Soldaten

Frame of Reference: War

Before we turn to the question of how National Socialist the Wehrmacht’s war really was, let us summarize the key points of individual soldiers’ frame of reference. The decisive factors in their basal orientation—the way in which they perceived and interpreted events—were the military value system and their immediate social environment. Differences of ideology, background, education, age, rank, and branch of service mattered little on this level. The exceptions were the differences just discussed between the Waffen SS and regular Wehrmacht soldiers.

Cultural ties reinforce this conclusion. These include, above all, ties to a canon of military virtues, the accompanying official and perceived responsibilities, and the accolades one could receive for carrying out one’s duty. As we saw in our brief comparison of German, Italian, and Japanese soldiers, each group had a specific national frame of reference. This helps explain why some German soldiers continued to fight even after they knew the war was lost.

On the other hand, soldiers in the concrete situations in which they had been deployed often did not know that the war was lost, or if they did, were unable to comprehend what defeat meant. Moreover, the issue of whether the war was still winnable was sometimes irrelevant to soldiers trying to carry out a specific task, be it holding their position, avoiding capture by the enemy, or saving the lives of subordinates. Knowledge of the larger context does not automatically rule out actions independent of that knowledge. As a general rule, interpretations and decisions in concrete situations are usually made without reference to the “big picture.” Thus, it is not surprising that most of the soldiers whose voices we encounter in the surveillance protocols seem ignorant of the larger context.

Disorientation results when things run contrary to their expectations, for example, when enemy success stories dispelled Germans’ initial euphoria after their easy early triumphs and their premature fantasies about final victory, and their confidence began to erode. Yet as we have seen, disappointments scarcely altered soldiers’ desire to perform their military tasks. The futility of the endeavor as a whole did not change the frame of reference, in which individuals’ roles and responsibilities were defined. On the contrary, complaints about the inadequacy of the military leadership and the material at their disposal grew precisely because soldiers continued to want to do their jobs well.

As we observed in examples of extreme violence, sexual attacks, racist convictions, and quasi-religious faith in the Führer, temporally specific contexts of perception influenced the perspective, interpretations, and actions of soldiers. This is why, from today’s vantage point, soldiers related and listened to stories of the most extreme brutality with such nonchalance. Understanding the context also helps us understand why many German soldiers maintained such a seemingly irrational faith in the Führer so late in World War II.

Role models and the desire to set a good example influenced soldiers’ behavior perhaps more than any other factors. Indeed, we almost have to conclude, tautologically, that “soldierliness,” as it was imagined and enacted in group practice, directed individual perceptions and actions. That is the reason foot soldiers subjected their superiors’ behavior to such close scrutiny and vice versa. The internalized canon of military virtues provided the matrix for a subtle, continual evaluation of one’s own behavior as well as that of comrades and enemies.

War-specific interpretive paradigms—for example, the ideas that war is hell, casualties are inevitable, and different rules obtain in combat than in civilian life—are omnipresent. War was the arena in which soldiers existed, and it was from within this world that they perceived POWs, civilian populations, partisans, forced laborers, and everyone else they encountered. As we saw with the examples of mass execution of supposed partisans, there was often no clear distinction between soldiers’ interpretations of their situation and their justifications for their actions. The violence of war opened up an interpretive and behavioral freedom that did not exist in civilian life. The power to kill and rape others, to be cruel or merciful, as well as all the new possibilities soldiers had, can be traced back to the opening of an arena of violence and its accompanying interpretive paradigms.

Official duties were a decisive influence on soldiers’ lives and behavior, as we saw with deserters late in the war, who still felt the need to justify what from our perspective seems like a perfectly rational decision. The same holds true of social duties. Frontline soldiers felt an almost exclusive sense of duty to their comrades and their superiors who formed their social units. What girlfriends, wives, or parents thought of what soldiers experienced and did was irrelevant. Soldiers’ immediate social environments compelled them to act in certain ways. Abstract concepts like a “global Jewish conspiracy,” “Bolshevist promotion of genetic inferiority,” or even the “National Socialist Volk community” played only an ancillary role. As a rule German soldiers were not “ideological warriors.” Most of them were fully apolitical.

Personal dispositions no doubt played a role in how soldiers saw, evaluated, and dealt with events, but the specific details are only visible in individual case studies, which are beyond the scope of this book. Initial studies of this sort suggest that soldiers’ perceptions were heterogeneous. This is true even of generals, who because of their long military service were often seen as a homogeneous group.^{846} Nonetheless, soldiers’ diverse and often diametrically opposed views of the war were rarely reflected in their actions. In war, soldiers tended to behave alike, regardless of whether they were Protestants or Catholics, Nazis or regime critics, Prussians or Austrians,^{847} university graduates or uneducated people.

In light of these findings, we should be even more skeptical of intentionalist explanations of Nazi atrocities. Studies devoted to collective biography may highlight motivations,^{848} but they also tend to exaggerate the formative role of ideology at the expense of actual practice. Group-specific practices are a much more enlightening source for explaining extremely violent behavior by soldiers than cognitive rationale and personal categories.

In our view, the decisive factor in the atrocities discussed in this book was a general realignment from a civilian to a wartime frame of reference. It is more significant than all issues of worldview, disposition, and ideology. These are primarily important in determining what soldiers saw as expected, just, bewildering, or outrageous. They did not dramatically influence how they actually behaved. This conclusion may seem somewhat lapidary in light of the atrocities soldiers committed, but war creates a context for events and actions in which people do things they never would have otherwise. Within this context, soldiers could murder Jews without being anti-Semites and fight fanatically for the fatherland without being committed National Socialists. It is high time to stop overestimating the effects of ideology. Ideology may provide reasons for war, but it does not explain why soldiers kill or commit war crimes.

The actions of the workers and artisans of war are banal, indeed just as banal as the behavior of people existing under heteronomous circumstances—in companies, government offices, schools, or universities—always are. Nevertheless, this very banality unleashed the most extreme violence in the history of humanity, leaving behind 50 million casualties and a continent devastated in many respects for decades to follow.