LINGNER: For three whole days he and eighteen men defended a locality which was being attacked from all sides by half a regiment. I actually experienced how one MG pinned down whole sectors. Then we carried out a counter-attack and rescued them. They were the remnants of a rescue “Abteilung” which was 180 men strong before and now had only those eighteen men left. Those were still the good old types!565
The norm of fighting bravely on instead of surrendering can also be identified among noncombatants from the Wehrmacht. For instance, the POWs who complained most vehemently about the quick German capitulation in Paris on August 25, 1944, were army administrators.566
Bravery, obedience, and devotion to duty were the major determining factors of how soldiers’ behavior was perceived,567 and this matrix of values remained stable over the entire course of the war. Individual biographical and political elements played almost no role whatsoever. Military values were just as important to those with Ph.D.’s in philosophy as to people who had worked in banks or bakeries—and just as significant for committed Social Democrats as for passionate Nazis. As much as the 17 million members of the Wehrmacht may have differed from one another socially, they consistently shared the same military value system during their time of service.
There were, however, interesting nuances between various branches of the military and soldiers who used different sorts of weaponry. Conversations between navy men emphasized bravery, pride, hardness, and discipline more than talk between airmen and army men did. First Lieutenant Hans Jenisch reported about the loss of U-32 in October 1940: “When our U-boat sank I heard a few shouts of ‘Heil Hitler,’ and some cheering in the distance, but some cried pitifully for help. Horrible! But there are always one or two who do that.”568 A private told in the same vein of the sinking of the blockade runner MS
There are many other examples of this sort illustrating the importance of military virtues in the stories told by navy POWs. Similar statements can be found among servicemen from other military branches, but there was good reason why they occurred so frequently among sailors. German navy men had rebelled against their commanders near the end of World War I, and the navy was, from the beginning of World War II, the least important branch of the German military. On September 3, 1939, the commander in chief of the navy, Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, deemed the coming struggle against Britain, a traditional sea power, to be so hopeless that all German sailors could do was “die with honor.”570 Raeder’s mood soon improved, and at one point he even believed that a blockade could bring England to its knees, but the navy leadership was also forced to try to bolster morale in special ways. Displaying particularly good morale was the navy’s lone trump card, the one way it had of achieving recognition within the state and the Wehrmacht in general. Nonetheless, as of 1943, the German navy descended into military insignificance. German battleships and destroyers were far inferior technologically to American and British warships, and the German navy lacked the necessary fuel to properly train sailors, so the Allies won almost all of the battles at sea. Notable successes failed to materialize. The Allies negated a slight German advantage in E-boats and U-boats with better radar and sonar technology. And the longer there was no positive news to report and the larger the enemy’s matériel and personnel advantage became, the more fighting became a value for its own sake.571 The Nazi leadership respected the navy in this regard,572 and the alleged extraordinary morale among German sailors was one of the main reasons Hitler chose Grand Admiral Dönitz to succeed him as Reich president.
“The German gives up, if it’s hopeless.”573
