Soldaten полностью

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.