Soldaten полностью

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: