Following Hitler’s “seizure of power” (which he actually attained by being appointed chancellor by the president as leader of the largest party in parliament), the new Wehrmacht, established in March 1935 as a conscript army in defiance of the Versailles Treaty, began the process of binding together all these different strands: the Prussian tradition represented by Hindenburg and the conservative elite; the technological, technocratic, and organizational concepts of Ludendorff and his ambitious young disciples; the veterans’ ethos of the Kampfgemeinschaft; and Hitler’s notion of the “new man,” the resurrected unknown soldier, committed to the destruction of Germany’s domestic and foreign, political and “biological” enemies who had allegedly stabbed Germany in the back on the brink of victory in 1918. The new leaders of the Wehrmacht had all been junior and middle-ranking officers in World War I. Devastated by the defeat, they had spent the intervening years vegetating in unpromising careers in the Weimar Republic’s 100,000-man Reichswehr, dreaming of the day of reckoning. Now their time had come; given the opportunity of personal advancement and national aggrandizement by Hitler, they were not about to relent. In complete agreement with the Fuhrer, they were convinced that as a precondition for victory they had to instill a new spirit into their fresh recruits, combining traditional patriotism with National Socialist teaching, a glorification of war and a determination to wipe out the enemy at home and abroad.
The extraordinary motivation and resilience of the Wehrmacht during World War II was thus a function of its perception of war as an opportunity to rectify the errors of 1914—18 and redress the abomination of defeat. But unlike the French, who envisioned the next war as a repetition of the last, German conduct took a radically different course. Paradoxically, while French war plans were based on a perfectly rational analysis of 1914—18, the German tendency to take the Great War’s myth of the battle community at face value contributed in no small measure to the Wehrmacht’s elan. To be sure, many practical lessons from 1914—18 were applied to tactics and strategy in World War II. But the emphasis on re-creating a tight-knit community of warriors, wholly dedicated to its members and to the nation, became a fundamental tenet in the organization and indoctrination of the Wehrmacht, while the belief that the army had been betrayed by the “November criminals” of 1918 introduced a unique brutality and vindictiveness to military conduct. Moreover both the motivation and the ruthlessness of the soldiers were tremendously influenced also by Hitler’s repeated references to himself as a frontline soldier who had firsthand knowledge of the realities of combat, as well as by his much publicized obsession with annihilating both real and imaginary enemies. His impact on the troops was manifested by their devotion to him until very late in the war, just as much as by their massive participation in the implementation of Germany’s policies of subjugation, devastation, plunder, and extermination. Hitler represented to the troops both their fathers, mythologized as the heroic and tragic warriors of World War I, and themselves, the hopeless, desperate, and tough Landser (simple soldiers), wreaking revenge on a “world of enemies.” Remarkably, despite his extremely rare visits to the front, Hitler was increasingly seen by the troops as their only true (but omnipotent) representative in the Reich’s leadership.
There is an understandable reluctance to concede that German soldiers fought out of conviction, that they truly believed themselves to be part of a glorious, “world-historical” undertaking. Many prefer to view them as coerced by a dictatorial regime, united by fear of their superiors and enemies, and motivated by loyalty to their “primary group” and a sheer will to survive. All such explanations have one thing in common—they largely ignore the troops’ own self-perception and understanding of their actions. For whatever the purchase of various theories on motivation, one crucial element in the reality of the war was the manner in which it was perceived and interpreted by those who made it happen. What we need to understand is that the Wehrmacht’s soldiers saw the world through very different eyes from our own. Our disbelief that acts of murder, wanton destruction, and ruthless plunder could be perceived as glorious may reflect our humanistic sentiments, but also exposes the limits of our moral universe and imagination: the troops’ distorted perceptions cannot be retroactively corrected by our own.
If after World War I the reality of defeat was repressed by a great deal of talk about the community of battle, the army’s complicity in criminal actions was obscured after 1945 by a rhetoric of suffering and victimhood. To be sure, in the 1950s German mainstream magazines still carried pictures of handsome, tired, but undefeated officers and men, revealing a male ideal that for a while continued to compete with the new image of youthful rebels popularized by Hollywood melodramas. But such representations of heroic soldiers were gradually relegated to publications for veterans and military history buffs. The conventional image that came to dominate the German media and scholarship in the early postwar decades was of the simple soldier as an increasingly disillusioned victim of circumstances beyond his control, fighting a hopeless battle against unequal odds, and in no way responsible for the crimes committed “behind the army’s back” by the SS and the Gestapo. Speaking of the war as a glorious undertaking became highly unfashionable, although the fighting against the Red Army always retained a certain aura of desperate resistance to evil.
Yet during the war things appeared very differently. There is little doubt that not all the men who served in the Wehrmacht sympathized with the regime or wanted to fight. Many combat soldiers shared the sentiment of their World War I predecessors that the ample propaganda material disseminated to their units was mere eyewash concocted by people who had never been to the front. But the majority of the troops did not fight with such remarkable determination merely as cynical survivalists. As their own letters, diaries, frontline journals, and memoirs clearly indicate, they were strongly motivated by an image of battle as a site of glory precisely because it was harsh, pitiless, and deadly. That their sacrifice was not given sufficient public recognition after the war embittered many of them. But postwar testimonies and accounts, interviews and oral histories, and public and private encounters have repeatedly demonstrated over the years that veterans still cherish their memory of the good and glorious fight and feel offended, challenged, and enraged when it is suggested that they were part of a vast criminal undertaking. The longevity of this resistance to the overwhelming evidence of the Wehrmacht’s crimes tells us a great deal about the efficacy of the soldiers’ self-perception, their view of the enemy, and their understanding of Germany’s mission in determining their conduct and molding its memory.
In trying the grasp how glory on the battlefield was conceptualized, we must understand that conventional distinctions between heroism and comradeship, and what we would normally describe as atrocities and war crimes, were not perceived in the same manner at the time (although individual soldiers occasionally did make such distinctions). Especially during the war against the Soviet Union, and in the latter phases of the war in other parts of Europe, soldiers were told and in most cases seem to have believed that fighting enemy troops was as honorable as murdering political commissars, massacring Jews, wiping out villages in acts of collective punishment, and shooting outright or starving to death prisoners of war. As early as 1939 the Wehrmacht’s leadership insisted that the honor of the German officer depended on his firm National Socialist bearing (Haltung), and as of summer 1941 the implications of this were manifested on a vast scale. By the end of the war, Germany’s fields of glory were strewn with the corpses of its political and “biological” enemies. Repeatedly exhorted to remember that this was a war of ideologies aimed at exterminating the Judeo-Bolshevik enemy who had caused the collapse of 1918, and that taking pity on seemingly innocent victims was tantamount to betraying theVolk (nation or race), the troops came to view their criminal actions as the very essence of military glory, as exacting a just and necessary retribution for past defeats and humiliations and thereby ensuring the final victory.
As the war wore on, it is true that anything that smacked of propaganda emanating from the “green desks” of staff officers in the rear or Goebbels’s ministry was viewed with suspicion by the troops. Yet those elements of the regime’s ideology and policies that coincided with the views and prejudices internalized by the troops even before their conscription were not thought of as propaganda, but rather as accurate statements about and actions relevant to their role and mission in the war. Hence soldiers’ letters to family and friends described their actions at the front in almost identical terms to those employed by the regime’s propaganda. Most revealingly, the troops’ perception of the enemy as diabolical led them to ascribe their own atrocities to Bolshevik savagery and Jewish criminality, and to portray mass killings of civilians as a glorious final reckoning with foes who had been poised to inflict untold barbarities on the German Volk. While the army tried to justify its actions also with conventional arguments, citing security concerns, partisan activity, and civilian resistance, one is struck by the extent to which soldiers expressed pride and satisfaction in finally being able to destroy their enemies, be they soldiers, prisoners, civilians, or, provoking the greatest glee, Jewish men, women, and children. It was at this point that massacre and glory became synonymous.
In the case of the SS, the equivalence of genocide and glory was the very core of its identity. The motto of the Black Corps was “SS man, Your Honor is Loyalty” (SS-Mann, Deine Ehre heisst Treue). The German term Treue, which also means faith, crucially linked personal honor with an unflinching devotion to Hitler’s person and Weltanschauung. And since the Fuhrer was said to have ordered the extermination of the Aryan race’s enemies, perpetrating mass murder was transformed into a glorious enterprise. Heinrich Himmler was well aware of the implications of this breathtaking moral inversion. Speaking to SS leaders in October 1943, he noted that the glory of the SS consisted in its ability to carry out genocide while remaining clean and decent; the task was not merely to kill efficiently but to guard against the damage that such actions may cause to the organization’s moral fiber. Hence, while genocide was an honorable undertaking, its victims threatened morally to pollute the SS even as they were being massacred. In Himmler’s logic, murdering women and children was virtuous, making a personal profit from such actions despicable. Precisely because both Himmler and his audience knew that in reality organized and unauthorized robbery of the victims was an institutionalized component of the “Final Solution,” Himmler’s rhetoric revealed an awareness of his revolutionary reconceptualization of glory well beyond its mundane manifestations. This concept’s longterm polluting effects on humanity as a whole cannot be overestimated. No amount of erasing the traces by exhuming and cremating the murdered, bulldozing the death camps, and planting forests over mass graves would purge our moral universe of this redefinition of ethics and decency.
If World War I had replaced the old notion of chivalry with the sustained industrial killing of nameless soldiers, Nazi Germany invented the glorification of systematic industrial killing of civilians. By now what bound the soldiers together more than theirKampfgemeinschaft and its extension in an ostensible Volksgemeinschaft, was their awareness of belonging to a community of murder, attested to implicitly and explicitly both by the leadership of the Reich and by many of its citizens and soldiers. With defeat looming on the horizon, the knowledge of complicity in horrendous crimes only exacerbated fears of ultimate retribution. But alongside the bonding effects of shared guilt (accompanied by frantic attempts to waive responsibility) came the construction of genocide as a liberating, redemptive act whose centrality for the salvation of humanity need only be recognized by other nations to release the perpetrators from accusations of murder: the realization that even in defeat, Germany had purged the world of the evil that had threatened its very existence. It is this presentation of depravity as morality, guilt as honor, atrocity as heroism, and genocide as redemption that continues to haunt our civilization long after the destruction of Nazism.