Soldaten полностью

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.

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: