Soldaten

Work is a crucial social activity in all modern societies. What we do is embedded within a veritable universe of desired end results, defined largely by people other than ourselves, be they bosses or those who set the rules for institutions, businesses, or military units. In the context of work, individuals per se only bear particular responsibility for that precise part of the total process to which they contribute. Ironically, division-of-labor arrangements are precisely what relieve individuals of accountability for what they do or are prepared to do. Commercial airplane pilots or reserve policemen can become murderers who kill civilians. Likewise, aviation companies, oven producers, or academic departments covering pathology can become instruments of genocide. Matrixes of social functions and institutions store up human potential like batteries.^{874} Never is this more apparent than in wartime. When societies are mobilized to fight a total war, institutions, businesses, and organizations that normally work harmlessly toward their respective peacetime goals become “essential to the war effort.” That’s because they can easily redirect their potential.

Seen from the historical perspective, cases in which swords have been beaten into plowshares are far less common than vice versa. Modern division of labor, with its focus on instrumental reason, can serve almost any purpose imaginable. In their analysis of letters German soldiers sent home from the Eastern Front, historians Ute Daniel and Jürgen Reulecke cited Jens Ebert’s thesis that war is accepted as long as it can be articulated in terms of peacetime, workplace values such as diligence, endurance, persistence, duty, obedience, and voluntary subordination: “The only thing that changes on the frontline or as part of a special commando is the content of one’s work, not one’s attitudes toward work itself or the way it is organized. In this sense, the soldier is a ‘worker of war.’”^{875}

This sort of work-oriented understanding of war is also clearly expressed in a letter sent home by a U.S. Marine captain to his mother during the Vietnam War. In it, he tries to justify his decision to extend his tour of duty and explain why killing enemies is an appealing job, carrying a lot of responsibility. “Here there is a job to be done. There are moral decisions made every day. My experience is invaluable. This job requires a man of conscience. The group of men that do this must have a leader with a conscience. In the last three weeks we killed more than 1,500 men on a single operation. That reflects a lot of responsibility. I am needed here, Mom.”^{876}

When war arises, the participants don’t have to reconfigure their psyches, overcome themselves, or be specially socialized in order to be able to kill. The context in which they do the things they do only needs to be altered. For soldiers who only do the sorts of things they were trained for anyway, nothing at all changes except the fact that the context becomes deadly serious. Thus, as a number of examples have shown, the transitional phase from training and practice to actual war not only surprised and frightened soldiers. It also excited and fascinated them. In no case, however, did the definition of what they were supposed to do, what they were there for, change.

Pride in the fruits of one’s labor and descriptions of what one has achieved are not the only way in which people express that war is work, and that they see it as such. The idea is also articulated in acknowledgment that the enemy, too, has done a “good job.” In the surveillance protocols, one vivid example of this was the appreciation German POWs had, all Nazi propaganda about Bolshevik inferiors notwithstanding, for the skill of Red Army soldiers. The same was true for German soldiers viewed from the perspective of the enemy.^{877} Nonetheless, soldiers’ perceptions of one another were also formatted by cultural stereotypes. For Germans, Red Army soldiers were courageous warriors and masters of improvisation. But those positive images were clouded by stereotypical beliefs in inherent Russian brutality and lack of self-preservation instincts.^{878} Since Japanese soldiers treated POWs with extreme brutality, American GIs also came to view “Japs” as inhuman enemies. Other aspects of Japanese behavior were equally incomprehensible to U.S. soldiers: the practice of killing their own wounded or POWs who had been released, or of refusing to be saved by GIs when their ships were sunk. This radicalized the way American soldiers perceived their enemies, expanding upon already existing cultural stereotypes. For that reason, the word “Jap” had extremely nasty, and occasionally racist, connotations that were absent from the relatively harmless term “kraut.”^{879}

THE GROUP

Cultural differences prevent soldiers of all nationalities from perceiving war universally. In soldiers’ own eyes, not all soldiers are created equal. Differentiations people make in peacetime persist during war. What distinguishes war from peace, and remains constant from war to war, is camaraderie. The group plays an extraordinarily important role. Without it, individual soldiers’ behavior in wartime would be incomprehensible. Soldiers never act on their own. Even sharpshooters or fighter plane aces, who have only themselves to rely upon, are still parts of a group that remains together before and after battle. Samuel Stouffer’s previously discussed study from 1948 thus concludes that the group has far more influence over individual soldiers’ behavior than ideological convictions, political views, and personal motivations.^{880}

This conclusion does not just apply to the military. Edward Shils and Morris Janowitz, for instance, emphasize that the Wehrmacht’s ability to do battle was based not on National Socialist fervor, but on the need to satisfy personal needs within the context of group relationships.^{881} Moreover, this aspect of the Wehrmacht’s organization was supported by modern management and personnel techniques.^{882} A soldier’s immediate social environment decides how he perceives and interprets war, and the parameters by which he targets and evaluates his own actions. Every member of a group sees himself as he believes others see him. That, as Erving Goffman has shown in his “stigma” study, provides the most powerful motivation for people to conform to the norms of the group.^{883} In war, for an indeterminate length of time and under the most extreme conditions, the soldier is part of a group he can neither leave nor seek out according to his own personal preference. That is completely different from civilian life, in which people select their own groups. The lack of alternatives to the group a soldier is part of and helps comprise makes it an all-decisive normative and practical entity, especially as battle is a life-or-death situation. To paraphrase a sentiment often expressed in American combat briefings in Vietnam: I don’t know why I’m here, and you don’t know why you’re here, but let’s try our best to do a good job and stay alive.^{884}

Such sentiments underscore the importance of one’s comrades for everything that happens and is thought or decided during war. This far outweighs the significance of any worldviews, convictions, or historical inevitabilities, which might have provided the external conditions leading to the war itself. The internal reality of war, as it presents itself to soldiers, is the group. That is how war appeared to Vietnam veteran Michael Bernhardt, who refused to participate in the My Lai massacre and was subsequently ostracized. The only thing that counted, Bernhardt later recalled, was how people thought of you in the here and now, how people in your immediate surroundings regarded you. Bernhardt’s unit was his entire world. What they thought was right, was right; what they thought was wrong, was wrong.^{885}

The German soldier Willy Peter Reese would have agreed with Bernhardt:

Willy Peter Reese was killed shortly after he wrote these words. His words resonate with another universal truth of war: reasons don’t matter.^{887}

IDEOLOGY

One of the major themes of literary and cinematic meditations on war—from Erich Maria Remarque and Ernst Jünger to Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now—is that ideology and all other larger reasons behind war are irrelevant. Indeed, apart from a small percentage of ideological warriors, one central characteristic of soldiers is their distance from and disinterest in the causes that led to their present situation. This is true not only when everything is falling apart, as in Reese’s description. It also applies to situations of victory. Soldiers’ attention is primarily focused on things at hand, the plane just shot down or the village just taken—and not abstractions like “the conquest of living space in Eastern Europe,” “the defense of Bolshevism,” or the “yellow peril.” Things like that form the backdrop of war and the arenas of battle connected with it. But they rarely provide the concrete motivation for soldiers’ interpretations and actions in any given situation.^{888}

That fact runs all the way through the twentieth century. The signature psychosocial experience of World War I was disillusionment at the fact that there was nothing heroic or ideological about the hail of shrapnel soldiers endured as part of trench warfare. Fundamental senselessness was a feeling shared by American troops in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq, and by all the nations involved in Afghanistan. Indeed, it was augmented as the rationale behind those wars became increasingly abstract. Why should you fight far away from home for the freedom of people who despise you? Why defend populations and stretches of territory that have nothing to do with you personally?

With reference to the Vietnam War, one U.S. sergeant wrote to a friend: “Of course Americans are dying, and I would not belittle anyone who served ‘with proud devotion’ and faith in this enterprise. It may not have been a terribly wrong theoretical idea at one time. But the foreign introduced offensive, the consequent corruption and then the contempt that developed between people and groups—it makes a mockery of the ‘noble’ words used to justify war. It belies the phony enthusiasm with which those words may be delivered. It’s now a war of survival.”^{889}

Today, a German captain serving with the 373rd Paratroopers Battalion in Kunduz says: “At the start, we wanted to achieve something, for example, taking some territory from the enemy. But after the death of my men, we sometimes ask ourselves whether it’s worth it. Why risk our lives, when the Taliban will immediately reappear as soon as we’re gone? We’re fighting for our lives and our mission, if we even still have one. But in the end in Kunduz, we’re above all fighting for sheer survival.”^{890}

Soldiers’ statements about their experience of war frequently show strong similarities and points of overlap. Andrew Carroll, the founder of the Legacy Project, a volunteer initiative aimed at collecting and preserving correspondence by U.S. veterans of all foreign wars, has said that the similarities and not the differences stand out when one compares letters by American soldiers with correspondence written by their German, Italian, and Russian counterparts.^{891}

At the beginning of World War II, German soldiers were far less prone to see the conflict as senseless. Quick German victories were followed by relatively long periods of respite, and Wehrmacht soldiers thought that they would personally benefit from Germany’s war of conquest.^{892} But by fall 1941, when success stories became rarer and long, drawn-out battles increasingly taxed German troops, “worldview” rationales and motivations declined in importance. The predominant feeling among soldiers was that they had been abandoned to a monotonous endeavor which had little to do with their own lives, although their own survival depended on it. There is not one sociological study of World War II that fails to emphasize the relatively minor role played by ideology and abstract convictions in the daily practice of war. Group dynamics, technology, space, and time set the parameters that mattered to soldiers and allowed them to orient themselves. Given the dominance of the here-and-now, the only difference between what soldiers did and what people in modern societies always do, when confronted with a task that they are supposed to carry out, was the fact that the former entailed life or death. If you work for an energy, insurance, or chemical company, “capitalism” as such does not help you perform your job, and if you’re a policeman handing out a speeding ticket or a court bailiff repossessing a flat-screen television from a debtor, you don’t think that you are upholding the values of freedom and democracy. You’re only carrying out a duty you have been charged with. Soldiers do their jobs in war using violence. That’s all that distinguishes their actions from those of other workers, employees, and government officials. The results of soldiers’ work are also different: casualties and destruction.

MILITARY VALUES

The immediate social environment, the modern work ethic, and fascination with technology may indeed yield something like a “universal soldier.” At the same time, different perspectives exist on war and violence, and we can identify nationally specific elements in the formation of military frames of reference. For the Wehrmacht in World War II, these elements included concepts of honor, toughness, and sacrifice to a degree that no longer applies within today’s German military.^{893} Even World War I did not see such an extreme emphasis on the idea of being duty-bound.^{894} Although the dividing lines may be blurry, Wilhelmine Germany, the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, and today’s Federal Republic all featured different sets of military values.

The differences are even greater in the international arena, as our brief comparison of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan showed. The central values for Wehrmacht soldiers were bravery, obedience, devotion to duty, and emotional hardness. Those were the key factors determining how soldiers perceived and evaluated their own behavior.^{895} This frame of reference, already in place during peacetime, remained remarkably stable throughout World War II.

But even though soldiers began with this core set of values, they arrived at differing views on the ultimate sense of the war. A committed Nazi saw things differently than a former communist, and the same was true for a fifty-two-year-old general and a twenty-three-year-old lieutenant. Their basic understanding of the military, though, remained the same, and in battle it was irrelevant how soldiers’ individual values had been formed, as long as they stuck to the core virtues as a guide for their interpretations and actions. Men like Axel von dem Bussche and Otto-Ernst Remer, both highly decorated battalion commanders, hardly differed in terms of their military ethos, even though the former was a major figure within the German resistance, and the latter was responsible for smashing the anti-Nazi opposition in Berlin.

The consequences that emerged from this positively charged canon of values were far-reaching. Few people seriously questioned either the Wehrmacht or the war itself, even if they believed Germany was heading for defeat or were outraged by atrocities. The idea that a soldier had to do his duty under all circumstances was so firmly anchored in soldiers’ frame of reference that it could only be shaken by the immediate prospect of death or complete military defeat. The imperative to act according to military norms only ended when the Wehrmacht order collapsed and soldiers could no longer see any sense in sacrificing their lives for a lost cause. Self-sacrifice for its own sake was never a part of the classic military canon of values, and the Nazi leadership had little success over the course of the war in radicalizing soldiers’ attitudes.

Biographical factors no doubt influenced how individuals interpreted the war. But quantitatively speaking, such differences were marginal and got smoothed over by the daily experience of battle in much the same way as differences in social class. Only at the core of the left-wing and Catholic milieus did the military canon of values possess less appeal.^{896} Far more influential in shaping individuals’ attitudes and behavior were military formations. Elite units, for instance, had their own variations on the military frame of reference, although they affected perceptions of the war far less than soldiers’ actions and consequences. What mattered for elite soldiers was action. An elite fighter was supposed to prove his mettle in battle, and not just talk about it. In each branch of the military and each class of weaponry, specific identities crystallized. They in turn were heavily influenced by concrete events and experiences. The trope of fighting to the death, for instance, was interpreted in significantly different ways by an infantry soldier, a fighter pilot, and a submarine helmsman.

VIOLENCE

Violence is practiced by all groups, men and women, educated and uneducated people, Catholics, Protestants, and Muslims, if cultural and social situations make it seem sensible. Exercising violence is a constructive social act. That is to say, perpetrators use it to achieve goals and create realities. They compel others to bend to their will, distinguish those who belong from those who are excluded, increase their own power, and take possession of the property of those vanquished. Violence is also destructive, of course, and not just for its victims.

Yet none of this argues for the persistent myth that violence is always bubbling, waiting to be released, just below the thin crust of civilization. All these reflections imply that groups of human beings have perennially chosen the option of violence when it seemed likely to promote their own survival. In fact, civilization is not some sort of thin crust. Ever since modern nations introduced the principle of a state monopoly on the legitimate use of force, meaning that every private act of violence can be punished, the use of violence has dramatically declined. This bit of progress brought on by civilization has allowed for the level of freedom enjoyed by the citizens of democratic societies today. Yet that does not mean violence has been eradicated. It has only taken on a different form. It does not mean that individuals or groups never violate the state’s monopoly or that democratic states per se refrain from exercising violence. The frame of reference for violence in the modern age is different from that in nonmodern cultures—that is all. The question is not one of violence and its absence, but of its proportions and the means by which it is regulated.

A sufficient reason for people to decide to kill other people can be the feeling that their existence is threatened, that violence is being legitimately demanded of them, or that it makes some sort of political, cultural, or religious sense. This applies not just to violence in the course of a war, but to other social situations as well. For this reason, the violence practiced by Wehrmacht soldiers was not as a rule more “National Socialist” than the force used by British or American soldiers. The only cases in which the violence can be seen as National Socialist were those instances where it was directed against people who could under no circumstances be seen as a military threat: the murder of Soviet POWs and, above all, the extermination of European Jews. War, as is the case with all genocides, created the framework in which the constraints of civilization were revoked. It also created the large number of Wehrmacht soldiers who would eventually serve as “assistant executioners.” The Holocaust did not define the character of World War II. Nonetheless, as the most extreme form of violence in human history, the Holocaust has influenced and formed people’s views of that war. This historically unique crime still dominates our understanding today of history’s most deadly war, an exorbitant explosion of violence that claimed 50 million lives. Yet the majority of the victims died in the violence of World War II, not as a result of the Holocaust. All the wars waged in the meantime have shown that it is inappropriate to show outrage or surprise that people are killed and maimed when there is war. If there is war, that’s the way it is.

It would be more productive to ask whether and under what circumstances people can refrain from killing. That would put an end to the ostentatious demonstrations of horror at the crimes and violence against innocent civilians every time states decide to wage war. Civilian casualties are inevitable because the frame of reference “war” promotes actions and creates temporary structures in which violence, in either a total or partial sense, can no longer be constrained and limited. Like every form of social behavior, violence has its own specific dynamic. This book is full of illustrations of what that dynamic is.

Will it ever be possible for a historical or sociological analysis of violence to develop the sort of moral neutrality a quantum physicist maintains toward an electron? Will such analysis ever be able to describe violence as a social possibility with the same detachment as political scientists approach elections and parliaments? As products of the modern age, history and social sciences are duty bound to follow certain basic assumptions. That’s why they encounter such difficulty when confronted with phenomena that challenge those assumptions.

If we cease to define violence as an aberration, we learn more about our society and how it functions than if we persist in comforting illusions about our own basically nonviolent nature. If we reclassify violence in its various forms as part of the inventory of possible social actions among communities that have come together for mutual survival, we will see that such groups are also always potential communities of annihilation. Modernity’s faith in its own distance from violence is illusionary. People kill for various motives. Soldiers kill because it’s their job.