Jewish question,” but an astonishing number of them were explicitly against it. But for all of them, the existence of the question was a given, regardless of whether they as individuals thought the Nazis’ anti-Jewish policies were good or bad, right or wrong.

THE SPECTRUM OF OPINION

In April 1943, after reading the nineteenth-century German poet Heinrich Heine, First Lieutenant Fried remarked: “They say that the Jews weren’t able to master the German language in literature and so on. But the ‘Journey through the Harz’ is marvellous.”^{528}

A few months earlier a low-level officer named Wehner* declared: “When I meet a Jew I could shoot him out of hand. The number of Jews we killed in POLAND! We did them in mercilessly.”^{529}

Both statements were made around roughly the same time by two members of the same branch of the military, the Luftwaffe. So is it fair to say that Fried represented humanistic Germany whereas Wehner was an anti-Semitic ideological warrior? Our material provides no evidence that enjoying Heine’s “Journey Through the Harz” was any indication of whether or not someone was capable of murdering Jews. Conversely, of course, we can conclude that Wehner was fanatic enough to refuse to read books by Jewish authors (his other statements confirm this). The juxtaposition of these two excerpts indicated the spectrum of opinion expressed in the protocols about Jews and racism in general. On the one hand, the transcripts contain praise for Heine and Jewish doctors, chemists, and physicists as well as emotional rejections of the Holocaust and the persecution of Jews in general.^{530} On the other, the protocols are also full of theories about a global Jewish conspiracy, including “Jewified” England and America, as well as tales of glee after killing Jews.^{531} In short the transcripts contain just about everything under the sun. Moreover, contradictory opinions were not only expressed by two or more POWs in dialogue. As we saw in the section on the Holocaust, single individuals often used seeming mutually exclusive arguments and expressed diametrically opposed perspectives. “The Nazis are worse swine than the Jews,”^{532} remarked one POW, while another opined, “The Japanese are the Jews of the east.”^{533}

Some statements indicate how far the anti-Semitic imagination was given free rein:

Other utterances were nothing short of absurd: “I am the ping-pong champion of Western Germany. But I am out of practice. I gave up the game after a typical Jew-boy—sixteen years old—had beaten me. Then I said to myself: ‘That is certainly not real sport!’”^{535} Conversations about racial issues or “the Jews” have the same basic structure as other exchanges. Remarks are interjected, and stories told, before the POWs change the subject. Such conversations aimed primarily at establishing consensus and did not admit of one side insisting on a point, doggedly asking questions, or arguing. In the main, a unity of perspective and political evaluation was quickly established, and in any case soldiers did not see topics dealing with Jews as particularly important. If the topics were broached, soldiers usually had an opinion, but no one seems to have been particularly eager to bring them up.

That impression is confirmed by a detailed analysis carried out by Alexander Hoerkens, who examined the role of ideology in two thousand pages of transcripts from the protocols. He determined that less than one fifth of the excerpts concerned political, racial, or ideological topics.^{536} The everyday routine of the war was far more important to POWs. With a few notable exceptions, the “Jewish” topic was just another subject of conversation, and it was treated as such by both hard-core anti-Semites and enthusiastic exterminators and those who were generally repulsed by Nazi crimes. When the talk did turn to the mass executions, the conversation was often about fears of reprisals: “Don’t you think that the shooting of all those Jews, of women and children, will be avenged? My brother, who is an infantryman, has told me a lot about how they were pushed into the graves before they were really dead.”^{537}

Just as there were some committed National Socialists who thought the persecution of Jews was a historical mistake, there were also clear anti-Nazis who thought anti-Semitism was the party’s only reasonable policy. Two soldiers, for instance, got quite hot under the collar when discussing “the Nazis”:

From this excerpt one would expect such frank critics of the Nazi regime to be against the party’s anti-Semitic policies. But the conversation takes the following turn:

Today, the argumentative mix found in the protocols is dumbfounding. One reason is the very nature of everyday conversations. As the nineteenth-century German author Heinrich von Kleist already sensed, much of what we think only gets “finished” in the act of speech.^{539} Opinions and attitudes do not simply exist a priori of concrete social interactions, like objects in a drawer that one can take out at will. Often, thoughts first coalesce in conversation, one word following the other, and they do not exist for very long. Under the influence of mood, a need for consensus, or a misapprehension, or because the conversation is just idle chatter, people sometimes try out opinions or thoughts that they will discard the next time they converse with someone. For that reason, real arguments are rare in the protocols, despite the fact that the men concerned did not come together of their own free will, and the amount of time they were forced to spend together would otherwise encourage conflicts. Of course, there were a few genuine arguments of the “I beg to differ” variety^{540} and at least one running feud of the sort that can happen between people sharing an apartment.^{541} This shows that arguments were in fact recorded and thus happened very rarely. As in all other everyday conversational situations, soldiers might agree with an opinion only to reject it in their next conversation, and the desire to establish a relationship was often far more significant than the content of what was said.

COHERENT PICTURES OF THE WORLD

The vagaries of human conversation make it difficult to determine how deeply anchored bits of National Socialist ideology were in the consciousness of POWs. We can only say for sure that ideology played a role in absolutely unambiguous statements. An example is this one by nineteen-year-old navy midshipman Karl Völker:

Völker was the classic ideological warrior of the sort Daniel Goldhagen envisions: a willing executioner, driven by delusional eliminatory and pornographic visions of violence, who gave his all to exterminate Jews. Völker’s tales, which elicit a skeptical response from his listener, are most likely the result of an intensive study of the SS magazine Der Stürmer and anti-Semitic group training in the Hitler Youth. Such stories may seem completely bizarre, but the speaker here both believes in and draws conclusions from them. People like Völker did indeed exist.

In the minds of most of the POWs, though, National Socialism was something different than the piecemeal, if internally consistent, theory about the “eternal laws of life” one can read out of the writings and speeches of everyone from Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg to Hitler himself. Hoerkens’s analysis concludes, on the basis of conversations between 621 soldiers, that the majority tended to view Nazi racial policies negatively and that only 30 of them could be described as ideological warriors. Junior officers, above all lieutenants, made up the lion’s share of this minority. They were still children in 1933 and thus had been socialized most intensely by the Third Reich.^{543} It is among them that we can best speak of a Nazi picture of the world.

When the rest of the soldiers talk about politics, race, Jews, and related topics, it is not a coherent worldview but rather a patchwork of diverse and often contradictory fragments. Committed National Socialists were able to tell stories full of empathy about Jews they had known personally and express dismay at the “scandalous treatment” of the minority by a “cultured people.” At the same time, there was a basic level of agreement with Nazi racial policies, as the example of navy W/T operator Hammacher in May 1943 shows:

Examples concerning the “Jewish actions” have already revealed that soldiers could be critical of the methods employed for mass executions, while feeling indifferent to or even supportive of the executions themselves. The same applied to ideology and racism in general. Negative opinions predominated on these topics. “I have always been opposed to those SS swine,” a Lieutenant Oehlmann opined. “I was always against the persecution of the Jews, too. One should have been able to exile the Jews but one shouldn’t have treated them like that.”^{545} This was hardly a fundamental rejection of anti-Semitic policies, although views on the topic grew more and more critical as confidence in victory dissolved. “It will be a disgrace being a German after the war,” one POW complained. “We’ll be as much hated as the Jews were.”^{546} “The greatest mistake was the expulsion of the Jews,” seconded another. “That and particularly the inhuman treatment,” agreed a third.^{547}

In general, we can assume that such topics were most often broached by those who objected to the persecution and execution of Jews, while those to whom the Final Solution seemed necessary would have spoken up less often. Phrases liked “international” or “world Jewry” or “Jewified” England and America—together with stereotypes such as Jews being “work-shy”—occur with regularity. The reference frame of categorical inequality and the everyday anti-Semitic practice clearly had a deep psychological effect on POWs. Nonetheless, it still remains largely uncertain what that meant for the men’s perception and behavior in concrete situations. The capacity of attitudes and mental dispositions to inspire action is often overrated. They only predispose individuals to anti-Semitic behavior in extreme cases, such as the navy man cited above. It would require intense analysis of concrete situations to determine whether someone killed Jews out of anti-Semitic conviction or as a result of group dynamics. Sometimes, peer pressure made people into mass murderers without any sort of individual motivation on their own part. This conclusion is supported by evidence from the Wehrmacht, including the various positions and situations in which soldiers found themselves. Anti-Semitism may have been one basis for what they did when they battled, retreated, fought against partisans, and spent their free time, but it was not a sole motivation. As exemplified in POWs’ remarks about the Jewish ghettos, many of the men felt some empathy with the victims and were shocked at their living conditions: “These Jews were doing hard labour there at the main airport and were treated badly, like animals.”^{548} But that sympathy did not have any consequences in terms of the question of whether they would carry out or refuse an order to secure a ghetto.

For instance, a Lieutenant Rottländer told of a friend who had suffered after having participated in a mass execution:

Rottländer’s listener, Lieutenant Borbonus, has an immediate response: “Well, what on earth can you do if it is ordered by higher authority?”^{549}

When there was sufficient distance between the speaker and the events described, POWs related news of atrocities in much the same tone that people today talk about child soldiers in Africa or bestial deeds of the Taliban. We may find certain acts terrible, but our frame of reference for atrocities is abstract and doesn’t have much to do with our own lives or those of our interlocutors. An engineer who designs mobile phones does not perceive himself as being connected with the fact that coltan, essential to modern telecommunications, is strip-mined in war-torn Congo. Likewise, soldiers were not personally affected if Jews were being slaughtered somewhere else by others. The same distance applies, mutatis mutandis, for ideological and racist concepts. It is unclear how such concepts related to what they did in World War II. Take, for example, Heinrich Skrzipek, chief quartermaster of U-187:

Even if most of the racist stereotypes used in the protocols are anti-Jewish, the things POWs said reflected the entire spectrum of Nazi prejudice. Stereotypes are applied to Germany’s allies (“Those yellow monkeys aren’t human beings; they are still animals”;^{551} “The Italians themselves don’t know what they want. They’re a stupid race”^{552}) and its enemies (“I can’t even look on a Russian as a human being”;^{553} “Poles! Russians! There’s a lousy crowd working in there”^{554}) alike.

Racism could even serve as the basis for a surprisingly melancholic statement on the postwar future: “One thing is obvious: EUROPE will perish, regardless of whether the Germans or the English are beaten, as these two races are the props of culture and civilisation. It is tragic that such prominent races should have to fight each other instead of fighting Slavdom together.”^{555} Stereotypes and prejudices are constant elements of cultures, and they shape individuals’ orientation and group social practice.^{556} In a society in which categorical inequality directs state policy, is considered a scientific standard, and is bolstered by massive propaganda, collective stereotypes are cemented. Nonetheless, as our sources show, this did not happen to the extent that Goebbels, Himmler, or Hitler would have liked and that Holocaust research long declared it did. Ideology is merely the basis of attitudes, and we know little about whether those attitudes in fact inspired action.

Conversely, we can say that the ideology of fundamental human inequality made antisocial behavior toward oppressed groups seem acceptable and even desirable. That is why sympathy with adversaries and victims, although present in protocols, was the exception and not the rule.

Astonishingly, a concept that does not occur at all in our sources is the idea of the Volk community. Considering how much attention has been given to this psychosocial category in recent research on Germans in the Third Reich, it is surprising that soldiers never once refer to what should be a central aspect of their mentality.^{557} Nor does the concept crop up in other sources, such as reports on state-sponsored “Strength Through Joy” vacations and other Nazi social provisions. This is even more baffling since the Volk community reflected civilian and not military organizational structures. The complete absence of this phrase should make future researchers skeptical about the extent to which such integrative elements permeated Nazi society.

All in all, in terms of soldiers’ mentality, we cannot say that the majority felt they were waging an “eliminatory” or a “racial” war. Above all, they were oriented around a military and wartime frame of reference in which ideology played only a subordinate role. But they also waged war within the frame of reference of their society, a National Socialist one, which in certain situations led them to act in radically inhumane fashion. Nonetheless, to perpetrate atrocities—and this is what is most disconcerting—soldiers did not need to be either racist or anti-Semitic.

MILITARY VALUES

Far more important than ideology for soldiers’ perceptions and interpretations, and thus for their concrete decisions and actions, was their military value system. It was firmly integrated into their frame of reference. Germany’s militaristic tradition had greatly eased the incorporation of millions of men into the Wehrmacht. They were already familiar with the system of norms that awaited them in the barracks. Although most of them were conscripts, they were more than willing as a rule to adapt to the military framework and carry out their tasks as well as they could. Skilled carpenters, bookkeepers, and farmers wanted to become good tank drivers, gunners, and infantrymen. This meant learning the concrete basics of the military craft, perfecting the use of weapons, and becoming obedient, disciplined, and hard. They wanted to achieve victories, demonstrate bravery and a willingness to sacrifice, and fight down to the last bullet in case of defeat. Ever since the wars of 1864–71 had unified the German nation, there had been a broad consensus in German society about what soldiers were supposed to be.

Germans’ sense of positive identification with the armed forces was reinforced both by Germany’s military triumphs early on in World War II and by internal structures within the Wehrmacht that promoted meritocracy. All soldiers were given the same food to eat, all were eligible for the same medals, and all were encouraged to take on responsibility, if they demonstrated leadership qualities. The high degree to which soldiers identified with the military is evident in countless conversations among POWs. They loved talking about how their units were structured and armed, how various forms of organization had fared in combat, what sort of training they had received, how their weapons worked, and what sort of promotions and distinctions they had earned. The POWs presented themselves as masters of their trades, committed, proud of their units and weapons, and irritated when things did not go according to plan. The military was viewed as something self-evident, as a world to which one belonged and in which one had found one’s true place.

Nonetheless, soldiers accepted norms and values like obedience, bravery, and devotion to duty so unquestioningly that they rarely mentioned them explicitly. The only ones who did so were high-ranking officers who had reason to reflect on general questions about normative issues. Colonel General Hans-Jürgen von Arnim, for instance, remarked: “A soldier who doesn’t stand firm is no soldier, and the more confused things are around him, the firmer he must stand—mentally.”^{558} Arnim was referring to the obedience and devotion to duty. These were all the more necessary in difficult times, as he himself had just experienced in the course of German defeat in Africa. Colonel Reimann, who was interned with Arnim in Trent Park, described the Wehrmacht’s mental corset in even more vivid terms: “We would do what our superiors, who have one star more [say]. We would do what our superior officers ordered us.” Reimann added that it was a “racial peculiarity of the Germans, when they are soldiers, that they obey orders.”^{559} Whether or not Germans were particularly and excessively obedient, though, is an open question.

In any case, obedience was seen as a higher virtue than reflecting on whether military actions made sense. Captain Hartdegen, for example, said of his time in the staff of a tank training division in Normandy in 1944: “We used to sit down together in the evening with the ‘General’ and his senior commanders, and we always used to say: ‘Has the FÜHRER gone mad—these orders which he demands of us.’ We carried them out, just because we had been properly educated.”^{560} Irmfried Wilimzig, a critic of the Nazis who was interned at Fort Hunt in the United States, concurred: “Orders are orders, that’s self-evident, especially at the front.”^{561} Although the Wehrmacht also tried to teach soldiers to think and act for themselves, obedience remained one of its most important norms. Refusing an order was considered an utterly unacceptable deviation, which threatened the very foundation of the army. The imperative to obey bound soldiers together less because they were afraid of being punished than because it was a firmly anchored rule in their frame of reference. Major Leonhard Mayer told a bunkmate in a U.S. POW camp about the following incident at the Battle of Cherbourg:

Major Mayer found himself in a moral dilemma, faced with what he calls a “thankless destiny.” He had to choose between following orders and trying to preserve the lives of comrades whom he had known for years and for whom he was responsible. He wanted to be a good commander who stood by his men and shared their suffering, and he realized that more and more of them were being killed because he as a commander refused to break off the one-sided battle. But disobeying orders was out of the question. Obedience and duty were his highest priority. This becomes especially evident in his remark that he would have behaved exactly the same had he been a member of the Red Army. Only when his troop was down to the last thirty men, Mayer reports later on in the protocols, did he give up the fight. Otherwise, they would have all been simply slaughtered. It was impossible for him to violate orders until his unit had, for all practical purposes, ceased to exist and his own life was jeopardized. Technically speaking, though, he had not followed instructions down to the letter. For that reason, he thinks he could theoretically be brought up for court-martial.

We do not know the details of how Mayer’s unit really behaved in battle in June 1944. It’s possible that he also suffered pangs of conscience because in reality some of his men had deserted or surrendered long before he was down to his last thirty soldiers, as he claimed. Nonetheless, his anecdote is an example of the immense importance that the officer corps, in particular, attached to obedience and duty. Only in extreme emergency situations, at the very last second, one could say, was it possible for them to break free from this reference frame. Interestingly, politics had very little influence on the attitudes of men like Mayer. There was no shortage of critics of the regime who complained about the misfortune the Nazis had brought down upon Germany and yet were outraged when infantrymen surrendered without any stiff resistance.^{563}

In soldiers’ frames of reference, bravery was just as universal a virtue as obedience and sense of duty. Bravery was the primary reflection of an individual’s performance insofar as most soldiers, unlike Luftwaffe pilots, could not measure themselves on the basis of enemies killed or tanks destroyed. Land warfare was the sum of many smaller parts, and there were no concrete results of individual actions. Bravery was the only criterion. The standard against which infantrymen were judged was their ability to keep fighting and carry out their tasks under the most difficult circumstances.

For example, a First Lieutenant Gayer reported about his deployment on the Italian Front:

Gayer’s story contrasts the behavior of his own soldiers with that of the Italians, among whom even the lieutenant ran away. By contrast, the Germans, if Gayer is to be believed, held out for ten days before the unit was wiped out by murderous artillery fire. The image of soldiers courageously fighting on under the most difficult, deadly conditions recurs throughout the surveillance protocols.

Combat soldiers, especially those who had been part of elite units, told these sorts of stories most frequently. One of the most drastic narratives came from SS Standartenführer Hans Lingner, one of the few high-ranking SS officers to be captured by the Allies during the war. He reported proudly about the deeds of an Untersturmführer in his division:

The norm of fighting bravely on instead of surrendering can also be identified among noncombatants from the Wehrmacht. For instance, the POWs who complained most vehemently about the quick German capitulation in Paris on August 25, 1944, were army administrators.^{566}

Bravery, obedience, and devotion to duty were the major determining factors of how soldiers’ behavior was perceived,^{567} and this matrix of values remained stable over the entire course of the war. Individual biographical and political elements played almost no role whatsoever. Military values were just as important to those with Ph.D.’s in philosophy as to people who had worked in banks or bakeries—and just as significant for committed Social Democrats as for passionate Nazis. As much as the 17 million members of the Wehrmacht may have differed from one another socially, they consistently shared the same military value system during their time of service.

There were, however, interesting nuances between various branches of the military and soldiers who used different sorts of weaponry. Conversations between navy men emphasized bravery, pride, hardness, and discipline more than talk between airmen and army men did. First Lieutenant Hans Jenisch reported about the loss of U-32 in October 1940: “When our U-boat sank I heard a few shouts of ‘Heil Hitler,’ and some cheering in the distance, but some cried pitifully for help. Horrible! But there are always one or two who do that.”^{568} A private told in the same vein of the sinking of the blockade runner MS Alstertor: “During the fight we had some prisoners down under one of the hatches, and a guard was posted outside the door with pistol drawn and commanded not to open the door till the order was given. The officer who was to give the order was killed. The ship keeled over, but the guard remained standing there at his post, and neither he nor any of the prisoners got out. That’s what’s called doing one’s duty!”^{569}

There are many other examples of this sort illustrating the importance of military virtues in the stories told by navy POWs. Similar statements can be found among servicemen from other military branches, but there was good reason why they occurred so frequently among sailors. German navy men had rebelled against their commanders near the end of World War I, and the navy was, from the beginning of World War II, the least important branch of the German military. On September 3, 1939, the commander in chief of the navy, Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, deemed the coming struggle against Britain, a traditional sea power, to be so hopeless that all German sailors could do was “die with honor.”^{570} Raeder’s mood soon improved, and at one point he even believed that a blockade could bring England to its knees, but the navy leadership was also forced to try to bolster morale in special ways. Displaying particularly good morale was the navy’s lone trump card, the one way it had of achieving recognition within the state and the Wehrmacht in general. Nonetheless, as of 1943, the German navy descended into military insignificance. German battleships and destroyers were far inferior technologically to American and British warships, and the German navy lacked the necessary fuel to properly train sailors, so the Allies won almost all of the battles at sea. Notable successes failed to materialize. The Allies negated a slight German advantage in E-boats and U-boats with better radar and sonar technology. And the longer there was no positive news to report and the larger the enemy’s matériel and personnel advantage became, the more fighting became a value for its own sake.^{571} The Nazi leadership respected the navy in this regard,^{572} and the alleged extraordinary morale among German sailors was one of the main reasons Hitler chose Grand Admiral Dönitz to succeed him as Reich president.

DOWN TO THE FINAL BULLET

Especially in critical situations, military virtues were supposed to encourage soldiers to keep fighting to the very end. The model soldier was the one who battled, as the cliché had it, down to the very last bullet. Indeed, Wehrmacht regulation number 2 read: “It is expected of every German soldier that he prefers to die with a weapon in his hand to being captured. But in the vagaries of battles, even the bravest man may have the misfortune to be taken captive by the enemy.”^{574} In the first half of World War II, even if soldiers were made to swear an oath that they would sacrifice their lives for the Third Reich, the military leadership did not interpret this regulation literally.^{575} If a battle was lost from a tactical standpoint, soldiers were allowed to surrender. Fighting on was considered senseless, even if individual infantrymen still had ammunition in their belts.

Yet as the war turned for the worse, the German military leadership became more radical in its demands that soldiers fight on until the bitter end. In the final phase of the war, this trope became emblematic for the Wehrmacht as a whole. The German setbacks before Moscow in the winter of 1941–42 were the beginning of a transition whereby soldiers were no longer just supposed to fight until a battle had been decided, but to continue “fanatically” until they were killed.

On December 16, 1941, Hitler reacted to the deteriorating situation of Army Group Center on the Eastern Front by ordering: “Commanders, unit leaders and officers are to take personal steps to force troops to engage in fanatic resistance in holding their positions, without regard to enemy breakthroughs on the flanks or from the rear.”^{576} Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel added ten days later: “Every foot of territory is to be fought for with every ounce of energy.”^{577} Military commanders on the ground initially welcomed these general orders in the belief that they would help quell panic among exhausted soldiers. But opposition quickly arose when the orders were put into concrete practice. Colonel Erich Hoepner remarked: “Fanatic will alone isn’t enough…. The fanatic resistance that’s being demanded only leads to the sacrificing of defenseless troops.”^{578} German generals refused to accept stand-and-die commands because the death of their soldiers on the battlefield, under the conditions the army was facing, did not promise to yield any military advantages. Hitler remained adamant, however, and replaced those commanders who did not submit to his dictates. Hitler credited his uncompromising order for the fact that the Soviet counteroffensive before Moscow was halted in February 1942. That counterstrike was the first crisis faced by the Wehrmacht, and Hitler was convinced that it made military sense to sacrifice troops in precarious situations.^{579} Henceforth, he demanded that soldiers fight fanatically, down to the last bullet, no matter how critical their situation, and he insisted that his commands be carried out to the letter. On November 3, 1942, when Field Marshal Erwin Rommel wanted to withdraw from El Alamein in Egypt, the dictator explicitly forbade any sort of retreat. “Strength of will shall win out over the stronger battalion,” Hitler wrote. “There’s no other path to show your troops other than victory or death.”^{580} With support from his superior, Albert Kesselring, Rommel refused to follow this suicide command and ordered his troops to retreat. He was not principally concerned with saving the lives of individual soldiers. In other situations, Rommel had no scruples about sending men to their certain deaths. In April and May 1941, he had ordered part of his forces to launch a militarily irrational attack on the stronghold of Tobruk in Libya and accused Lieutenant General Heinrich Kirchheim of being a coward for refusing to sacrifice his men. But by November 1942, Rommel could see no military sense in having his divisions hold out in their current positions. Hitler had a different opinion. His command that German troops hold their ground in Africa had a narrow military goal and a larger aim. On the one hand, the dictator believed that sheer force of will could hold back the British 8th Army. And on the other hand, he saw a deeper meaning in soldiers sacrificing their lives. In Hitler’s mind, the willingness to do so was a precondition of national unity.^{581}

Rommel’s disobedience prevented German tank divisions in Africa from being completely destroyed in November 1942. He was subsequently transferred and thus did not witness their ultimate end in Tunisia in May 1943. Hitler strictly ruled out Rommel’s suggestion that Army Group Africa be withdrawn to Europe and instead ordered the troops to fight to the death. Knowing all too well what was being asked of him, the commander of the German Afrika Korps, Hans Cramer, relayed by radio on May 9, 1943: “Ammunition gone. Weapons and equipment destroyed. DAK [German Afrika Korps] fought until unable as per orders.”^{582} Cramer was taken prisoner by the British and interned in Trent Park. Because he suffered from serious asthma, the plan was to repatriate him in February 1944. But he soon began to wonder how, if he returned to Germany, he would explain to Hitler “why things collapsed so quickly.” What worried him the most was that the command to fight to the last bullet had not been carried out: “My division commanders asked me over and over whether this could be changed, and I said ‘No.’… But the end looked as though we had surrendered with bullets in our guns, in our machine guns and our tanks.” The idea of “to the last bullet,” Cramer told fellow POW General Crüwell, “is relative. You could just as well say ‘to the last tank-busting grenade.’”^{583} Cramer refused to enter into a fight “with pistols against tanks” or a “final infantry battle” that seemed to make no military sense. Once the battle had been decided from a tactical perspective, he had “handed over” his troops to the enemy—something he did not want to admit to the Führer. Crüwell advised him not to speak of “handing over,” but rather only of the “end.”^{584}

If General Cramer suffered from pangs of conscience about not completely fulfilling his duty, Colonel Meyne was positively outraged about the form the “final battle” took in Tunisia. It was, he complained, unprecedented in German military history, a capitulation that was “depressing” in a way the German defeat at Stalingrad had not been. The demise of the 6th Army had been sad, Meyne opined, but “they fought to the last, allowed themselves to be fired on from all sides in the tightest space and held out for who knows how long. Only when nothing more was possible, did they capitulate.” The situation in Africa, Meyne said, was completely different. “It is shattering how many officers give up fighting,” Meyne complained. “They simply lose desire. They’ve had enough.” The Führer’s command to fight down to the last bullet had been passed on to the Wehrmacht’s African divisions, but they had only answered “Where is the ammunition?” In the end, on May 8, 1943, the supreme commander of the 5th Tank Army, Lieutenant General Gustav von Vaerst, had simply ordered: “Pleinouvoir—as long as you can, and then stop.”^{585}

The POWs’ tales suggest that most officers interpreted the order to fight until the last bullet in terms of conventional military logic. Hitler, meanwhile, had divorced himself from traditional tactics. He wanted to see sacrifice for its own sake. Goebbels took a similar view in June 1944, when he wrote: “We are not fighting down to the last bullet for the sake of our own lives. We’re fighting down to the last drop of blood or breath…. There’s only one either—or situation, life or death.”^{586} The Wehrmacht adapted to this apocalyptic rhetoric. In summer 1944, officers in charge of the Atlantic bunkers had to swear an oath to defend their position to the last man.^{587} Excuses such as not having any ammunition or supplies would lead to them being “relieved [of command] in the sharpest fashion.”^{588} On July 21, 1944, Field Marshal Günther von Kluge reported to Hitler about the hopeless military situation in Normandy: “We will hold our positions, and if no support arrives to improve our situation, then we’ll have to die with honor.”^{589} These lines were no doubt intended to placate the Führer and conceal Kluge’s knowledge of two failed plans to assassinate Hitler. But Kluge’s report does show what the highest-ranking German military officers believed the Führer wanted to hear. As the Allies advanced to the borders of Germany proper in fall 1944, the Wehrmacht chiefs of staff officially introduced “a duty to go down fighting.”^{590} Field commanders were forbidden to capitulate even when the tactical situation was hopeless.^{591}

It remains to be seen whether the idea of truly fighting down to the bitter end really was anchored in the frame of reference of mid-level officers and ordinary soldiers. Regulations governed nearly everything in soldiers’ lives, from the cut of their uniforms to the use of weapons and conduct in battle. But there were no regulations governing capitulation. No rules stated when and how one was allowed to surrender. The ideas of the military leadership remained largely abstract to low-ranking soldiers in the heat of battle. Defeat on the battlefield was a moment of disorientation, in which group behavior became especially important. Soldiers fought as one, and mostly they were captured in groups.

First Sergeant Renner of Luftwaffe Reconnaissance Regiment 7, for instance, was unwilling to fight down to the last bullet in the Battle of Cherbourg in June 1944:

Renner repeatedly returned to German lines and saved the lives of 282 men, who became POWs. This case is a perfect example of how soldiers oriented themselves around how their comrades behaved. Renner had enough authority to assert himself against those who wanted to defend their positions to the last man. As soon as the first soldiers began to follow him, the ice was broken, and more and more began surrendering. Because the commanding officer was hiding in his bunker, Renner could exploit his men’s lack of orientation and show them a way out. This story would no doubt have turned out differently had a charismatic officer taken the lead and ordered the men to fight down to the last bullet.

Soldiers’ will to survive and the group dynamic of combat situations explain why, even during the early victorious phase of World War II, units of up to two hundred men sometimes surrendered, refusing, much to the dismay of the Nazi leadership, to fight to the last. Yet soldiers’ occasional violation of a military norm does not mean that the “last bullet” trope failed to establish itself.^{593} The surveillance protocols show that it was anchored as a central point of orientation in German soldiers’ frame of reference and did influence their behavior.

For example, a Captain Gundlach from the 716th Infantry Division reported the following about soldiers defending their positions in the village of Ouistreham in Normandy on June 6, 1944:

In his account, Gundlach continued to fight regardless of whether he could actually inflict any damage on the enemy. After the British began using flamethrowers and soldiers started passing out due to the heat and lack of oxygen, though, he felt he had done his duty. Gundlach fought up until a recognizable point, the moment when his men became incapable of defending themselves, before saying “No, we can’t have that.” Private First Class Lorch of the 266th Infantry Division tells much the same story about his capture near Saint-Lô in mid-July 1944. Initially his unit was forbidden to surrender. But “when our ammunition ran out,” Lorch related, “our commander said: ‘Now they can go kiss our asses.’”^{595}

Conversations among POWs taken captive during the German defense of Cherbourg in late July 1944 illustrate the relevance of the “fighting-to-the-bitter-end” idea as a norm for action. The soldiers knew that the loss of the city meant a huge setback for the Wehrmacht. And they repeatedly insisted both that the stronghold could not be defended by a ragtag and poorly equipped force, and that they themselves were not to blame for its rapid fall. Instead soldiers accused others of not fighting until the end. Colonel Walter Köhn, for example, said:

The surveillance protocols are not the only source in which members of the Wehrmacht speak with outrage at the behavior of German soldiers at Cherbourg as a violation of military norms. With obvious annoyance, the port commander navy captain Hermann Witt relayed to Paris that a Major General Sattler had needlessly surrendered with four hundred men.^{597} What irritated Witt was not capitulation in and of itself, but the fact that Sattler allegedly gave up without a compelling reason. For Witt, that was a sign of a total moral collapse. “It was JENA and AUERSTÄDT all over again,” he complained a short time later as a POW, referring to Prussian troops’ historic defeats in the Napoleonic Wars.^{598} Saving soldiers’ lives in a lopsided battle was of no concern to many officers in Cherbourg. It was noted with satisfaction that the unit under the command of First Lieutenant Hermann Keil had held out to the very end at Cap de la Hague: “One can only say that our troops behaved in a most exemplary manner right to the last moment; their morale and behaviour were excellent.”^{599}

Most soldiers showed at least a theoretical desire to hold out to the last. Nonetheless, situational factors, personal dispositions, and group dynamics often led to flexible interpretations of what that meant. Witt, the last man to surrender at Cherbourg, claimed he had fulfilled this ideal, as did Brigadier Botho Elster, who surrendered together with his twenty-thousand-strong troop at the Loire bridge in Beaugency on September 16, 1944, without firing a shot. Elster argued that he and his men had done everything they could to push through to the east, and that failings by the military high command had left him with no means of waging an honorable battle against the enemy.^{600}

Regardless of how they had actually behaved, soldiers stylized their actions as fighting to the bitter end. One example of this is the bold tones used in radio messages by high-ranking officers to their superiors, shortly before they capitulated. The verbal noise such exchanges produced allowed both sides to tell themselves they were conforming to norms. And in fact, some of the men involved received coveted medals or promotions for their behavior.^{601}

The need to depict one’s own conduct as honorable automatically led soldiers to differentiate their own behavior from that of others. Soldiers occasionally accused comrades from other branches of the military, or those of different ranks, of cowardice. One private, for instance, complained in July 1944: “The officers at CHERBOURG were a cowardly lot. One of them was to come before a court-martial of Naval Civilian officials because he intended deserting. They never even got as far as the proceedings because those officers were in their shelters and hadn’t the nerve to come out. The whole thing was dropped on that account. They had, however, the nerve to issue orders like: ‘We’ll fight to the last man!’”^{602} The private blamed the officers for his unit’s defeat: “At CHERBOURG our officers had packed their trunks days beforehand in readiness to be taken prisoner. If our officers hadn’t been such cowards, CHERBOURG would never have fallen the way it did.”^{603} Officers, of course, put things precisely the other way around. Colonel Köhn, for instance, complained, “When the CO and the officer were there the men held out, but the moment they had gone…”^{604} After the Wehrmacht rapidly lost Paris, some officers carped that they, the officers, had been the only ones who defended German control of the city. They, in the officers’ own accounts, could at least say with good conscience that they had fought to the last.^{605}

The arguments used were similar throughout the ranks, but the surveillance protocols demonstrate that the need to portray one’s own conduct as conforming to military norms increased the higher ranked an individual was. As a POW, Witt even used letters to his wife to report in secret codes to Grand Admiral Dönitz about his battle on the breakwater at Cherbourg.^{606} Other high-ranking officers boasted that their troops had been the last ones to capitulate.^{607} Major General Erwin Menny, who was captured by Canadian troops in Falaise and sent to a U.S. POW camp, noted in his diary in November 1944:

In Menny’s eyes, generals were subject to special rules of conduct. A general was supposed to fight to the last, preferably with a weapon in his hand, and seek out death rather than being captured. If he capitulated at all, then only after being wounded. Menny added with pride that he had refused to raise his hands when he surrendered.

Generals Thoma and Crüwell, despite being diametrically opposed in their politics, reacted with similar outrage when they read in Trent Park of Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus allowing himself to be taken prisoner in Stalingrad. “I should have blown my brains out. I am bitterly disappointed, bitterly disappointed!” Crüwell fumed, before adding, “I think the fact that you and I were captured is a different matter and there is no comparison.”^{609} Both men stress that they battled to the end before falling into enemy hands. Thoma reported that gunfire had forced him out of his tank and that an enemy bullet had passed through his cap. But the fashion in which Paulus had surrendered had nothing heroic about it. In Thoma’s and Crüwell’s minds, Paulus had violated the norm in two respects. Thoma opined:

But the two men agreed that Italian generals had behaved far more disgracefully at the battle of El Alamein. Whereas Thoma claimed to have barely escaped from his tank with bullet holes in his uniform, the Italian generals “arrived in full dress with all their baggage. The English officers in CAIRO laughed at them. They arrived looking like COOK’s tourists with their luggage containing their peacetime uniforms. They immediately put on their peacetime uniforms. I immediately said: ‘Please don’t put me with them.’”^{611}

The expectation that high-ranking officers would lead by example and fight to the death also recurs throughout official Wehrmacht daily reports. On July 3, 1944, for example, one report read: “In heavy defensive fighting, the commanding generals, Lieutenant General Martinek and Artillery General Pfeiffer, together with Major General Schünemann, fulfilled their duty and died a hero’s death, fighting at the vanguard of their troops.”^{612}

Significantly, soldiers’ reflections on this topic rarely, if ever, include thoughts about whether their behavior was useful in an operative sense. Thoma never paused to consider what benefit it would have for him as a commanding general to be present on the most advanced line, and Menny never mulled over the question of whether his attempted escape was sensible or whether it merely condemned more of his men to death. Nor did Captain Gundlach ponder whether holding out in his bunker near Ouistreham did anything to delay the advance of British forces. Fighting sui generis needed no justification. Those who conformed to the norm, or at least told themselves they did, could feel good about themselves as soldiers and avoid recriminations following defeat.

Germany’s worsening fortunes only began to influence standards of normal soldierly behavior late in the war. The crushing defeat at Normandy may have convinced many soldiers that the war was lost, but they continued to believe that soldiers should fight bravely down to the very end. Only after the failed Ardennes Offensive did this imperative lose currency, as most soldiers realized that unconditional surrender was the only option, and Hitler largely lost his mythic aura.^{613} Masses of soldiers commenced a “tacit strike,” as General Edwin Graf von Rothkirch reported on March 9, 1945, in Trent Park: “They just sit there and do nothing when the Americans arrive.”^{614}

This tendency should not, however, obscure the fact that some soldiers, depending on their situation and personal disposition, did put up fierce resistance to advancing Allied troops well into April 1945. If the social fabric of a combat unit remained intact, and if the soldiers felt they were still well equipped, they fought far more fiercely than one would expect in the final days of a lost war. An example was the performance of 2nd Navy Infantry Division south of Bremen in April 1945. The division consisted of leftover ships’ crewmen with little combat experience. Badly trained and equipped, they nonetheless fought with great energy and absorbed huge losses.^{615}

The higher an individual was ranked, the more difficult it was for him to divorce himself from the framework of military values. In Trent Park, German generals argued quite emotionally about what the Wehrmacht should do in the face of the catastrophic military situation. In late January 1945, General Heinrich Eberbach concisely summed up the basic poles of opinion:

Admittedly, once the Allies succeeded in crossing the Rhine in late March 1945, most soldiers distanced themselves from the idea of fighting with honor down to the final bullet. “I used to think it was wrong to lay down your arms, that it would cause a crack in popular morale that would bode ill for the future,” admitted General Ferdinand Heim in late March 1945. “But now it has to end. It’s simply insanity.”^{617} Heim reached this conclusion in the relatively idyllic surroundings of Trent Park. Generals at the front may have had similar thoughts, but their subjective perceptions of how much room for maneuver they enjoyed varied, so they did little to resist the apocalyptic fantasies of the military high command. The fact that Germany’s collective military suicide was only partial came down to the reality that fighting to the last man presumed that one was capable of fighting at all. No one, neither the troops nor the officers, wanted to face tanks with only rifles in their hands. If there were no effective means to combat the enemy, German soldiers simply stopped fighting. They did this in Russia in 1941, in Normandy in 1944, and in the Rhineland in 1945.

The only exceptions were a handful of elite units in the Waffen SS, the military wing of the organization, who took their instructions to fight to the final bullet more literally. It is striking how few SS men British and American forces succeeded in capturing either in France or Germany. American and British reluctance to take any SS prisoners cannot, by itself, explain this phenomenon. Another explanation is that many, if not all, SS units continued to fight in the sort of hopeless situations in which regular troops laid down their arms. Wehrmacht soldiers observed this fanaticism with ever greater disbelief. Sacrificing their own lives, observed Lieutenant Colonel von der Heydte, was a manifestation of the “false ethics, that faithful into death complex,” which the SS, like Japanese kamikazes, cultivated among their ranks.^{618}

With the exception of the Waffen SS, German ground forces possessed enough common sense to give up fighting when they were no longer able to put up an organized and effective defense. Soldiers simply refused to sacrifice their lives in such situations. Sacrifice to no military end was not part of their universe of norms. Becoming a casualty had to serve some sort of instrumental value. If there was no purpose in dying, soldiers tended to lay down their arms, especially on the Western Front, since it was not considered dishonorable to surrender to the Allies.

Such patterns of behavior can be seen again in the battle for the fortress of Saint-Malo. When German troops were surrounded in the citadel there, the commandant, Colonel Andreas von Aulock, let it be known that “everyone should prepare to die and remind himself that you can only die once. It was a battle to the last, to the point where we were supposed to sacrifice ourselves.” That was how Georg Neher described the situation to a bunkmate in the U.S. POW camp Fort Hunt. “The day before we surrendered he ordered the sappers to lay landmines here and there. They weren’t aimed at the Americans, but us. Of course, we didn’t do that…. We had survived up until then and done ourselves proud on the battlefield, and now we were supposed to die a pathetic death. I would have rather thrown a grenade in the colonel’s bunker.” But to the soldiers’ relief, they determined that “Aulock wasn’t serious. It was all bluster. He never intended to die. He just said what he did so he would be mentioned a couple of times in the Wehrmacht reports and be promoted to general. He wanted to be interned as a general and a bearer of the [Iron Cross with] oak leaves.”^{619} Aulock achieved his ends. Reports of the colonel’s heroic persistence delighted Hitler, who remarked that Aulock should serve as a model for all other garrison commandants. Aulock got his Oak Leaves and the promise he would be promoted to major general. Ironically, due to a clerical error, it was Aulock’s brother Hans and not Aulock himself who ended up getting promoted.

Even high-ranking officers like this colonel did not fight to the bitter end, although some of them felt pangs of conscience about being captured alive by their enemies. “Strictly as a soldier, I have nothing to be ashamed of,” said Lieutenant General Wilhelm von Schlieben, the fortress commandant at Cherbourg, shortly after he was interned. “I simply say that things would have ended more happily, if I’d died.”^{620} It would have been a “historical deed,” Schlieben added, if he had thrown himself into the machine gun fire. Rear Admiral Walter Hennecke, one of Schlieben’s fellow POWs, reported that the latter had indeed tried to end it all. Hennecke had hindered his fellow officer by arguing “That’s tantamount to suicide. There is no point to it.”^{621}

Colonel Hans Krug, who was captured by British landing forces in Normandy on June 6, 1944, had a mind-set similar to Schlieben’s:

As British forces surrounded Krug’s bunker, he had called his division commander over a still functioning telephone connection and asked for instructions. But the commanding general refused: “‘Do whatever you consider right.’ I said: ‘Won’t you give an order, sir?’ ‘No, I can’t survey the situation.’ I said that to him too. He said: ‘No, you act according to your conscience!’” Krug was bewildered. He had accepted orders to defend his position to the last man, and now he was supposed to decide for himself. He didn’t know what to do, although the hopelessness of his military position was obvious. He later formulated his dilemma as follows: “If it affects the prestige of the FÜHRER and the REICH, then we shall carry out this order. Or isn’t it more important for me to save these valuable young lives from completely useless destruction.”^{623} In the end, Krug surrendered, but he continued to have pangs of conscience about not falling in battle.

The urge to fight until the bitter end was even stronger on the Eastern Front. German soldiers’ fear of the Red Army, encouraged by Nazi propaganda, and the brutality of the war as it was waged on both sides did not make internment as a POW seem like a very attractive prospect. “Then there’s another point which rather bothers me personally, and that is the following,” reflected General Cramer. “It also has to do with my experience in RUSSIA about which you also know. It is of course a fact that the final fighting in AFRICA was not so intense as that in RUSSIA, because the soldiers know that to be a PW in ENGLAND is bearable in contrast to being killed in RUSSIA.”^{624} In addition to the last battles in Tunisia, Cramer had personally experienced the collapse of southern German lines on the Eastern Front after Stalingrad had been surrounded. He was thus in a position to compare the Wehrmacht’s two greatest military catastrophes in the years 1942 and ’43, and there was undeniable truth to his observation, as countless other examples show.^{625} German soldiers’ fear of the Red Army meant that many of them refused to capitulate in the final year of the war. When surrounded in places like Tarnopol, Vitebsk, Budapest, Poznan, and finally Berlin, the last defenders of the Third Reich often preferred the most hair-raising attempts to break through to their own lines to the option of simply surrendering. In so doing, thousands of soldiers marched to their own deaths like lemmings. Had they capitulated, most of them would have survived.^{626} Nowhere in the West, neither in Cherbourg and Saint-Malo nor Metz and Aachen, did German soldiers show the same reluctance to surrender. But such reluctance was only a tendency, not an iron rule. Hundreds of thousands of Wehrmacht troops did allow themselves to be captured on the Eastern Front. The estimated number was 860,000 from 1941 to 1944.^{627}

DYING WITH HONOR

The German navy developed a relationship all its own to the trope of fighting down to the last bullet. As we have seen, the German navy command, ever conscious of the shame of the sailors’ rebellion of 1918, had placed utmost priority upon making amends in World War II. The fatalist command that navy men be ready to “die with honor” followed immediately upon Britain’s entry into the war, which few of the top leaders had expected.^{628} Navy Commander in Chief Raeder may have covered up the 1939 case of the crew of the MS Admiral Graf Spree sinking their own ship to avoid a lopsided battle with the British and save their own skins. But he also ordered that in future German warships were to battle to victory or go down with flags flying.^{629} There are numerous examples of navy commanders demanding this sort of sacrifice from their men during the course of the war. And Raeder’s successor, Dönitz, placed even more emphasis on “dying with honor” in the second half of the conflict.

For example, in November 1942, when Dönitz learned that Captain Hans Dietrich von Tiesenhausen, commander of U-331, had waved the white flag in order to save his helpless vessel from enemy aircraft, he immediately condemned the action and promised to have the captain court-martialed upon his return to Germany. “There can be no doubt in the Navy,” Dönitz fumed, “that waving a white flag or taking down one’s flag is equivalent to dishonorable surrender… and a violation of the venerable military and seaman’s principle of preferring to go down with honor rather than lowering one’s flag.” In Dönitz’s view, the commander should have sunk his own vessel after exhausting his capacity to do battle rather than heading for the African coast in order to better the chances of saving his crew. “Officers are to be instilled with the uncompromising rigor to regard the honor of the flag as more important than the lives of individuals,” Dönitz added. “There is no such thing as raising a white flag in the German Navy, either at sea or on land.”^{630}

It had become a general trend during the nineteenth century for warships to refuse to surrender, and the same behavior can be found in various navies in the first half of the twentieth.^{631} In Germany, Hans Bohrdt’s painting The Last Man had provided an iconic image of this idea during World War I. Bohrdt’s work was a stylized representation of a naval battle off the Falkland Islands in December 1914, in which sailors from the capsized cruiser MS Nuremberg had supposedly held up German flags to approaching British warships, and subsequently drowned.^{632}

During World War II, the German navy leadership cultivated the cult of fighting to the last bullet in special ways. In late March 1945, to Dönitz’s satisfaction, Hitler ordered that fortifications in Western Europe should be placed under the command of navy officers. “Many fortresses have been surrendered without fighting to the bitter end,” Hitler noted, “but never a [German] ship.”^{633} In his political testament, Hitler even wrote that the navy had completely lived up to his idea of honor for German officers, that “the surrender of territory or a city is intolerable and above all troop commanders are responsible for leading by example and sacrificing their own lives to do their duty.”^{634}

Naturally, we should ask here how much such statements actually reflected reality, and how much wishful thinking. In spring 1944, German naval forces in the North Atlantic were barraged with orders and warnings that stressed the importance of repelling the coming invasion and getting sailors to sacrifice their lives. Dönitz even ordered submarines to surface and ram enemy ships if necessary.^{635} But that command remained just words. In practice, Dönitz was careful about deploying his resources, for instance only sending submarines into the English Channel if there was a good chance they could carry out their missions successfully. He never again spoke of them ramming enemy ships, and the only sailors sent on what amounted to suicide missions were small close-combat units, who used hastily improvised weapons like human torpedoes, boats packed with explosives, and, as of 1945, tiny, two-man submarines. Losses among pilots of one-man torpedoes were horrendous and in no way justified by military results. Yet news of the willingness with which young German sailors sacrificed their lives got around, making its way even to Imperial Japan’s ambassador, who compared their bravery to that of the kamikaze pilots.^{636}

A closer look reveals that what actually happened at sea was considerably more ambivalent than navy captains made it seem in their final radio messages. For example, on May 27, 1941, when the battleship Bismarck was sunk, Admiral Günther Lütjens radioed: “We’re fighting to the final shell. Long live the Führer.” Yet that was an exaggeration. In reality the Bismarck kept battling until the heavy artillery on board was disabled. One hundred fifteen men from a crew of 2,200 survived. In this respect, Lütjens behaved in much the same way as Rear Admiral Heinrich Ruhfus in Toulon. Both knew how their respective lopsided battles would end, yet neither wanted to give up without a fight. Ruhfus tried to gain time in order to destroy the port, while Lütjens seized the opportunity to inflict damage on British ships. But when his artillery was put out of commission after a short exchange of fire, the crew of the Bismarck began preparing to abandon ship. Many died as British navy men subjected the defenseless vessel to a barrage of gun and artillery fire. Before they sank their own ship, around a thousand Bismarck crew members escaped overboard. But high seas and fear that German submarines might be lurking prevented British sailors from launching an efficient rescue operation.

German navy men lived in a world of military commands in which orders to sacrifice their lives and battle “fanatically” played a particularly central role. And the rhetoric used by the navy leadership definitely had an effect on ordinary sailors. In conversations among navy POWs, concepts of discipline, pride, and honor occur much more frequently than in the chatter between army soldiers:

When sailors talked about their own ships, there was a noticeable change in their perspective. They fought tooth and nail until their equipment no longer functioned, and under no circumstances did they want their own vessels to fall into enemy hands. Sailors also took great care to destroy top secret material. Yet none of them would have thought of voluntarily going down with their ships to avoid being captured by the enemy. And whether a ship went down with flags flying was chiefly a concern of official, stylized propaganda. Once a sailor’s ship had been sunk, he had done his duty, and he would try to save his own life, whether or not the flag was still flying. As in the army, there were limits to the willingness of German navy men to sacrifice their own lives. The fact that so many vessels were lost with all hands on deck had more to do with the nature of naval warfare than with the selflessness demanded by the German navy leadership. Even if a crew succeeded in getting off board, rescues were relatively rare. For instance, in 1944, the crew of a Canadian amphibious plane, the Sunderland, reported that it had sunk a German U-boat off the west coast of Ireland and that the crew were swimming around in the water. Someone took a photo of fifty-seven German sailors, and then the plane circled a few times and headed back to its home base. None of the submarine crew survived. U-625 was one of 543 German ships that went lost together with its entire crew. Dönitz used such horrendous losses to argue for the special morale maintained by submarine crews.^{638} But in their own words, one finds little evidence of the fanaticism and contempt for death Dönitz praised in his speeches. German sailors followed orders and tried to be brave. But more than anything they wanted to survive.

“I WOULDN’T HAVE RAMMED ANYONE. IT’S SHEER IDIOCY. LIFE MAYN’T BE MUCH, BUT ONE DOES CLING TO IT AFTER ALL.”^{639}

The radicalization of the German political and military leadership did not have the same sort of effect on the Luftwaffe as it did on the army and the navy. In the face of dissipating morale in 1944–45, pilots were ordered to redouble their intensity in battle. This was especially the case with fighter pilots, whom Göring increasingly accused of cowardice.^{640} In fall 1943, the idea of using kamikaze pilots was first broached. Luftwaffe doctor Theo Benzinger and glider pilot Heinrich Lange formulated it in a memorandum: “The military situation justifies and demands that naval targets be fought with extreme means like manned missiles whose pilot voluntarily sacrifices his life.” The authors knew that this would represent “a form of warfare that is fully new in Europe.” But the benefits of conventional attacks were disproportionate to the number of pilots getting shot down. If airmen were going to lose their lives anyway, the authors reasoned, why not take the greatest number of the enemy with them?^{641}

In September 1943, Field Marshal Erhard Milch, the second most important leader in the Luftwaffe, discussed this suggestion with his subordinate officers. Plans were hatched to crash planes loaded with explosives into enemy warships or fighters packed with ammunition into enemy bomber formations. But Milch had scruples about sending pilots on “suicide missions.” It would be better, he reasoned, if pilots dove toward enemy targets and then ejected with parachutes before impact. But the general view of the Luftwaffe leadership was that kamikaze missions were unnecessary, and suggestions like Benzinger and Lange’s were never put into practice.

Hanna Reitsch, the well-known female test pilot, was friends with Benzinger and Lange and took the opportunity while visiting Hitler’s Berghof residence to tell the Führer about their idea. But Hitler was having none of it and personally intervened in July 1944 to prevent thirty-nine pilots from crashing their Fw 190 fighter bombers into an Allied armada in the Baie de la Seine.

In fall 1943, when it was again proposed to crash special “suicide aircraft” into enemy ships, Luftwaffe fighter officer Hans-Günther von Kornatzki formulated the idea of an airborne “storm attack.” In his vision, fearless fighter pilots would bring down Allied planes by simply ramming them in the air. Over the course of the war, this had happened on a number of occasions—either by accident or after a conscious decision on the part of pilots. There was a decent chance for the pilot to survive by ejecting with a parachute. The task was to coordinate such chance events. The commanding general in charge of fighter pilots, Adolf Galland, was open to the idea of a “storm attack” but didn’t think much of the hair-raising spectacle of pilots purposely ramming enemy planes. In May 1944, when the first “storm fighters” were initiated into this new type of mission, they had to swear that they would attack the enemy from extremely short range and, if they failed to shoot him down, physically ram his aircraft. Three such units were formed in the course of 1944, each one containing around fifty specially modified Fw 190s. Yet despite the fact that the oath taken by the pilots emphasized their willingness to ram enemies, it rarely happened in practice. If the planes were able to get that close to the enemy, they could usually shoot him down using artillery. Still, on occasion, German pilots did ram Allied bombers. About half of them lost their lives.

The surveillance protocols show that Luftwaffe pilots did not consider ramming sorties suicide missions, but as an especially clever way of adapting aerial warfare, which was becoming ever more extreme.^{642} Any means were legitimate if they increased the number of enemy kills. Luftwaffe POWs didn’t even show any particular outrage at rumors of a new ordinance stipulating that any airmen returning home without an enemy kill or at least damage to their aircraft would be court-martialed.^{643}

Colonel Hajo Hermann felt that, since conventional fighter planes were too few in number to stop the Allied daytime bombardments of Germany, the defense of the Reich needed to be radicalized. In fall 1944, he came up with the perfidious idea of having one or two thousand young pilots ram their fighters into an American bomber squadron. The shock that the U.S. Air Force would feel from this “massive blow,” Hermann felt, would buy Nazi Germany some breathing room. Experienced pilots, who would be needed later in the war, would be exempt from the mission.

When Luftwaffe general and former ace pilot Adolf Galland learned of the plan, he asked Hermann whether he was going to be part of the mission, to which Hermann replied in the negative. After that Galland saw no point in discussing the idea any further. “He’s second on my list of criminals,” Galland later remarked as a POW.^{644}

In January 1945, though, Galland succeeded in getting an audience with Hitler. Hitler’s Luftwaffe adjunct subsequently had let it be known that the Führer had the highest respect for men who were willing to volunteer for such ramming missions. No soldier would be ordered to take part, but it was felt there would be enough volunteers. By the end of the month, Göring had signed off on a call for young pilots to volunteer for a mission that, at the cost of one’s own life, might turn the tide in the war. Two thousand young men allegedly stepped forward. Three hundred of them were selected and informed that the plan was for them to crash into American bombers en masse. Many were surprised. They had expected to be going after bigger targets like aircraft carriers or battleships and found their lives too valuable to be sacrificed to destroy a single B-17 Flying Fortress. Those responsible for training them explained that this wasn’t a suicide mission per se. Pilots would be allowed to eject from their planes once they had rammed their targets. On April 7, 1945, 183 pilots purposely crashed their aircraft into an American bomber unit over Magdeburg. The Wehrmacht reported four days later that the pilots’ “fearless willingness for self-sacrifice” had destroyed more than 60 enemy aircraft. In reality the number was 23. Of the 183 German aircraft that had taken off, 133 had been shot down, and 77 pilots lost their lives.

What is particularly interesting is that suggestions to commence “self-sacrificial missions” did not come from the highest levels of German political and military leadership, who otherwise never tired of demanding that soldiers fight until death. While hundreds of thousands of ground troops fell because of Hitler’s command to hold out whatever the costs, the Führer could not bring himself to order the Luftwaffe to approve a suicide mission for dozens of pilots. And the ramming sortie of April 7 wasn’t a kamikaze mission in the narrow sense, since pilots could escape by parachute. Sixty percent of those involved did in fact survive. This was a much higher quotient than applied to submarine crews on the most risky missions.

Another variation of “self-sacrificial missions” was tried out in April 1945. On January 31 of that year, the Red Army had crossed the Oder and established itself on that river’s western banks. The German army had tried but failed to destroy the bridgeheads. The Luftwaffe was told to use any means to achieve this end in order to disrupt the Soviet advance on Berlin. On March 5, the idea was put forward of destroying the bridges over the Oder with a self-sacrificial mission, but first the Luftwaffe tried to accomplish this aim by conventional means. After that, too, failed, the German air force resorted to suicide sorties. Some of the former volunteers were recalled, and others stepped forward of their own free will. On April 17, one day after Soviet troops launched their major assault on Berlin, the first pilots crashed their planes into the bridges over the Oder. From a military standpoint, though, the mission was completely senseless since pontoon bridges could be repaired very quickly.

All in all, Hitler’s ideas of military sacrifice were astonishingly contradictory. He demanded that soldiers fight down to the final bullet and the last man. His orders forbade any retreats or premature surrenders, promoting fanaticism as the key to ultimate victory. Yet even as he thundered that “every bunker, every block of houses in every city and every German village must become a fortress before which either the enemy bled to death or the occupants perished in hand-to-hand combat,”^{645} he also accepted that survivors did exist. In the case of the failed defense of the German stronghold of Metz, he even commissioned a special armband in recognition of those who had taken part. He would have no doubt approved if the veterans of Metz had shot themselves with their final bullets. But he did not enforce his stand-and-die demands, although hundreds of thousands of soldiers who had followed to the letter his commands to hold out had lost their lives. Hitler was indifferent to the number of dead. He considered massive casualties to be part of the destiny of the German people, locked in a struggle for total victory or total defeat. Nonetheless, he shied away from explicitly ordering suicide commandos, just as he didn’t demand poison gas be used as the final stage of a total war.

ITALIAN WEAKLINGS AND RUSSIAN BEASTS

The reference frame of German soldiers firmly anchored the virtues of following orders, doing one’s duty, and fighting bravely to the last, and this ethos made itself apparent throughout the stories soldiers told about their own battle experiences—and even more so when they discussed comrades, enemies, and allies.

With few exceptions, German soldiers in all three military branches had an extremely negative view of Italians. Wehrmacht troops had difficulty understanding Italian behavior, which they perceived as tantamount to an unwillingness to fight. Their commentary was correspondingly dismissive. Italian behavior was a “tragedy.”^{646} “If only those blasted Italians… would do something,” one POW carped.^{647} Other telling excerpts from the protocols: “They have no self-confidence”;^{648} “They’re in a blue funk”;^{649} they “were a frightful lot!”^{650} “The dirty dogs,” groused another German soldier, “give themselves up if they have the slightest trouble!”^{651} “They’re so terribly soft,” concurred someone else.^{652} Militarily, Germany’s Italian allies were seen as useless. “You can only consider 130,000 Italians equal to about 10,000 Germans,” reckoned one POW.^{653} Another joked that every Italian tank carried with it a white flag,^{654} while someone else quipped that “if [our enemies] were only the Italians then the B.D.M. [the League of German Maidens] and the old peasants from the CHIEMSEE would be quite enough.”^{655} German soldiers mocked Benito Mussolini’s pretensions: “The Italians are supposed to be descended from the Romans, but the Romans would have achieved more with spears and shields than they have!”^{656} In short, German soldiers found that Italians “are the worst soldiers we have anywhere in EUROPE.”^{657}

A few Italian units did come off slightly better in the judgments of their allies. The Italian paratrooper division “Folgore” may have been poorly equipped, “but at least they were men.”^{658} And there was one situation in which Italian fighters did perform up to scratch: “Under German leadership they (the Italian soldiers) are excellent,” a Sergeant Funke reported about the battles in Tunisia in April 1943. “At ENFIDAVILLE in the retreat they received the order: ‘Young Fascists will die where they stand.’ Thirty Italians held out there for three days.”^{659} Some POWs also mentioned poor Italian equipment and supplies as mitigating factors. But of the eighty-four German generals interned at Trent Park, only one brought this up. The ratios were similar at other British facilities and in American POW camps.

No doubt, the negative view of Italians as soldiers, which established itself as early as 1941 and which was also on ample display in official files and in field posts and soldiers’ diaries, exaggerated the situation. But it was not entirely untrue. The stereotype was based on experiences on the battlefield, where Italian units often crassly failed to live up to German standards, or British ones for that matter.

Military virtues were also the criteria German soldiers used to evaluate their other allies. Slovak soldiers were second only to members of the Wehrmacht; Romanians were “very good, notably better than they were in the last war”^{660} and “not at all bad soldiers.”^{661} Spanish mercenaries also came in for praise: “The Spanish Legion is very good—the only thing is that they’re a frightful mixture, but from the military point of view they’re good soldiers.”^{662} Hungarians, however, were deemed “a worthless lot” since they were perceived to have simply run away from the Russians.^{663}

German soldiers used the same reference frame to judge their enemies. Wehrmacht soldiers had the greatest respect for the British, who were seen as “tough and brave opponents” who fought fairly.^{664} In Dunkirk and Greece, British troops had fought fantastically. They were “excellent airmen”^{665} and “tough guys”… “like us.”^{666} “Put a British soldier in a German uniform and you won’t notice the difference,” one soldier for the Wehrmacht’s Afrika Korps thought.^{667} Yet higher-ranking officers didn’t always join in the praise: “If the English get a few hits, they just clear off, and they don’t go to it—like our people do, and when they do, they’re very clumsy.”^{668} The commander of the Wehrmacht’s 1st Paratroop Division even opined about Allies in Italy: “In their whole attitude toward the war, the masses of the enemy won’t be able to absorb heavy losses in the long term.”^{669}

American troops were less admired than the British because their victories were allegedly only the result of their material advantages, which Wehrmacht soldiers considered unfair. As soldiers, U.S. troops were “cowardly and petty”;^{670} they hadn’t “any idea what real hard warfare means”;^{671} “they cannot endure privations”;^{672} and they were “inferior to [Germans] in close combat.”^{673} “The American swine,” scoffed one POW, “take to their heels if they’re really attacked.”^{674} Again in conjunction with fighting in Italy, one general concluded: “Generally speaking, the Americans, with a few exceptions, are considered poorer fighters because they lack driving force and have no desire.”^{675}

By contrast, German soldiers had enormous respect for their Russian adversaries, whose capacity for sacrifice and brutality was a source of fear. A sample of opinion: “Those people have a terrific toughness of spirit and body”;^{676} “They fight to the very last, the Russians, my God, they can fight”;^{677} “You wouldn’t believe how fanatically the devils fought.”^{678} Nonetheless, precisely because they seemed to display such contempt for death, Russians often struck Germans as soulless, oxlike, fighting beasts. Crüwell related: “Near UMAN, in that first battle of encirclement in the UKRAINE, my tanks literally had to crush the people to death because they wouldn’t give themselves up. Just imagine that.”^{679} Still, Crüwell had high regard for Red Army soldiers because they fought so brutally. Higher-ranking German officers still thought there was no way a soldier who battled tirelessly and fiercely for his country could be a bad soldier. That was in keeping with the militaristic ethos of the Wehrmacht. A Major Blunt from the Luftwaffe related how 125 Russian bombers attacked a German bridgehead over the Berezina River near Bobryusk in 1941. German fighter pilots shot down 115 of the planes. But for Blunt, the Russian attack was neither senseless nor insane. On the contrary, the incident only proved what “grand fliers” the Russians were.^{680}

German soldiers saw Italians as cowardly, Russians as death-defying, British as tough, and Americans as soft, and with very rare exceptions these estimations did not change over the course of the war. The initial battles set the tone that continued until 1945, aside from a few expansions and variations. Only when the tide began to turn against Germany did subtle shifts occur. For instance, in the second half of the war, as the Red Army began advancing, ever more quickly, to the borders of Germany proper, Germans tended to emphasize Russian soldiers’ brutality over their bravery.

Bravery in battle was also a key criterion for evaluation of one’s own comrades. No one liked “staff wallahs.”^{681} Those who weren’t actively engaged in combat opened themselves up to accusations of cowardice, and one’s superiors were expected to lead the vanguard. One POW complained:

A positive counterexample was Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg:

Although Major Viebig thoroughly condemned Stauffenberg’s role in the failed attempt to assassinate Hitler, he was full of praise for the count as a military personality. Significantly, Viebig saw Stauffenberg as a combat soldier, even though the latter had only spent three months at the front. General staff officers were often viewed critically, but Stauffenberg’s “energy,” combined with the fact he had been seriously and visibly wounded in Tunisia, outweighed any skepticism his rank might have brought with it.

Soldiers also approved of Field Marshal Rommel for his energy, even though they otherwise perceived him as an ambivalent figure. “He was impressive as a soldier,” opined a Colonel Hesse. “He was no great leader but he was a real soldier, an intrepid, very brave man, very harsh, even towards himself.”^{684}

COWARDICE AND DESERTION

Soldiers had an almost exclusively negative view of those who failed to conform to the ideal of the brave warrior, those who were thought to have fled without a fight or even gone over to the enemy. As of summer 1944, there was no end to the conversations in British and American POW camps about excessive numbers of cowards in the German ranks. A Lieutenant Zimmermann from the 709th Infantry Division recalled driving along a country road from Cherbourg to the front: “Troops were already streaming along the road in any order: Labour Service, Flak and a few infantrymen. I said: ‘Boys, don’t run away, don’t make the bloody affair even worse than it is.’”^{685} Zimmermann knew that Cherbourg would soon be lost, but he still felt that order should continue to rule and that soldiers should bravely fight on. The fact that German soldiers were retreating pell-mell made the inevitable defeat even worse, as it undermined the core of Zimmermann’s belief in what it meant to be a soldier.

Very rarely, and only among nonofficers, did soldiers admit that they had considered abandoning their positions and running away. A Private Leutgeb told a bunkmate about the battle in Normandy:

In soldiers’ eyes, the only thing worse than someone who refused to fight was someone who deserted. Major Heimann recalled a case from the battles for Aachen:

In their conversations, POWs treated desertion as something unthinkable. “I could never have done it myself and I don’t think any men from GERMANY proper would ever desert, only Austrians and all those Volksdeutsche [ethnic Germans from outside Germany proper],” asserted one lieutenant in late December 1944.^{688} It was rare for soldiers to directly address the topic before the end of 1944. One exception: “I shall probably be sentenced to death, but it’s better to be alive under sentence of death for desertion, than to be lying dead on the battlefield.”^{689} Interestingly, the soldier who said this was a member of the SS division “Frundsberg.” By July 1944, the German situation was so miserable that even the Waffen SS was no longer a monolithic bloc of fanatic political warriors. In order to avoid accusations of shirking and cowardice, most German soldiers who had deserted concealed that fact and sought to portray their behavior as conforming to military norms. They had only given up because the war was now lost and it no longer made sense to keep fighting. Hopelessness was named far more often as a reason for desertion than any political motivations. This may have been due to the POWs’ communicative situation: especially while being held prisoner, individuals were not permitted to question military values.^{690}

Very few soldiers articulated any doubts at all about the war itself or Germany’s attacks upon its neighbors. Even a deserter like Alfred Andersch, later a well-regarded German author, who abandoned his post near Rome on June 6, 1944, displayed a thoroughly positive attitude toward the Wehrmacht and military virtues.^{691} That shows how deeply even those men who had the courage to break free from the framework of the Wehrmacht had internalized the military value system. It was only as of spring 1945 that increasing numbers of soldiers dared to speak frankly and unashamedly about desertion:

The official punishment for showing cowardice in the face of the enemy or for desertion was, with very few exceptions, death, and German military tribunals were not shy about enforcing this rule. Some 20,000 German soldiers were given the death penalty—about the same number as in Imperial Japan. By comparison, only 146 American soldiers were put to death, while it is estimated that 150,000 Soviet ones were executed.^{693}

The number of men executed as deserters increased as final defeat began to loom, rising dramatically in fall 1944. Up until that point, soldiers seemed to have accepted the death penalty as a perfectly normal punishment for desertion or even cowardice in the face of the enemy. In December 1943, Lieutenant Hohlstein of 15th Tank Division talked about his experiences two years previously in Russia. His bunkmate First Sergeant von Bassus inquired about the conditions surrounding the winter of crisis before the gates to Moscow in 1941–42. Hohlstein pointed out that there had been deserters:

Bassus was astonished that Wehrmacht soldiers had deserted as early as 1941. Both men consoled themselves with the idea that these had been only isolated cases, and they agreed that deserters definitely deserved the death penalty.

The protocols contain numerous first- and secondhand descriptions in the period up until late 1944 of executions of soldiers who had supposedly shown cowardice or deserted. As was the case with reports about the executions of partisans, the tales rarely called forth astonishment, outrage, or negative reactions. Listeners were mostly interested in gory or unusual details. Otherwise, the stories were part of the everyday realities of war. Several generals tried to prove their toughness by describing how they lined up soldiers “against the wall” at the front. These officers were by no means fanatic Nazis. Lieutenant General Erwin Menny reported about his assignment in Russia in 1943:

The only response from Menny’s interlocutor, Schlieben, was a question: “Where was that?”^{695}