Major Mayer found himself in a moral dilemma, faced with what he calls a “thankless destiny.” He had to choose between following orders and trying to preserve the lives of comrades whom he had known for years and for whom he was responsible. He wanted to be a good commander who stood by his men and shared their suffering, and he realized that more and more of them were being killed because he as a commander refused to break off the one-sided battle. But disobeying orders was out of the question. Obedience and duty were his highest priority. This becomes especially evident in his remark that he would have behaved exactly the same had he been a member of the Red Army. Only when his troop was down to the last thirty men, Mayer reports later on in the protocols, did he give up the fight. Otherwise, they would have all been simply slaughtered. It was impossible for him to violate orders until his unit had, for all practical purposes, ceased to exist and his own life was jeopardized. Technically speaking, though, he had not followed instructions down to the letter. For that reason, he thinks he could theoretically be brought up for court-martial.
We do not know the details of how Mayer’s unit really behaved in battle in June 1944. It’s possible that he also suffered pangs of conscience because in reality some of his men had deserted or surrendered long before he was down to his last thirty soldiers, as he claimed. Nonetheless, his anecdote is an example of the immense importance that the officer corps, in particular, attached to obedience and duty. Only in extreme emergency situations, at the very last second, one could say, was it possible for them to break free from this reference frame. Interestingly, politics had very little influence on the attitudes of men like Mayer. There was no shortage of critics of the regime who complained about the misfortune the Nazis had brought down upon Germany and yet were outraged when infantrymen surrendered without any stiff resistance.563
In soldiers’ frames of reference, bravery was just as universal a virtue as obedience and sense of duty. Bravery was the primary reflection of an individual’s performance insofar as most soldiers, unlike Luftwaffe pilots, could not measure themselves on the basis of enemies killed or tanks destroyed. Land warfare was the sum of many smaller parts, and there were no concrete results of individual actions. Bravery was the only criterion. The standard against which infantrymen were judged was their ability to keep fighting and carry out their tasks under the most difficult circumstances.
For example, a First Lieutenant Gayer reported about his deployment on the Italian Front:
GAYER: I was first sent into operation near CASSINO, and we were in operation for a few weeks on the ORSOGNA front. Although in that case I noted as “Kompanie” commander and was in fact near ARIELLE (?) south of PESCARA. We were completely wiped out by artillery fire. My “Kompanie” consisted of twenty-eight Germans and thirty-six Italians. The Italians ran away. The Italian “Leutnant” was the first to go. We stayed there for about ten days.564
Gayer’s story contrasts the behavior of his own soldiers with that of the Italians, among whom even the
Combat soldiers, especially those who had been part of elite units, told these sorts of stories most frequently. One of the most drastic narratives came from SS Standartenführer Hans Lingner, one of the few high-ranking SS officers to be captured by the Allies during the war. He reported proudly about the deeds of an Untersturmführer in his division:
