In any case, obedience was seen as a higher virtue than reflecting on whether military actions made sense. Captain Hartdegen, for example, said of his time in the staff of a tank training division in Normandy in 1944: “We used to sit down together in the evening with the ‘General’ and his senior commanders, and we always used to say: ‘Has the FÜHRER gone mad—these orders which he demands of us.’ We carried them out, just because we had been properly educated.”560 Irmfried Wilimzig, a critic of the Nazis who was interned at Fort Hunt in the United States, concurred: “Orders are orders, that’s self-evident, especially at the front.”561 Although the Wehrmacht also tried to teach soldiers to think and act for themselves, obedience remained one of its most important norms. Refusing an order was considered an utterly unacceptable deviation, which threatened the very foundation of the army. The imperative to obey bound soldiers together less because they were afraid of being punished than because it was a firmly anchored rule in their frame of reference. Major Leonhard Mayer told a bunkmate in a U.S. POW camp about the following incident at the Battle of Cherbourg:
