Soldaten

This story, as told by Staff Sergeant Schmid on June 20, 1942, typifies how the soldiers talk in the protocols. As in all everyday conversations, the speaker repeatedly changes the subject, following a chain of associations. In the middle, when Schmid is talking about music, it occurs to him how much he enjoys Russian music, whereupon he briefly describes it before continuing his narrative. Schmid’s anecdote begins harmlessly enough, but turns truly horrific at the end with the execution of the two young Russian soldiers. The narrator reports that not only were the two youths murdered, they were made to dig their own graves. The execution runs into a complication, and that leads to the eventual moral of the story. The young soldier about to be killed proves “fanatic” or “idealistic,” eliciting the staff sergeant’s admiration.

At first glance what we have here is a spectacular combination of topics—war, enemy soldiers, youths, music, Russian expanses, crimes against humanity, and admiration for one’s adversary—that don’t seem to cohere. Yet they are narrated in a single breath. That is the first thing we need to recognize. The stories we will be examining in this book deviate from what we expect. They were not intended to be well rounded, consistent, or logical. They were told to create excitement, elicit interest, or provide space and opportunity for the interlocutor to add commentary or stories of his own. In this respect, as is true for all everyday conversations, the soldiers’ stories tend to jump around in interesting ways. They are full of ruptures and sidebar narratives, and they aim to establish consensus and agreement. People do not converse solely in order to exchange information but to create a relationship with one another, establishing commonalities and assuring themselves that they are experiencing one and the same world. The soldier’s world is that of war. That is what makes their conversations seem so extraordinary to readers today. For the soldiers themselves, they were perfectly normal.

The brutality, harshness, and absence of emotion of war are omnipresent, and that is what is so disturbing for us reading the dialogues today, more than sixty years after the fact. Involuntarily, we can only shake our heads in dismay and frequent incomprehension. Yet in order to understand the world of these soldiers, and not just our own world, we need to get beyond such moral reactions. The matter-of-factness with which extreme acts of brutality are related shows that killing and the worst sorts of violence were part of the narrator’s and audience’s everyday reality. The POWs discussed such topics for hours on end. But they also conversed about airplanes, bombs, radar devices, cities, landscapes, and women:

Male conversations are like this. The two soldiers protocolled here, a Luftwaffe lance corporal and a sergeant, at times describe the Russian campaign like tourists, telling of “delightful” towns and memories. Then, suddenly, the story becomes about the spontaneous rape of female forced laborers. The sergeant relates this like a minor, ancillary anecdote, before continuing to describe his “trip.” This example illustrates the parameters of what can be said and what is expected in the secretly monitored conversations. None of the violence related goes against his interlocutor’s expectations. Stories about shooting, raping, and robbing are commonplace within the war stories. Rarely do they occasion analysis, moral objections, or disagreements. As brutal as they may be, the conversations proceed harmoniously. The soldiers understand one another. They share the same world and swap perspectives on the events that occupy their minds and the things that they’ve seen and done. They narrate and interpret these things in historically, culturally, and situatively specific frameworks of reference.

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

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

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

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

To understand and explain why German soldiers waged war for five years with a ferocity still unparalleled today, causing an eruption of violence that claimed 50 million lives and decimated an entire continent, we have to see the war, their war, through their eyes. The following chapters will be concerned in detail with the factors that influenced and determined the soldiers’ perspective, their frames of reference. Readers who are not interested in Nazi and military frames of reference and are more curious about the soldiers’ narratives and discussions about violence, technology, extermination, women, or the Führer should proceed directly to this page. After we have given a detailed account of the soldiers’ views on fighting, killing, and dying, we will compare war as waged by the Wehrmacht with other wars, thereby elucidating what was specifically “National Socialist” about World War II. This much we can reveal in advance: the results of this examination will often be unexpected.

SEEING THE WAR WITH SOLDIERS’ EYES: ANALYZING FRAMES OF REFERENCE

Human beings are not Pavlovian dogs. They don’t react with conditioned reflexes to predetermined stimuli. Between stimulus and reaction, something highly specialized happens which epitomizes human consciousness and which distinguishes our species from all other forms of life. Humans interpret what they perceive and on the basis of interpretation draw conclusions, make up their minds, and decide what to do. Belying Marxist theory, human beings never act on the basis of objective conditions; nor do they act, as disciples of rational choice theory long wanted us to believe, solely with an eye toward cost-benefit calculations. Waging war is neither the only logical result of cost-benefit analysis nor a necessary consequence of objective circumstances. A physical body will always fall according to the laws of gravity and never otherwise, but whatever human beings do they could always have done differently. Nor do magic entities such as “mentalities” make people behave a certain way, although psychological structures no doubt influence what human beings do. Mentalities precede but do not determine decisions. Even if people’s perceptions and actions are bound up with social, cultural, hierarchical, and biological or anthropological circumstances, human beings always enjoy a certain freedom of interpretation and action. But the ability to interpret and decide presupposes orientation and knowledge of what one is dealing with and what consequences a decision can have. And a frame of reference is what provides orientation.

Frames of reference vary drastically according to historical periods and cultures. Orthodox Muslims, for instance, categorize suitable and unsuitable sexual behavior within a completely different framework from that of secular inhabitants of Western society. Nonetheless, no member of either group is able to interpret what he sees outside references not of his own choice or making. They influence, guide, and even steer his perceptions and interpretations. That is not to say that transgressions of a preexisting frame of reference do not occur in special situations. It is possible to observe or think something new. But this is relatively seldom the case. Frames of reference guarantee economy of action so that most of what happens can be sorted within a familiar matrix. That makes things easier. People called upon to act don’t need to start from the very beginning with the question: what is actually going on here? In the vast majority of cases, the answers to this question are preprogrammed and accessible, saved in a corpus of cultural orientation and knowledge. Most everyday tasks are taken care of by routines, habits, and certainties, and that saves individual human beings a colossal amount of work.

Thus when we want to explain human behavior, we first must reconstruct the frame of reference in which given human beings operated, including which factors structured their perception and suggested certain conclusions. Merely analyzing objective circumstances is inadequate. Nor do mentalities explain why someone did a specific thing, especially in cases where members of a group whose minds were all formed the same way arrive at entirely different conclusions and decisions. This is the systemic limit upon theories about ideological wars and totalitarian regimes. The question always remains: how are “world views” and “ideologies” translated into individual perceptions and interpretations and how do they affect individual behavior? In order to understand those things, we analyze frames of reference as a way of reconstructing the perceptions and interpretations of people in specific historical situations, here German soldiers during World War II.

When frames of reference are ignored, academic analyses of past actions automatically become normative, since present-day standards are enlisted to allow us to understand what was going on. As a result, past wars and violence often appear bafflingly “horrible,” even though horror is a moral and not an analytical concept. Moreover, the behavior of people who exercise violence appears abnormal and psychopathic, despite the fact that when we reconstruct the world from their perspective their rationale for using violence is entirely logical and understandable. Analyzing frames of reference allows us to view the violence of World War II in nonmoral, nonnormative fashion. The aim is to understand the preconditions for psychologically normal people to do things they would not otherwise do.

We have to distinguish between different orders of frames of reference:

Frames of the first order are the broad sociohistorical backdrop against which people of a given time operate. They are what sociologist Alfred Schütz called “the assumptive world,” the things we pre-presume must be the case. They include categories of good and evil and true and false, what is edible and what is not, how much distance we should maintain when speaking to one another, and what is polite or rude. This “world as we feel it to be” has its effects on us less as beings capable of self-reflection than as creatures influenced by the unconscious and our emotions.^{4}

Frames of reference of the second order are more concrete in a historical, cultural, and often geographical sense. They comprise a sociohistorical space that, in most respects, can be clearly delimited—for instance, the length of a dictatorial regime or the duration of a historical entity like the Third Reich.

Frames of reference of the third order are even more specific. They consist of a concrete constellation of sociohistorical events within which people act. They include, for example, a war in which soldiers fight.

Frames of reference of the fourth order are the special characteristics, modes of perception, interpretative paradigms, and perceived responsibilities that an individual brings to a specific situation. This is the level of psychology, personal dispositions, and individual decision making.

This book analyzes second- and third-order frames of reference since that is primarily what our source material allows us to best approach.

FUNDAMENTAL ORIENTATIONS: WHAT IS ACTUALLY HAPPENING HERE?

On October 30, 1938, CBS Radio in the United States interrupted its regular programming with a special announcement that there had been a gas explosion on the planet Mars and a cloud of hydrogen was speeding toward the earth. Then, during a radio reporter’s interview with an astronomy professor, aimed at clarifying the potential dangers, another announcement was made about a seismic catastrophe of earthquake strength, presumably the result of a meteor hitting our planet. A barrage of news flashes followed. Curiosity seekers at the site of impact reported being attacked by aliens who emerged from the crater. Further objects were said to be striking the earth’s surface, and hordes of little green men from Mars were pressing on with their attacks. The military had been deployed, with little success. The aliens were marching on New York. Warplanes took to the air. People began fleeing the danger zone. Panic was breaking out.

At this point a change in frame of reference occurred. Up until the episode about the warplanes, the news reports were simply following the script of a radio play Orson Welles had adapted from H. G. Wells’s novel The War of the Worlds. But the people fleeing in panic were real. Among the six million Americans who had tuned in to Wells’s radio broadcast, two million of them believed every word they heard. Many of them hastily packed their things and ran out into the streets to escape the alleged alien gas attacks. Telephone lines were jammed for hours, and it took hours more until news got around that the whole thing was fictional.^{5} This legendary event, which established Orson Welles’s fame, vividly illustrated the truth of sociologist William I. Thomas’s 1917 theorem: “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.” No matter how objectively wrong or irrational people’s estimation of reality may be, the conclusions they draw create new realities.

That was the case with the listeners who had not heard the announcement that The War of the Worlds was a radio play and who thought the alien invasion was really happening. Nineteen thirties communications technology, of course, did not allow people to quickly check the truth of what they had heard, and those who fled their apartment buildings saw crowds of other people also taking to the streets. What reason did they have to suspect they had been taken in by a hoax? Human beings always seek to confirm their perception and interpretation of reality by observing what other people do, all the more so in unexpected and threatening situations that make people lose their orientation and ask: what is going on here and what should I do?

The War of the Worlds is a spectacular example, but it only illustrates how people behave when they are trying to orient themselves. Modern societies in particular, with their rich variety of functions, roles, and complex situations, demand that their members constantly interpret reality. What is happening here? How can I fulfill expectations of me? Most of these questions remain unconscious because the lion’s share of the orientation work happens automatically, steered by routines, habits, prescripted responses, and rules. But in cases where things don’t function as they should, when accidents, misperceptions, and mistakes occur, we become explicitly conscious of the need for what we are always implicitly doing: interpreting what is going on in front of our senses.

Naturally, this interpretative work does not happen in a vacuum or start from the very beginning. Interpretation itself is bound to frames, perspectives comprised of many elements that structure and organize experiences as we are in the process of making them. Following the analysis of Gregory Bateson^{6} and Alfred Schütz,^{7} Erving Goffman described a plethora of such frames and their attendant characteristics. In so doing, he elucidated not only how frames comprehensively organize our everyday perceptions and orientation, but how they yield highly divergent interpretations, depending on contextual knowledge and standpoint of observation. Take the example of fraud. For the swindler, for example, the framework of activity is a “deceptive maneuver,” while for his victim it is that which is being deceptively advanced as true.^{8} Or, as Polish journalist Kazimierz Sakowicz noted in his diary in the context of World War II and the Holocaust: “For Germans, 300 Jews mean 300 enemies of humanity; for Lithuanians, they mean 300 pairs of shoes and trousers.”^{9}

CULTURAL TIES

Stanley Milgram once said that he was curious about why people would rather burn to death in a house fire than run outside without trousers. Seen objectively, this is an example of irrational behavior. But subjectively, it shows that standards of decency can become barriers to necessary strategies of survival, and that these barriers can be hard to overcome. In World War II, some Japanese soldiers preferred to take their own lives rather than become prisoners of war. In Saipan, hundreds of civilians jumped to their deaths over cliffs in order to avoid falling into American hands.^{10} Even in life-or-death situations, cultural ties and duties often outweigh the instinct for survival. This is why people die in the attempt to rescue a dog from drowning, or decide to become suicide bombers.

Where survival is at stake, cultural baggage weighs heavy and occasionally proves fatal. Or put the matter differently: in all these examples, the main problem is perceived not as a threat to individual survival, but as a danger to established, symbolic, inviolable rules of behavior and status. A danger of this sort can appear so grave to those concerned that no way out is visible. In this sense, people can become victims of their own techniques for survival.

NOT KNOWING

History itself is not perceived. History happens. Only in retrospect do historians determine which events from a massive inventory of possibilities were “historical,” i.e., significant for the eventual way things turned out. Everyday consciousness rarely registers gradual changes of social and physical environment because perception constantly readjusts itself in line with changes in its various environments. Psychologists call this phenomenon “shifting baselines,” and examples such as the recent changes in our communicative habits or the radical alteration of normative standards under Nazism show how powerful they can be. In both examples, people were under the impression that everything had basically stayed the same, even though fundamental change had occurred.

Only in retrospect does a slow process, at least one perceived as slow, such as the breakdown of civilization, congeal into an abrupt event. That happens when people realize that a development has had radical consequences. The interpretation of what people perceived within a process that later turned into a catastrophe is a very tricky enterprise—not least because we pose our questions of what people knew with our own hindsight as to how things turned out. Historical actors, of course, possessed no such knowledge. We view history from the end to the beginning and are forced to suspend our own historical knowledge in order to say what people knew at any specific historical juncture. For that reason, Norbert Elias has proposed that reconstructing what people did not or could not have known is one of the most difficult tasks of social science.^{11} Or to use the terminology of historian Jürgen Kocka, we could describe this task as the “liquification” of history, the conversion of facts back into possibilities.^{12}

EXPECTATIONS

On August 2, 1914, Franz Kafka in Prague wrote in his diary: “Germany declared war on Russia—afternoon: swimming lessons.” This is just one particularly prominent example of events that later observers learn to see as historic not being perceived as such in the real time in which they come together. Indeed, if such events are even registered, it is as a part of everyday life, in which a variety of things are perceived and compete for people’s attention. Even an exceptionally intelligent individual like Kafka can find the outbreak of a war no more noteworthy than a swimming lesson later in the day.

From a historical perspective, one can say that the groundwork for a war of annihilation had been laid long before the German army attacked the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. At the same time, it is doubtful that the soldiers who received their orders that morning truly realized what sort of a war they faced. They expected to make lightning-quick advances, as had been the case in Poland, France, and the Balkans, and not to wage a murderous frontline campaign with previously unprecedented ferocity. Moreover, there was even less reason for them to anticipate that in the course of the war groups of people that had no immediate connection with the hostilities would be systematically eliminated. The frame of reference “war,” as it had been previously known, did not presume anything like that.

For the same reason, many Jewish Germans did not recognize the dimensions of the process of exclusion of which they would become the victims. Instead many viewed Nazi rule as a short-term phenomenon that “one will have to get through, or a setback that one could accept, or at the worst a threat that restricted one personally, but that was still more bearable than the arbitrary perils of exile.”^{13} The bitter irony in the case of Jews was that while past discrimination meant their reference frame did indeed encompass anti-Semitism, persecution, and larceny, it also rendered them unable to see that what was happening in the Third Reich was of a different, absolutely deadly order.

TEMPORALLY SPECIFIC CONTEXTS OF PERCEPTION

On June 2, 2010, in the German town of Göttingen, three bomb squad specialists lost their lives in an attempt to defuse an unexploded bomb from World War II. German media reported extensively on the accident, and it caused a considerable outpouring of sympathy. Yet if the bomb had killed three people in 1944 or 1945, when it was actually dropped, it would have attracted little attention beyond the immediate families of the men killed. During wartime, such deaths were nothing unusual. In January and February 1945, some one hundred residents of Göttingen were killed in bombing raids.^{14}

Historically speaking, violence has been enacted and experienced in very different ways. The extraordinary abstinence from violence in modern society, the fact that the public and to a lesser degree the private spheres are relatively free from force, is the result of the civilizing influence of separation of state powers and the state’s monopoly on the legitimate use of force. These achievements have allowed for the enormous sense of security that is an integral part of modern societies. In premodern periods, people were far more likely to become the victims of direct physical violence than now.^{15} Violence was also far more present in the public sphere, for example, in the form of public punishments and executions.^{16} It is therefore reasonable to assume that the frames of reference and the experiences of committing and suffering violence varied throughout history.

ROLE MODELS AND RESPONSIBILITIES

As discussed earlier, roles make up an extensive social arena, especially in modern, functionally differentiated societies, and each type of role brings with it a certain set of responsibilities for those who choose or are forced to play it. Roles represent an intermediate level between cultural ties and responsibilities, and group-specific and individual interpretation and action. Within many roles, we may not even be aware that we are acting according to their standards, although it is obvious that we in fact are. They include all the roles sociologists use to differentiate between societies: roles of gender, age, social origin, and education. The sets of responsibilities and norms they entail are consciously perceived and questioned only in exceptional cases. Nonetheless, such self-evident, everyday roles influence our perception, interpretation, and behavioral options, while they themselves, as is especially the case with gender and age, are subject to normative rules. People expect a different sort of behavior from an elderly lady than from a young male, even though there is no specific catalogue of dos and don’ts, to say nothing of laws. As members of society, all of us “know” such rules implicitly.

The situation is different with explicitly adopted roles, for instance, those we take on in the course of our careers. They bring along new sets of responsibilities to be learned. If a person who has been studying mathematics gets a job at an insurance company, his set of responsibilities changes dramatically, affecting norms of attire, working day, communication, and what that person considers important and insignificant. Other fundamental transitions happen when people become mothers or fathers, or when a pensioner retires from the working world. Furthermore we can observe radical role changes when people enter “total institutions”^{17} such as a cloister, a prison, or—as is particularly significant for the present context—the military. Such institutions—say, for instance, the Wehrmacht or the SS—claim total dispensation over the individual. Individuals are given uniforms and special haircuts and thereby lose control over the enactment of their own identities. They no longer do with their time as they see fit but are constantly subjected to external compulsion, drills, harassment, and draconian punishment for violating rules. Total institutions function as hermetically sealed worlds of a special sort, directed toward producing a finished result. Soldiers do not just learn how to use weapons and negotiate various types of terrain. They are taught to obey, to subjugate themselves to hierarchy, and to act on command at a moment’s notice. Total institutions establish a specific form of socialization, in which group norms and responsibilities have far more influence on individuals than under normal social conditions. The group to which one belongs may not be freely selected, but it is the only group to which one can relate. One is part of the group because one was assigned to it.^{18}

A total institution initially attempts to rob initiates of all forms of self-control. Only after the “initiation” or “apprenticeship” has been completed does a measure of freedom and a spectrum for possible behavior open up. This phenomenon is extreme even in peacetime, and it is the more so during war, when acts of battle are no longer simulation, but everyday reality, and one’s own survival may well depend on the smooth functioning of one’s unit. At that point, the total institution becomes a total group, allowing only specific spectrums of action precisely defined by rank and command structure.^{19} In comparison with civilian roles of every sort, the frame of reference of soldiers at war is characterized by the lack of alternatives. One of the soldiers, whose conversations with a comrade were secretly recorded, put it so: “We’re like a machine gun. A weapon for waging war.”^{20}

In decisions of what, when, and with whom, a soldier’s behavior is not subject to his own perception, interpretation, and decision making. The leeway with which a command can be interpreted according to one’s own estimation and abilities is extremely small. Depending on the circumstances, the significance of roles within frames of reference varies considerably. Under the pluralistic conditions of civilian life, it can be quite negligible. Under the conditions of war or other extreme situations, though, the significance can be total.

Parts of various civilian roles can also be transferred to the military context, where they become matters of life or death. A harmless action like transferring files can suddenly become murderous, if the context changes. As early as 1962, in his seminal work The Destruction of the European Jews, Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg underscored the negative potential of people employing civilian skills for homicidal purposes:

Applied to war, that would mean: every mechanic could repair bombers whose deadly payloads killed thousands of people; every butcher could, as a member of a procurement enterprise, be complicit in the plundering of occupied areas. During World War II, Lufthansa pilots flew long-range sorties in their Fw 200s not to transport passengers, but to sink British merchant ships in the Atlantic. Yet because their activity in and of itself didn’t change, those who played these roles rarely saw reason to engage in moral reflection or to refuse to do their jobs. Their basic activity remained the same.

INTERPRETIVE PARADIGM: WAR IS WAR

Specific interpretive paradigms are tightly connected with the sets of demands that accompany every role. Doctors see an illness differently than do patients, just as perpetrators view a crime differently than do victims. The paradigms that direct these interpretations are, in a sense, mini frames of reference. Every interpretive paradigm, of course, includes an entire universe of alternative interpretations and implies nonknowledge. That is disadvantageous in situations so new that previous experience does more to hinder than to help our ability to deal with them.^{22} Paradigms are effective in familiar contexts since they remove the need to engage in complex considerations and calculations. One knows what one is dealing with and what the right recipe is for solving a problem. As predetermined, routinized frames for ordering what is happening at a given moment, interpretive paradigms structure our lives to an extraordinarily high degree. They range from stereotypes (“Jews are all…”) to entire cosmologies (“God will not permit Germany’s demise”), and are both historically and culturally very specific. German soldiers in World War II typecast their enemies according to different criteria and characteristics than soldiers in the Vietnam War did, but the procedure and function of the typecasting are identical.

Interpretive paradigms are especially central to how soldiers in World War II experienced others, their own mission, their “race,” Hitler, and Jews. Paradigms equip frames of reference with prefabricated interpretations according to which experiences can be sorted. They also include interpretations from different social contexts that are imported into the experience of war. This is especially significant for the notion of “war as a job,” which in turn is extremely important for soldiers’ interpretations of what they do. This central role can be gleaned from phrases like the “dirty work” or the “fine job” done by the Luftwaffe that recur in the soldiers’ conversations. The interpretive paradigm from industrial society for how soldiers experienced and dealt with war also informs philosopher Ernst Jünger’s famous description of soldiers as “workers of war.” In Jünger’s words, war appears as a “rational work process equally far removed from feelings of horror and romanticism” and the use of weapons as “the extension of a customary activity at the workbench.”^{23}

In fact, commercial work and the work of war are indeed related in a number of respects. Both are subject to division of labor, both depend on technical, specialist qualifications, and both are hierarchically structured. In both cases, the majority of those involved have nothing to do with the finished product and carry out orders without asking questions about whether commands are sensible. Responsibility is either delegated or confined to the particular area on which one directly works. Routine plays a major role. Workers and soldiers carry out recurring physical movements and follow standing instructions. For instance, in a bomber, pilots, bombardiers, and gunners with varying qualifications work together to achieve a finished product: the destruction of a target, whether that target might be a city, a bridge, or a group of soldiers in the open field. Mass executions such as those perpetrated against Eastern European Jews were not carried out only by those who fired the guns, but by the truck drivers, the cooks, the weapons maintenance personnel, and by the “guides” and “carriers,” those who brought the victims to their graves and who piled up the corpses. The mass executions were the result of a precise division of labor.

Against this backdrop, it is clear that interpretive paradigms give war a deeper meaning. If I interpret the killing of human beings as work, I do not categorize it as a crime and, thereby, normalize what I am doing. The role played by interpretive paradigms in the reference frame of war emerges clearly from examples like the ones above. Actions that would be considered deviant and in need of explanation and justification in the normal circumstances of everyday civilian life become normal, conformist forms of behavior. The interpretive paradigm, in a sense, automatizes moral self-examination and prevents soldiers from feeling guilt.

FORMAL DUTIES

Part of an orienting frame of reference is very simple: it is a universe of regulations and a position within a hierarchy that determines what sort of orders an individual can be told to carry out and which orders he himself can issue to subordinates. Civilian life, too, has a spectrum ranging from total dependence to total freedom, depending on the roles one has to play. A business tycoon may enjoy immense freedom of action and be beyond the command of anything but the law in his business. But the situation might be very different in his family life, where he may be bossed around by a dominant father or an imperious wife.

By contrast, such things are eminently clear in the military. In the army, rank and function unambiguously determine how much leeway individuals have. The lower down one is in the hierarchy, the more dependent one will be on others’ commands and decisions. Yet even within total institutions like a military boot camp, a prison, or a closed psychiatric clinic, everyone enjoys at least a small measure of freedom of action. In his book Asylums, sociologist Erving Goffman has convincingly described how people can exploit rules in total institutions for their own purposes. According to Goffman, when people in such institutions use jobs in the kitchen or the library to get organized or smuggle desired goods, they are engaged in “secondary adjustments,” pretending to follow the rules but actually advancing their own interests. Occupying troops enjoy numerous opportunities for secondary adjustment. In June 1944, for example, a certain Lieutenant Pölert related: “I sent home a tremendous amount of butter and three or four pigs from France. It may have been three to four cwt of butter.”^{24} Soldiers welcomed such sides of war from which they could personally profit. The leeway afforded by secondary adaptation, however, drastically declines in actual battle and can only be exploited if one enjoys violence. In any case, as the situation grows more confined and drastic, the frame of reference becomes less differentiated.

SOCIAL DUTIES

In cases like total institutions with a limited frame of reference, freedom of choice is minimized while security of orientation grows. At the same time, social duties can intervene in established, unambiguous decision-making structures and make group ties or even chains of command more permeable. For instance, the commandant of the Dautmergen concentration camp, Erwin Dold, disobeyed orders and organized food for “his” inmates, in a unique attempt to improve their chances of survival. He did this in the secure knowledge that his wife supported and even expected such behavior.^{25} Another example of the impact of social duties was soldiers who suddenly felt moral scruples when carrying out mass executions, after noticing resemblances between children they murdered and their own kids.^{26} Nonetheless, we should be under no illusions about the effect of social duties. We know of a great number of cases in which the real or imaginary presence of a wife actually encouraged soldiers to kill because they felt they were acting in harmony with the wishes and choices of their spouses.

Social duties emerge clearly in the recorded conversations of tank commander Heinrich Eberbach. In October 1944, while interned in the British POW camp Trent Park, he talked about whether he should voluntarily assist Allied propaganda efforts:

The profound influence of social ties results from the fact, contrary to popular assumption, that people behave within social relationships and not for causal reasons or according to rational calculation. Social ties are thus a crucial variable in determining what people decide—all the more so when decisions are made under stress, as in Stanley Milgram’s famous simulation. In that experiment, social constellations were decisive in how obediently the subjects behaved toward the authority figure.^{28}

Social proximity, perceived or actual, and the duties bound up with it constitute a central element in frames of reference. In the discipline of history, this element rarely comes into focus since, as a rule, sources rarely contain information about a person behaving in a specific way because he felt a sense of duty toward someone else. Further complicating the matter is the fact that social duties are not necessarily conscious. Sometimes they are so deeply internalized that they serve as points of orientation without an individual being aware of them. Psychologists call this phenomenon delegation.

When we pause to consider the one-dimensional reference frame of soldiers faced with military situations and the restriction of soldiers’ social environment to their comrades, we begin to see the significance of a sense of social duty. Whereas in civilian life, family, friends, schoolmates, and fellow students or workers represent a pluralistic corpus of diverse figures of reference, soldiers at the front essentially have only their brothers-in-arms. And they are all working within the same reference frame toward the same goal of fulfilling their military tasks while ensuring their own survival. Solidarity and cooperation are decisive factors in battle. Thus, the group always represents the strongest element of the frame of reference. Yet even when they are not engaged in active fighting, individual soldiers are highly dependent on the group. A soldier does not know for how long the war will go on or when he will get his next home leave or transfer, situations in which he will distance himself from the total group and rejoin a pluralistic community. Much has been written about the force of camaraderie. Along with its socializing functions, camaraderie also reveals antisocial elements when it is directed externally. The internal norms of the group determine standards of behavior, while the standards of the nonmilitary world are considered subordinate and insignificant.

In his role as comrade, an individual soldier does not just become a voluntary or involuntary part of a group, forfeiting autonomy in the process. He also receives something in return: security, dependability, support, and recognition. From this perspective, camaraderie entails not only a maximum concentration of social duty, but also the relief from duties vis-à-vis all other normally significant aspects of the world. The soldier’s frame of reference and, in particular, the soldier’s practical everyday existence are highly determined by this give-and-take. In the practical situation of war, camaraderie is no longer a tool of socialization that brings some duties while relieving others. A group of comrades becomes a literal unit of survival, creating binding forces that would never have such power under normal circumstances. This is not a feature unique to National Socialism. In their wide-ranging study of Wehrmacht soldiers, Edward A. Shils and Morris Janowitz also emphasized the central importance of camaraderie as the primary unit of individual orientation and interpretation in wartime.^{29} Camaraderie is less about a specific view of the world or ideology, than orientation. Many individuals feel emotionally more at home with their comrades than with family members, who do not share their experience as soldiers and thus cannot understand them. Camaraderie is by no means a romanticized military myth. It is a social environment whose importance outstrips all rival environments.

SITUATIONS

In 1973, scholars at Princeton University carried out a remarkable experiment. A group of theology students were told to compose a short essay on the parable of the Good Samaritan and then take it, upon command, to a specific campus building, where it would be recorded for radio. The students waited around for that specific instruction, but suddenly an authority figure would appear and say: “Are you still here? You should have been over at the building a long time ago. Maybe the assistant is still waiting! You better hurry!” Each of the students duly hastened off to turn in his essay. In front of the entrance to the building in question, they found a seemingly helpless person lying on the ground, coughing and moaning with his eyes closed. There was no way to enter the building without noticing this person, apparently in the greatest of need. How did the theology students react? Only sixteen of forty subjects tried to help; the rest hurried on past the sufferer in order to keep their appointment. Even more confusingly, post-experiment interviews suggested that many of the subjects who had not helped claimed not even to have noticed that a fellow human being was in distress, despite practically stumbling over him.^{30}

The experiment shows that people have to perceive before they can act. When we work toward a goal with extreme concentration, we simply shut out things unrelated to that goal. Focus of this sort does not admit moral questioning. It is the product of a necessary and almost always functioning economy of action that seeks to avoid what is nonessential. There is a vast gap between what people believe about their own moral values, convictions, and commitments and their actual behavior. In concrete situations that demand decisions and action, the decisive factors rarely have much to do with ethical considerations and moral tenets. What matters is the achievement of a goal or the fulfillment of a task. The central question is what is the best and most efficient way to get things done. The theology students were not primarily concerned with the ethos of helping out one’s fellow man, but with the speed they were supposed to keep up to fulfill a task. The inventors of the Good Samaritan experiment, the psychologists John Darley and C. Daniel Batson, concluded that people who were not in a hurry would likely stop and try to offer assistance. Those in a hurry, on the other hand, would continue to hurry even if the task was to deliver a speech on the parable of the Good Samaritan.^{31}

A situation itself seems to have much more influence on what people do than the personal characteristics that get them into a certain situation. That conclusion is supported by the established fact that in the Third Reich, people didn’t need to be anti-Semitic to murder Jews or otherwise altruistic to rescue them. In both cases, it was enough for people to find themselves in a social situation in which one or the other course of action seemed called for. Once a given decision has been made, though, subsequent ones follow the path previously trodden. If an individual had taken part in one mass execution, the probability rose that he would participate in a second or third one. The same was true for people who offered assistance.

PERSONAL DISPOSITIONS

Of course, not everything people perceive and do can be reduced to external references. It goes without saying that different individuals bring various tendencies of perception, social interpretive paradigms, age-specific experiences, and special talents, weaknesses, and personal preferences with them into situations that call for interpretation and response. With this in mind, social situations always represent temporary structures that can be used and expanded with various degrees of freedom. A lot depends on the individual. It is certain that the grotesquely simplified relations of power in concentration camps or during the mass executions tended to appeal to violently inclined members of the SS, the reserve police corps, and Wehrmacht soldiers, offering them an opportunity to live out their sadistic desires, while calling forth repulsion in more sensitive, nonviolent people. It makes a big difference what sort of personality structure is confronted with what sort of situation. At the same time, though, we should not overestimate the significance of personal difference. As the Holocaust and the Nazi war of annihilation show, the vast majority of civilians, as well as soldiers, SS men, and police officers, behaved in discriminatory, violent, and inhumane fashion if the situation at hand seemed to encourage and promote such behavior. Only a tiny minority proved capable of humane resistance. According to the standards of the time, humane behavior was deviant, and brutality was conformist. For that reason, the entire collection of events known as the “Third Reich” and the violence it produced can be seen as a gigantic experiment, showing what sane people who see themselves as good are capable of if they consider something to be appropriate, sensible, or correct. The proportion of people who were psychologically inclined toward violence, discrimination, and excess totaled, as it does in all other social contexts as well, 5 to 10 percent.

In psychological terms, the inhabitants of the Third Reich were as normal as people in all other societies at all other times. The spectrum of perpetrators was a cross section of normal society. No specific group of people proved immune to the temptation, in Günther Anders’s phrase, of “inhumanity with impunity.” The real-life experiment that was the Third Reich did not reduce the variables of personality to absolute zero. But it showed them to be of comparatively slight, indeed often negligible, importance.