Soldaten

Soldiers’ military value systems, their faith in technology, and their immediate social environment were the main factors forming their wartime frame of reference. Yet this does not mean they were completely unaffected by daily events in combat. Even when individual soldiers were not directly involved in them, victories and defeat were constantly present, be it via newspapers, radio, and tales told by their comrades, and soldiers paid keen attention to reports of distant battles, if only because they themselves could always be transferred. Nonetheless, their own direct, personal experiences of war heavily influenced how they interpreted the pivotal events of the conflict. This section will examine how soldiers saw the general context of what they were doing against the backdrop of their frame of reference.

BLITZKRIEG (1939–42)

The militarization of the German people and in particular German soldiers was one of the most important goals of both the Nazi and Wehrmacht leaderships and went hand in hand with rearmament. Yet notwithstanding their considerable success in instilling the idea that Germany was in dire need of defense from external threats,^{417} few Germans reacted with unrestrained enthusiasm at the start of World War II in September 1939. It took the quick victories over Poland, Norway, and especially France, which no one expected to be vanquished so easily, to unleash true euphoria. The intoxication of victory was then consolidated by German successes in Africa and the Balkans.

The mood at this point was especially positive in the Luftwaffe. Conversations between POWs recorded in summer 1940 are dominated by expectations that German troops would soon land in England and free them from captivity. Nearly everyone was certain that ultimate German victory was imminent: “In a month or 6 weeks the war here will be at an end. I definitely believe that the attack will take place this week, or on Monday next.”^{418} “I believe the war is already won,” said another POW,^{419} while a third added, “The chances look very rosy that it won’t last long.”^{420} One Luftwaffe first lieutenant, who’d been shot down early on in the conflict, even started discussing how, after the German conquest of England, he’d like to have some new suits made by fine English tailors.^{421}

Even as German losses mounted, the Battle of Britain was lost, and German invasion plans had to be postponed, most captured German pilots remained obsessed by visions of their own country’s might. In spring 1941, political and military expectations were still very positive, and Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union did nothing to change the mood. On the contrary, most POWs expected a quick German victory on the Eastern Front, after which a somewhat more intense struggle would bring ultimate victory in the West as well. In 1941–42, very few flying units were transferred back and forth between the two fronts, so the numbers of airmen in British POW camps who had served in the East was very small. The surveillance protocols represent an external view of that theater of war. The Wehrmacht’s massive losses in the Soviet Union, German troops’ complete exhaustion in fall 1942, and the murderous following winter are hardly reflected in POWs’ conversations.^{422}

Strategic expectations thus remained constant in 1942, as a statement by Sergeant Willi Zastrau, a W/T operator in Wehrmacht Bomber Wing 2, makes clear:

Only in 1944, when masses of German infantrymen were captured in Italy and France, do the protocols provide valid information about expectations among German army soldiers. A few army troops had been captured as early as 1940, but their numbers were too small to be representative of a specific view of the war. The views that were recorded on tape basically conform to the picture researchers have reconstructed from other sources. Unlike in the Luftwaffe, the euphoria produced in the army by early military triumphs was seriously shaken in 1941–42. Nonetheless, in February 1942, the German military leadership believed that “the dip in troop morale” had been overcome. Examinations of letters sent home had suggested soldiers believed they had “gotten the job done.”^{424} Surviving the first hardships on the Eastern Front had apparently created a new confidence among “Eastern fighters,” who continued to believe in their own innate superiority to their Soviet enemies.^{425}

During the Blitzkrieg phase, soldiers conflated larger events in the war with their own personal experiences to produce a rosy vision of the future. A decisive factor here for both Luftwaffe and German army men was their faith in their superiority to enemies on all fronts. Setbacks and even being taken as a POW could not shake this fundamental confidence.

The situation was different for navy men. Their wartime frame of reference was formed by one not insignificant additional point: the knowledge that they were undeniably inferior to the gigantic British Royal Navy, which was six times the size of the German navy at the start of the war. Despite some successes, German sailors had to acknowledge that other branches of the German military, and not the navy, would have to prevail if final victory was to be achieved. The perspective of submarine crews who had been taken prisoner was thus more pessimistic than that of Luftwaffe pilots. For instance, the chief engineer of U-32, First Lieutenant Anton Thimm, already arrived at the conclusion in November 1940: “The English can hold out under existing conditions for years; you only need to look at the shops, and in a large city at that. The U-Boat arm will not accomplish that (break them) nor airmen either. Time is on the side of the English and we cannot afford to give them time.”^{426} First Lieutenant Hans Jenisch, the U-boat’s commander and a bearer of the Knight’s Cross, even opined that the U-boat was outmoded as a weapon. That drew protest from another U-boat commander, Wilfried Prelberg, who couldn’t believe he was hearing such pessimism from one of his peers. Jenisch’s outlook is all the more remarkable because he was a very successful captain whose crew had survived, almost to a man, the sinking of their vessel. And he was not alone in his views. “The U-boat arm is finished,” a first mate said with a sigh in June 1941. “Absolutely finished.”^{427} Others were critical of Germany’s strategy for bringing Britain to its knees: “We shall never defeat the English through the blockade.”^{428} And others still predicted a long war, which “will be very bad for us.”^{429} Radio operator Willi Dietrich of U-32 was already speculating by November 1940: “Just think of what would happen if we lost the war!”^{430}

There was little change in these attitudes over the course of 1942, although naturally there were some optimists who felt victory was at hand in Russia and believed Germany would then launch a successful offensive against Britain. The first officer of the watch of U-32, First Lieutenant Egon Rudolph, painted the following scenario in late 1941:

Rudolph was a fanatic Nazi, anti-Semite, and Anglophobe. The vehemence of his language was unusual, and he was in the minority of those who remained optimistic at this juncture in the war. Whereas, when cross-examined, most navy POWs claimed they were counting on German victory, they were much more cautious and skeptical when conversing with one another.^{432}

A first mate from U-111, for instance, predicted: “If the war in the east isn’t over by the end of this year, we shall probably lose it.”^{433} And in March 1942, a navy man named Josef Przyklenk confessed to horror when he thought of the future:

It’s interesting here that Przyklenk admits to telling British interrogators something different from what he actually believes. This is another example of dissonance between what soldiers were supposed to and wanted to think and reality. Przyklenk’s response to the dilemma is simply not to think too hard about the situation.

Yet even when German navy men willfully avoided thinking about larger strategic questions, focusing instead on their own concrete experiences of naval warfare, some came to negative conclusions. Karl Wedekind was one of the few survivors when his vessel was sunk during a battle with an Allied convoy. In December 1941, he concluded: “The U-boat warfare is in the cart, the U-boats can do nothing.”^{435} And even in March 1942, a comparatively good month for German forces, Heinz Weszling expressed unmistakable frustration: “Submarine warfare is a damnable business, U-boat men could tell you some stories! As far as I’m concerned they can scrap the whole lot of U-boats.”^{436}

FROM STALINGRAD TO NORMANDY (1943–44)

Most army soldiers lost their confidence in final victory after the massive German defeats during the winter of 1942–43.^{437} Still, the majority believed that the war would now drag on and end in stalemate. Private Faust concluded: “That was a terrific blow! It’s impossible to estimate the proportions of this fiasco.”^{438} And First Sergeant Schreiber predicted: “If we don’t finish the Russians off next year, then we shall be done for. I’m convinced of that. Just think of all the Americans are producing.”^{439}

In the months that followed, news of victories and defeats caused the mood among POWs to rise and fall, but the general tendency remained the same. Thoughts of defeat began to crop up more often and led to impassioned discussions among the inmates. On March 22, 1943, two bomber pilots, both first lieutenants, debated Germany’s prospects in the war:

Holzapfel and Fried had been detained for two weeks together in Latimer House and got along well. Both were experienced pilots who swapped detailed stories about the sorties they had flown over England, and Holzapfel put up with a lot of skeptical remarks from Fried. But Fried crossed the line for him when he cast doubt upon the possibility of ultimate German victory. In Holzapfel’s world, that was unthinkable. The consequences of defeat were all too apparent and gruesome to contemplate.

Aside from some hopeless optimists, who still talked about Germany invading England in summer 1943,^{441} most of the soldiers simply considered total defeat impossible. German euphoria at early Blitzkrieg successes and conviction in their own innate superiority blocked acknowledgment of the course the war was actually taking. Expectations and reality were diverging ever more from one another, creating cognitive dissonance. For that reason, soldiers’ estimations of the situation were increasingly colored by wishful thinking, for example, the hope that the German “leadership” would put things right.

One day, when a Sergeant Kratz, a bomber aircraft mechanic from a Do 217, was flipping through an English newspaper, he was taken aback by a map showing troop movement on the Eastern Front. “So far I’ve always believed that the retreat was a tactical one,” he said. His bunkmate Lelewel answered: “The best thing is not to worry. It doesn’t help at all.”^{442} Lelewel’s response was telling. What good was the insight that the war was being lost? The POWs themselves were part of this war. They had invested their energy, imagination, and hopes in it, had risked their own lives, and, in most cases, lost comrades for it. What option did they have other than to pursue it to the bitter end? It is rare for people to retrospectively question decisions and experiences that are made under situations of duress and hardship. Moreover, people tend to justify things done with ambivalent feelings so as to preserve their own self-image. Therefore, subjectively, it often seems more sensible to repeat an action than to question it by pursuing a corrective. Once a person has overcome his doubts and scruples, the rule of “path dependency” dictates that he will overcome them again a second, third, and fourth time in similar situations. For this reason, it seemed anything but helpful to soldiers to reflect on the senselessness of their own endeavors.

The enthusiasm of men who had been engaged for years in a fruitless battle against English air defenses emerged strikingly in a conversation between three pilots who had been shot down in one of Germany’s last bombing raids on London, the so-called Baby Blitz. Lieutenant Hubertus Schymczyk recalled how the offensive was announced, and in so doing, everything suddenly seemed as it was in the good old days:

Most Luftwaffe pilots were mentally incapable of forming a halfway objective picture of the war. It is astonishing that the heavy losses they suffered in their battle with the RAF, be it in France or the Mediterranean, did not make a more negative impression—although those who engaged in some reflection and were prepared to draw conclusions from the information at their disposal sometimes did see things with crystal clarity. One of them was Wilfried von Müller-Rienzburg, a thirty-eight-year-old Viennese Luftwaffe officer, who declared: “We can’t win the war unless a miracle happens. Only a few complete idiots still believe we can. It is only a question of a few months before we come to grief. In the spring we shall be fighting on four fronts and then, of course, we haven’t got a hope. We’ve lost this war.”^{445}

Navy POWs were even more pessimistic than their army or navy comrades in the period between Stalingrad and the Allied landing at Normandy. In their immediate social environment, there had been practically no success stories since spring 1943, and the tide turned irrevocably in the Battle of the North Atlantic in May 1943. The German navy had become almost insignificant militarily, and crews’ views of the future were correspondingly bleak. “It’s a dog’s life nowadays,” twenty-one-year-old sailor Horst Minnieur complained on November 27, 1943. “It would be best to sink the boat in harbour. Going to sea in a U-boat is nothing but suicide.”^{446} Another comrade seconded that thought. “It’s a horrible business, going to sea nowadays.”^{447} And nineteen-year-old Fritz Schwenninger added, “What the U-boat has to go through today is only comparable with STALINGRAD.”^{448}

Two sailors who had been lucky enough to escape the sinking of the battleship Scharnhorst questioned whether it was worth carrying on given the disastrous course of the war:

Navy Commander in Chief Karl Dönitz tried with all the means at his disposal to combat such pessimism and skepticism. In an ordinance prohibiting “compulsive criticism and complaint” in September 1943, he called for an end to the doomsaying. From now on, the grand admiral commanded, there would only be “fighting, working and keeping silent.”^{450} Joseph Goebbels was impressed by this emphasis on morale. In his diary, he noted that, thanks to his “iron hardness,” Dönitz appeared to be succeeding in turning around the naval campaign and ending the crisis. Dönitz, Goebbels wrote, was cleaning out the old, worn-out officer corps, overcoming the “provocative resignation in the face of wartime developments,” and offering new ideas for continuing the submarine campaign. But macho appeals and motivational speeches by the leadership made little headway against the far more persuasive force of navy men’s own experience. More and more sailors believed Germany would lose the war—45 percent, according to a British survey of POWs carried out in fall 1943.^{451}

Historian Rafael Zagovec has pointed out that similar results emerged from a survey of German army soldiers in Tunisia in April 1943. The Allies were indeed startled that German soldiers seemed to have lost most of their confidence in final victory and belief in their own cause. That survey found that a majority were “sick and tired” and disinterested in broader questions.^{452} At the time, American military experts could hardly explain why their enemies continued to fight.

Of course, not all German soldiers looked toward the future with such desperation. With the reentrenchment of the fronts in late 1943, morale and confidence rose, and the Nazi and Wehrmacht leadership did their best to bolster the revival. The measures included the creation of the National Socialist Leading Officers, Nazi officials charged with political propaganda, on December 22, 1943. These “brave leaders of national defense,” in Hitler’s words, were charged with getting soldiers to believe in final victory, even if they did not know how it was going to be achieved.^{453} It isn’t possible to reconstruct whether this initiative had any success, but if so, it probably wasn’t all that great. While references to propaganda slogans do occur regularly in the surveillance protocols, and some POWs seem to have internalized them, there was no change in the general downward spiral of morale.

THE FINAL YEAR OF WAR

World War II was long decided in June 1944, when the Allies deployed a huge armada to land their troops on the beaches of Normandy. Today we know that the only thing that could have scuttled the operation was bad weather. But in 1944, the situation was far less clear. The Allies may have no longer doubted their ability to win the war, but they were uncertain as to whether the leap to the continent would succeed. Eisenhower even prepared a radio speech for the eventuality that the mission failed. And on the German side, many people believed that the landing of troops represented a chance for Germany to achieve a stalemate or even win the conflict.^{455}

The surveillance protocols confirm the impression that the majority of soldiers by no means thought the battle had been lost. On the contrary, for many of them, the Allied invasion represented an opportunity for the Wehrmacht to alter the course of the war. A conversation between Colonel Hauck and Colonel Annacker—two commanders of the 362nd Infantry Division, who had been captured in Italy—is typical of the expectations soldiers typically had on the day after the Normandy landing:

A Captain Gundlach, who had defended his bunker in the small coastal town of Ouistreham to the very last, shared similar hopes:

In this statement, we can observe the convergence of faith in final victory and faith in the Führer.

Yet no matter how much energy the Nazi leadership or German soldiers themselves put into mobilizing their last reserves of confidence, the massive material advantage of Allied troops, and especially their aerial and artillery dominance, crushed any remaining hopes. Soldiers no longer talked about setbacks on the front or battles that had been lost; their entire world collapsed like a house of cards. The path was freed for the sort of fundamental criticism that had previously been lacking—a Private First Class Hirst even opined, “I’ll do anything I can to end the war and see that Germany is completely defeated”^{458}—and not just among foot soldiers, but officers as well.

Typical in this regard was a conversation between Majors Arnold Kuhle and Sylvester von Saldern, both of whom had fought on the front lines as infantry commanders and had been taken prisoner in June 1944 on the Cotentin Peninsula:

Kuhle and Saldern both reached the sobering conclusion that Germany had no chance against an overpowering enemy. Hitler had not been able to keep his promises, and weapons of retaliation were tactically useless. The two men’s faith in the Führer and their trust in the German military leadership collapsed simultaneously. With that, Kuhle and Saldern see no way to continue nurturing hopes for a happy ending. The facts are the facts: the war is lost, and Germany’s collapse is only a question of a few weeks. Two days later Saldern opined: “Let’s hope a German general turns up, who says, as you do: ‘We have lost the war, so the sooner we make an end the better.’”^{460}

Most of the POWs brought to England from the battlefields of Normandy drew such broad conclusions. A Major Hasso Viebig was of the opinion that “a responsible German government would now try to bring the war to an end.” Major Rudolf Becker responded: “Well, of course they know perfectly well that the war is lost, and that this is the end of National Socialism etc. The only question is: are they fighting for the fatherland or for their self preservation?”^{461} Becker recalled a speech made in April 1944 in which General Heinz Guderian urged German troops to turn back the invasion as a means of giving the Führer a chance at concluding a halfway honorable peace. Becker therefore wondered why Guderian, who had seen things so clearly, had not taken action, allowing himself instead to be named army chief of staff.^{462}

Normally officers feel less pressure the higher they rank, but many generals who had experienced the battles of attrition in Normandy thought the same way Kuhle or Becker did. Even the supreme commander of Army Group B, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, was convinced by June 1944 that the war was lost and corresponding political consequences should follow.^{463} On the other hand, some soldiers still vacillated in their interpretation of the situation. Major Heinz Quittnat, for example, ventured: “My personal opinion is that if we are going to lose the war, it is a crime to continue fighting a day longer. If we have a chance of winning the war, of course, we should continue. But I can’t decide that.”^{464} Quittnat’s words came shortly after he himself had experienced American troops taking Cherbourg. Previously, he had spent years on the Eastern Front. How could such a person, we are tempted to ask today, feel unable to decide whether or not the war could still be won? In this case, Quittnat was probably trying to shield himself from the logical consequences of what he knew. As though having been caught thinking illicit thoughts, he quickly qualified his statement: “As a good German of course I hope that we shall win the war.” But doubts were equally quick to reemerge: “On the other hand if we win the war 100%, that would be pretty bad too, with our present regime. I would not remain a regular army officer then, at any rate.”^{465}

An analysis of the standardized questionnaires handed out to all German POWs in the U.S. camp of Fort Hunt yields an even more precise picture of the end of German hopes for winning the war. In June 1944, half of the 112 German POWs questioned believed Germany would emerge victorious. By August, it was only 27 of 148, and by September, only 5 of 67.^{466} Admittedly, the sample size was too small to be representative. But the answers still reveal that the main change of heart came in August 1944, as the Allies broke through German lines in Normandy and surrounded German troops in Falaise, taking most of them prisoner.

Those who dreamed of a German counteroffensive leading to a victorious comeback had shrunk to a tiny minority.^{467} A Captain Barthel still declared on August 19, 1944: “It still won’t be fatal for us if FRANCE falls.”^{468} Such inveterate optimists were usually young officers and, quite often, navy men. Sailors were more likely to be optimistic since they experienced a different and, to a certain extent, “cleaner” war than their army counterparts. They did not have to endure weeks of shelling, witness tens of thousands of their comrades dying, or suffer through months of privations in a fight for survival. As horrible as naval warfare may have been for many sailors, it could not be compared with the battles of attrition that took place on land.^{469}

After Stalingrad, the successful Allied landing at Normandy, the battles of attrition in the hedgerow country of the Bocage, and the Wehrmacht’s pell-mell retreat from France represented the second major psychological caesura in German soldiers’ perception of the war. Never before had so many people been killed in one place in such a short time as in these twelve weeks of 1944. It was the quantitative equivalent of a second Battle of Stalingrad. Moreover, the symbolic import was undeniable. Germany’s victory over France in 1940 had made the Wehrmacht feel like the lords of Europe. Losing France sealed Germany’s total defeat in most soldiers’ eyes.

To a certain extent, the Wehrmacht recovered some of its morale in fall 1944 after fleeing in panic across the German border.^{470} There, they had at least been able to regroup and form a coherent front, and no longer were tens of thousands of soldiers being taken prisoner. But there was a major difference between a willingness to fight on and faith in victory. Members of the German armed forces still functioned fairly well as soldiers, but the surveillance protocols make it clear that the stabilization of the front on Germany’s borders did little to improve German soldiers’ expectations for the future. The Ardennes Offensive also raised only a flicker of hope—and solely among the soldiers who participated in it.^{471}

By August 1944, a qualitative shift in evaluations of the war had taken place. One good example is the reflections of Colonel Gerhard Wilck, fortress commander in the German city of Aachen, after being taken prisoner in October 1944:

Wilck talked here of “the people,” but what he meant more specifically was himself, together with his men and the population of Aachen. Wilck was the first commander ordered by Hitler to defend a German city. But having been beaten down in a hopeless fight, Wilck no longer saw any way out.

In early 1945, there was a further decline in morale, as can be traced in the American surveillance protocols.^{473} And official army reports described units openly talking about being “sick and tired” of the war.^{474} The reluctant insight that the war was in fact lost also affected German soldiers’ behavior, particularly in the West, where many tried to get captured.

However, indications of a general decline in morale should not obscure the fact that there was a small group who believed in final victory right up until the very end. They tended to be higher officers or members of special units, for example, veteran fighter pilots. On March 18, 1945, First Lieutenant Hans Hartigs, who had already been imprisoned for two and a half months, asked newly arrived POW Lieutenant Antonius Wöffen from Luftwaffe Fighter Wing 27:

German soldiers’ interpretations of how the war was going generally followed the major milestones: the Blitzkrieg victories, the Battle of Stalingrad in 1942–43, and the Allied landing at Normandy in 1944. Yet interestingly, different branches of the military arrived at different interpretations. Put in simple terms: the Luftwaffe was more optimistic than the navy, while the army was, at least by 1944, the most pessimistic.

Luftwaffe pilots were a relatively small group of elite fighters who went to battle convinced of their superiority over the enemy. Despite all the difficulties of their mission, they led a pretty good life. Particularly in France, pilots enjoyed amenities foot soldiers could only dream of. Moreover, even if the qualitative and quantitative advantages of the Allies began to show as of 1943, Luftwaffe pilots could still celebrate individual triumphs in 1944–45. Fighter pilots still shot down enemy aircraft, and crews aboard bombers still dropped their deadly payloads on cities, ships, and troops. Navy men necessarily viewed the war more skeptically because they had been fighting a far stronger enemy ever since September 1939.

The army soldiers who experienced the fighting at Normandy and the collapse of the front in France are the most disillusioned group in the protocols. Examples of individual successes, such as enemy soldiers killed or tanks destroyed, play hardly any role in their conversations. Instead their discussions are full of everyday experiences of powerlessness at facing a materially far better equipped foe. The overarching mood of futility is impossible to ignore.

Today, it may seem surprising that soldiers only dared to believe in the downfall of the Third Reich as of mid-1944. Why did it take them so long to arrive at this conclusion when, from a military perspective, the war had likely been decided by the end of 1941 at the latest? A particular form of perception is part of the explanation. Someone with a high-paying job rarely thinks about the structural problems of the global economy, and even when he does, he does so calmly. People who have a certain task in a war behave similarly. As long as the war continues, the task remains. For that reason, people only saw that Germany was headed for defeat when they experienced it personally. Ahead of the disastrous summer of 1944, many German soldiers still had reason to hope. At that juncture, Germany still occupied half of Europe, and Allied aerial bombardment was restricted to German cities. Thus, German troops in Italy could maintain, with a certain justification, that they would stand their ground against the Allies. The same was true, incidentally, for soldiers in Army Group Center on the Eastern Front.

Without doubt, it would have been possible for German soldiers to view their own experiences and the war in general more critically. They could have asked themselves: what did it say about the war effort when Germany had to postpone the ground invasion of England, when the Wehrmacht failed to end the Russian campaign as promised in fall 1941, when the United States with its huge economic potential entered the fray, or when German troops retreated ever closer to the homeland? Anyone who read newspapers, listened to the radio, watched the weekly newsreels, or simply discussed the situation with comrades, friends, and family, could have realized where things were headed without overtaxing his brain. Yet like most other people in most other situations, German soldiers were strictly bound to the necessities of their immediate social environment. As long as major historical events do not have direct personal consequences, they do not fundamentally change perceptions, interpretations, and decisions. Human beings think in concrete, not in abstract, terms. What in retrospect may seem to be an increasingly obvious reality remains irrelevant for an individual acting in real time, as long as he himself is not directly caught up in the looming disaster. There are notable exceptions,^{476} but most people only notice the coming of a flood when the first story of their house is already submerged. And even then, hopes persist that the water level will recede.

Germans lost hope in increments during World War II. If Germany was not able to achieve final victory, they told themselves, at least it could force an honorable peace settlement. Giving up every last bit of hope would have invalidated all the effort and emotions they had invested in the war with one fell swoop. People typically cling to hopes and instances of wishful thinking that, with the benefit of hindsight, appear completely irrational. Why do workers fight to save a company that has no realistic chance of surviving on the market? Because they have invested all their energy, dreams, hopes, time, and opportunities in it. And this characteristic is by no means restricted to “everyday people.” The higher their status, the less people are able to acknowledge failure. General Ludwig Crüwell put it this way. In November 1942, shortly after receiving word that the 6th Army was surrounded at Stalingrad, he retorted: “Are hundreds of thousands of men to be killed in this way again for nothing? That’s unthinkable.”^{477}

FAITH IN THE FÜHRER

Shortly before the end of World War II, Colonel Martin Vetter, the commander of Paratrooper Regiment 17, and fighter pilot Anton Wöffen from Luftwaffe Fighter Wing 27 had a discussion about National Socialism. Both men had been captured a few days earlier in two separate towns in Germany. For them, the war was over, and it was time for a general evaluation:

This excerpt is an extraordinary document. Adolf Hitler—or the “leader,” as he is termed throughout the surveillance protocols—is simultaneously deemed Germany’s great benefactor and its grave-digger.

How could these two contradictory positions coexist? Were the POWs schizophrenic? Most certainly not. On the contrary, this short dialogue illustrates the diverse aspects of Germans’ faith in the Führer. Wöffen and Vetter’s conversation took place in March 1945, when it was obvious Germany was crashing to defeat. Doubts about Hitler’s military acumen had been growing since 1943. Nonetheless, despite Germans’ dissolving confidence in final victory, their belief in their Führer and the cult of personality surrounding Hitler remained intact for an astonishingly long time. Not even the imminent demise of the Third Reich could shake this quasi-religious faith. This may seem incomprehensible, but it can be explained if one considers what were perceived as Hitler’s enormous triumphs in Germany and abroad. That fed into the stylization of the Führer as a divine savior who negated the perceived injustice of the Treaty of Versailles and allowed (non-Jewish) Germans to once again feel proud of their country.

On March 7, 1936, slightly more than three years after becoming German chancellor, Hitler held a speech in the Reichstag in which he claimed that in the short time of his reign, Germany had regained its “honor,” having “rediscovered a faith, overcome its greatest economic crisis and finally begun a new cultural renaissance.”^{479} In an election twenty-two days later, the Nazi Party received 98.9 percent of the votes. Even though the polling was by no means democratic, there was no doubt, as historian Ian Kershaw writes, that the majority of Germans stood behind their Führer. Even today, people who experienced Hitler recall the prewar years of Nazi Germany as a “good” or “pleasant” time. And the concrete, palpable achievements credited to Hitler were indeed impressive. Kershaw writes: “To most observers, both internal and external, after four years in power the Hitler regime looked stable, strong, and successful.”^{480}

POW Vetter was referring to precisely these qualities. The fact that the Third Reich was collapsing did not automatically diminish Hitler’s status. He remained the primary figure with whom Germany identified precisely because they distinguished him from National Socialism and the other party elites. Vetter articulated the entire emotional power carried by the Third Reich—everything non-Jewish Germans saw in the National Socialist project and were prepared to invest in it emotionally. Germans’ faith in their own greatness, which Hitler personified, seemed to pay dividends even up until the final days of World War II.

Vetter and Wöffen weren’t the only POWs to judge the historical achievement of the Führer independently of Germany’s defeat and collapse. SS Brigadeführer Kurt Meyer, for instance, proclaimed:

This sort of emotional investment yielded fine returns—at least until the first deadly wartime winter in Russia in 1942. Feelings of national greatness based on the seeming and empirical triumphs of the Nazi regime were a fantastic payoff on the emotions and energy Germans invested in the Third Reich. Author W. G. Sebald wrote of such feelings “in August 1942, as the vanguard of the 6th Army reached the Volga River and more than a few Germans dreamed of settling after the war in the cherry gardens of an estate alongside the quietly flowing Don.”^{482} The emotional component involved in the proposition of a better future thanks to the National Socialist project explains why trust in the system and faith in the Führer grew continually until the system began to break down.

German national pride entailed faith in a rosy future and an assertion about Germans themselves, embodied by the Führer and the Nazi project, which united people to the extent that even those who initially had been critical or skeptical of the project were gradually integrated into the community. Psychologically, any misgivings about having chosen the wrong leader and system would have meant devaluing oneself. Thus faith in the Führer persisted even as hopes for final victory disappeared. Moreover, we can observe the same dialectic principle of self-reinforcing conviction in Adolf Hitler himself. His initial successes caused him to believe that he was indeed appointed by divine providence to lead Germany to the global dominance it was predestined to achieve by the laws of nature and race. Hitler, to follow Kershaw, increasingly became the victim of the myth of his own significance, and Hitler’s Volk set such extraordinary emotional stock in its faith in the Führer and itself that, as though on the commodities market, it had difficulty finding an exit strategy when its stock began plummeting. Just as the cult of personality surrounding the Führer exempted Hitler from any sort of criticism and transformed him into a superhuman savior, the German populace believed itself capable of anything under his leadership.

For that reason, the faith in the Führer that POWs articulated in the surveillance protocols was far greater than their trust in the system, and many of the prisoners drew the same sort of seemingly contradictory distinctions as Vetter and Wöffen.^{483} The notion that much of what went on in the government and particularly in the war happened behind the Führer’s back and against his will allowed soldiers to maintain their belief in Hitler even as the Nazi system eroded and the war was being lost. This perspective still persisted after the war. Even today, some three generations after 1945, every banal incident in the Führerbunker has the status of a historical event. Moreover, soldiers saw the personnel surrounding their leader—Himmler, Göring, Goebbels, Julius Ley, and Martin Bormann—as much the same circle of sometimes ridiculous characters we do today. Himmler was perceived as a demonic figure, whose SS succeeded in gaining a fatal influence over the system and the war. Göring, mostly referred to as “Hermann,” was a familiar, reliable fellow who acted on his convictions and, in most soldiers’ eyes, had lamentably little clout with Hitler. Goebbels was alternately the “imaginative politician” or “the cripple” with an impressive intellect. Ley was seen as a dilettante, bigoted, corrupt profiteer, while Bormann appeared as an inscrutable but definitely threatening gatekeeper controlling access to Hitler. This is more or less how all these men continue to be seen.

As the psychological warfare specialists who interviewed German POWs in the 1940s discovered, this basic constellation of Nazi leadership figures with its stereotypes and images already existed before the war was lost and set the tone for how Goebbels and company were viewed after the war.^{484} It is astonishing, when one reads the surveillance protocols, how constant the clichés about the other leading Nazis remained before and after German military defeat.

THE FÜHRER

Not surprisingly, in quantitative terms, the person POWs talked about most often in the protocols was Hitler, followed by Göring, Himmler, and Goebbels, and then at some remove Ley, Baldur von Schirach, Walter von Brauchitsch, and others. In this regard, the protocols reflected the amount of popular attention the individual leadership figures commanded during the Third Reich. Moreover, faith in the Führer is a running trope in the POWs’ conversations. “There is only one HITLER and whatever he wants will be done,” pledged one soldier,^{485} while another intoned, “If HITLER no longer lived then I should not desire to live.”^{486} Soldiers’ trust in their Führer was blind and boundless. “If the Führer has said it, you can rely on it,” one POW assured his listeners. Another asserted: “HITLER has done it wonderfully. He has kept all his promises. We all have the fullest confidence in him.”^{487} In November 1940, a lieutenant said: “I am perfectly convinced that we’ll win the war. Absolutely certain. HITLER will not tolerate BERLIN being bombed by American a/c [aircraft].”^{488} And a private confessed that when confronted with bad news: “I console myself with the words of the Führer, he has taken everything into account.”^{489}

Germans had emphatic faith not just in the Führer as a person but in the predictions he made. “I am not a rabid National Socialist,” said one Luftwaffe first lieutenant in 1941, “but when HITLER says that the war will end this year, then I believe it.”^{490} Even Stalingrad, as doubts first emerged in Germany’s ability to achieve final victory, did not dispel Germans’ trust in Hitler. For example, a low-level officer named Leska complained, “The outlook for us isn’t rosy,” whereupon his interlocutor, Private Hahnfeld, responded, “Yes, but the FÜHRER has always known that it is a struggle for our very existence.”^{491} A conversation between two sergeants was very similar:

Regardless of rank and function, German soldiers’ faith in the Führer seems to have been genuine. Often their statements give the impression that the speaker feels he has a personal relationship to Hitler. That is not unlike today’s pop stars, who seem beyond reach and blessed with something extraordinary, yet still remain strangely familiar and intimate. The propagandistic staging of Hitler’s public appearances, indeed the presentation of the whole National Socialist system, was thoroughly modern. It’s hard to imagine Winston Churchill receiving thousands of love letters, as Hitler did, or getting 100,000 congratulatory telegrams, as was the case when Göring’s daughter was born.

The myth of the simple-hearted, benevolent, and yet mysterious and omnipotent Führer was bolstered and updated by countless rumors. Hitler also cultivated the image of the diva with his screaming style of oratory, his ascetic eating and drinking habits, and his legendary outbreaks of temper, which allegedly once included biting a hotel carpet.^{493} POWs who could boast of special proximity to the Führer, for example, those who were once seated near him or called to report directly to him on military matters, described those encounters in immense detail and always with reference to Hitler’s special qualities. Those stories were intended to imply an intimate familiarity with the Führer, and news about Hitler, whether first- or secondhand, was a topic that guaranteed a rapt audience. One recurring trope was Hitler’s hypnotic ability to put others under his sway.

A somewhat different picture emerges from actual encounters with the Führer, such as related by Ludwig Crüwell, the commander of the Wehrmacht’s Panzer Army Africa, to an eagerly attentive stool pigeon:

In addition to being deeply impressed with Hitler, Crüwell offers evidence for his personal acquaintance with the Führer by using the sort of details that can only be observed in proximity, and those details, the general asserts, were different than he had imagined. In Crüwell’s tale, the personal Führer is even more fascinating than the hypnotic one. The story is unintentionally comic in the sense that Crüwell denies falling under Hitler’s hypnotic spell while describing the Führer as if he were the savior incarnate. Crüwell’s narrative is one of expectations and how they were surpassed. Hitler is not only astonishing; he is astonishing in an unexpected way.

Telling stories of this sort was a way for the speaker to distinguish himself as someone special who had been allowed to come so close to the Führer. Crüwell’s interlocutor offers a relatively sober commentary:

Crüwell immediately recognized this as a challenge and responds:

Crüwell interprets Hitler’s tendency to follow his gut instincts as a sign of authenticity and a part of what makes him convincing. The general then continues his narrative with intimate details about the Führer’s ostentatiously displayed asceticism and humility. Excerpts like this make it clear how much Hitler’s reputation for charisma programmed people’s encounters with him, and how the unexpected impression the Führer made fueled further stories. Encounters with Hitler were self-fulfilling prophecies; faith in the Führer, an emotional perpetuum mobile.

The significance of Hitler as a public figure who was alternately regarded as a savior and something of a pop star became particularly apparent when Germany celebrated France’s capitulation. The official festivities in Berlin were supposed to commence at 3 p.m. on July 6, 1940. Hundreds of thousands of people had been waiting for hours to give the Führer a rousing reception. The crowds constantly urged Hitler that afternoon to appear on his balcony. It was the height of his military success and his fame, and he was the embodiment of the German Volk’s inflated self-image: “‘If an increase in feeling for Adolf Hitler was still possible, it has become reality with the day of the return to Berlin,’ commented one report from the provinces. ‘In the face of such greatness,’ ran another, ‘all pettiness and grumbling are silenced.’ Even opponents of the regime found it hard to resist the victory mood. Workers in the armaments factories pressed to be allowed to join the army. People thought final victory was around the corner. Only Britain stood in the way. For perhaps the only time during the Third Reich there was genuine war-fever among the population.”^{496}

Two years on, the euphoria was over. The campaign against Britain had proven much more difficult than anticipated, and the invasion of the Soviet Union had not only ratcheted up the brutality of the fighting, but pushed the prospect of a rapid end to the war into an indeterminate future. German defeat at Stalingrad only reinforced the nascent doubts Germans had begun to feel. What if the war should be lost?

CONCERNS ABOUT DEFEAT

The continuation of Waldeck and Crüwell’s dialogue makes it clear that the latter sees the Führer’s historical importance as distinct from the outcome of the National Socialist project. But for others, faith in the Führer served as an antidote to doubts about whether the war would end happily for Germany. Colonel Meyne, for instance, asserted in June 1943: “The FÜHRER is a man of genius, he is certain to find some way out down there.”^{498} Statements like these were, of course, inspired by the belief that the war could still be won, and the speculations many soldiers engaged in were above all concerned with when that victory could be expected. This sort of confidence increasingly crumbled after Stalingrad, yet that didn’t affect people’s faith in Hitler. “The FÜHRER said: ‘We shall take STALINGRAD,’” asserted a Sergeant Kotenbar on December 23, 1942, at a point when the 6th Army had been surrounded for more than a month, “and you can depend on it, we shall take STALINGRAD.”^{499}

Others, for instance, Sergeant Wohlgezogen, were finding it difficult by this point to maintain their faith in final victory. His statements continually hint at doubts:

Two aspects of Germans’ faith in Hitler are clearly recognizable in statements like these. Responsibility for one’s own welfare is delegated to a person who knows how to achieve the desired end and possesses the means and the lack of scruples to do so. And, perhaps more interestingly, the figure of the omnipotent Führer serves to dispel the doubts the speaker otherwise would have.

Wohlgezogen is on the verge of articulating doubts about Germany’s prospects of victory before brushing them aside by reflexively summoning up a mythic image of the Führer: “ADOLF won’t give in!” This excerpt and others manifest the cognitive dissonance that arises when events deviate from expectations. Emotionally, cognitive dissonance produces deep feelings of dread, if events are negative and unchangeable. Since such feelings are hard to bear, and reality itself cannot be altered, the only way to correct the dissonance is to change one’s perception and interpretation of reality.^{501} This basic need is quite commonplace. People who live near nuclear power plants, for instance, tend to regard atomic energy as less dangerous than people who live at a greater distance. Smokers who are well aware of the health risks they are subjecting themselves to develop theories as to why the personal danger is not so great. They tell themselves that they are really moderate smokers, or that their father lived to the age of eighty-six, or that people die of other things besides lung cancer. These strategies of minimizing dissonance allow people to live with situations that are other than what they would prefer.

Germans’ maintenance of their faith in the Führer was just such a means of reducing dissonance, but it also required a continuous level of emotional investment. The more dubious Germany’s prospects looked, the more intense Germans’ belief in their leader had to be. Conversely, the psychological significance of the Führer figure showed how much Germans had already invested in such belief. Doubting the ability and power of the Führer would have devalued that investment. For this reason, Germans tended to conflate the destiny of their leader and their own fates:

A similar example is a conversation between two Luftwaffe lieutenants in March 1943:

Similar sentiments also cropped up among generals in June 1943: “We can’t deny that if HITLER had remained, shall we say, what he was… we could not have helped backing him up wholeheartedly and we would be looking forward to a happy time, there’s no doubt about that.”^{504}

Faith in the Führer was often linked with the idea that Hitler had personally ordered many details of how the war was waged. Many soldiers felt themselves to be personally dependent on his ability to make correct decisions. Luftwaffe First Sergeant Duckstein claimed:

It is clear from this dialogue that First Sergeant Kassel finds it unusual that Hitler would have personally ordered the sorties of Duckstein’s unit. Duckstein, in turn, invents or cites reasons to make what he has said seem plausible. His final argument, that Hitler concerns himself with everything, serves to reduce cognitive dissonance by reinvesting trust. The more Duckstein claims that the Führer is personally concerned, the more intensely Duckstein himself has to believe that idea.

As confidence in German victory disintegrated, many soldiers also developed a sense of sympathy with Hitler, which was based on conspiracy theories. “I’m sorry for the FÜHRER, the poor devil never sleeps peacefully,” one POW said. “His intentions were good, but what a government!”^{506} Another seconded that sentiment:

This, too, was a way of making reality cohere with wishful thinking and expectations. Even high-level officers were not immune to this way of thinking, as dialogue between Major Ulrich Boes and one of his peers demonstrates:

THE FÜHRER IS NO LONGER HIMSELF

In light of the theory of cognitive dissonance, it is hardly surprising that, even after the German debacle at Stalingrad, POWs would say things like: “We are sure to win the war. I should like to see the person who would refuse to fulfill any demand of the FÜHRER.”^{510} It is interesting to see how soldiers resolved such sentiments with their nagging doubts as to Hitler’s military acumen. On June 28, 1942, at the start of the Wehrmacht’s second major offensive in southern Russia, two Luftwaffe lieutenants racked their brains over what was going on inside the Führer:

This dialogue perfectly illustrated how the mechanism of dissonance reduction functions. The speakers transfer blame for any doubts about the Führer and their own emotional investment in him onto external factors. Psychological circumstances or conspiratorial activities here are what caused the change in Hitler’s personality. The Führer, Wahler and Fröschel posit, is no longer figuratively or even, in the impersonator idea, literally himself. Interesting, too, is the fact that Fröschel himself acknowledges the possibility that psychological factors are preventing him from acknowledging the truth. In so doing, he describes the mechanism of dissonance reduction. But the final turn in the conversation offers a much more satisfying explanation, that the real Hitler has been replaced by an actor, allowing the two men to maintain their faith in the Führer even when they have lost all faith in his actions.

Private Költerhoff had a far less extravagant explanation for Hitler’s behavior: “The FÜHRER himself is not the worst. There are many things which simply never come to his ears.”^{512} The idea that Hitler was being kept in the dark was one of the most common German legends, especially as the war neared its end. Sergeant Gamper also proposed that the truth about the course of the war was being withheld from Hitler:

Sergeant Müss used the same language. Hitler’s behavior, he posited, was becoming increasingly strange because he was hermetically sealed off from the truth:

Such theorizing usually held that Hitler was being systematically deceived. SS Hauptsturmführer Born and Sergeant Wolf von Helldorf, the son of the president of the Berlin police, named the guilty parties:

Even a high-ranking officer like Field Marshal Erhard Milch put forth a variation of this conspiracy theory. In May 1945, he proposed:

In another example, a POW regretted that the constant manipulation of Hitler unjustly diminished his historical significance. But even more lamentable was the fact that the misinformation of the Führer had led to things for which the German military was now going to be held responsible. Major General Reiter articulated this fear:

Higher-ranking officers, for example, Major General Gerhard Bassenge, were particularly concerned about being held responsible for the things that had been carried out with or without Hitler’s knowledge:

Soldiers’ disappointment that the future was almost certainly not going to be as bright as had been promised revealed the emotional significance of the National Socialist project and their faith in the Führer. Colonel Reimann, for instance, was clearly frustrated:

THE FÜHRER AS FAILURE

After the 6th Army capitulated in Stalingrad in February 1943, doubts began to multiply as to whether final victory was still possible. Even if the majority of soldiers did not point the finger of blame at Hitler, the number of statements critical of him grew. “I must admit that ADOLF isn’t all he should be, for instance, his treatment of the Jews isn’t right,” a Private First Class Harnisch complained.^{521} Colonel Helmuth Rohrbach even believed: “Apparently the FÜHRER doesn’t listen to our generals, it’s lamentable. One man can’t be a politician, a statesman and a general at the same time. That’s madness.”^{522}

In 1944, Sergeant Doetsch and First Sergeant Bräutigam arrived at a remarkable conclusion considering their socialization as young fighter pilots:

Of course, most of the critical remarks about Hitler contained remnants of personal sympathy and traces of faith. For instance, a sharpshooter named Caesar pondered what he would do if he were to encounter the leaders of his country:

Two recent master’s theses that have analyzed the statements of POWs of all ranks interned at Fort Hunt in the United States have come to another conclusion.^{525} Faith in the Führer tended to recede drastically among the lower ranks after Normandy while generally being maintained further up the hierarchy. This is another indication that the personal identification and emotional investment stabilized people’s trust in Hitler. But these indices need to be pursued. The reverse and difficult-to-grasp side of faith in the Führer is what does not occur in the POWs’ conversations: political reflection about what went wrong. In fact, the depoliticization of German soldiers would seem to be one of National Socialism’s most lasting achievements.

Soldiers tended to see what was happening as not their affair, but the business of their omnipotent Führer and his circle of helpers, whom the soldiers saw alternately as philistine, corrupt, incompetent, or criminal. They did not, in the main, have a political opinion on the National Socialist state, the dictatorship, or the persecution of Jews. The criticism they put forth was aimed at the personal traits of Nazi bigwigs and occasionally at individual policies. But it was very rare for the POWs to engage in political debates about decisions or perspectives. Clear differences in position or opinion seldom emerge. This is one of the central results of totalitarian rule. It creates a mental lack of alternatives and makes people fully dependent on the charismatic leader, to whom they stay true even when their mutual downfall is inevitable. As the protocols reveal especially with respect to higher-ranking officers, politics is replaced by faith. And since faith in the Führer was simultaneously a faith of Germans in themselves, every threat to positive images of Hitler was also a threat to the project in which people had invested so much energy and emotion. The fear was that this project would turn out to be utterly worthless.^{526}