THOMA: It’s impossible for the Commander to go on living in such circumstances. It’s just the same as if all the men on a ship were lost or three sailors or so were saved and the Captain and First Officer—the whole business is quite incomprehensible to me, because I know PAULUS. It must have been that his nerves and everything were completely shattered. But it is un-soldierly and it upsets me as a soldier.610
But the two men agreed that Italian generals had behaved far more disgracefully at the battle of El Alamein. Whereas Thoma claimed to have barely escaped from his tank with bullet holes in his uniform, the Italian generals “arrived in full dress with all their baggage. The English officers in CAIRO laughed at them. They arrived looking like COOK’s tourists with their luggage containing their peacetime uniforms. They immediately put on their peacetime uniforms. I immediately said: ‘Please don’t put me with them.’”611
The expectation that high-ranking officers would lead by example and fight to the death also recurs throughout official Wehrmacht daily reports. On July 3, 1944, for example, one report read: “In heavy defensive fighting, the commanding generals, Lieutenant General Martinek and Artillery General Pfeiffer, together with Major General Schünemann, fulfilled their duty and died a hero’s death, fighting at the vanguard of their troops.”612
Significantly, soldiers’ reflections on this topic rarely, if ever, include thoughts about whether their behavior was useful in an operative sense. Thoma never paused to consider what benefit it would have for him as a commanding general to be present on the most advanced line, and Menny never mulled over the question of whether his attempted escape was sensible or whether it merely condemned more of his men to death. Nor did Captain Gundlach ponder whether holding out in his bunker near Ouistreham did anything to delay the advance of British forces. Fighting sui generis needed no justification. Those who conformed to the norm, or at least told themselves they did, could feel good about themselves as soldiers and avoid recriminations following defeat.
Germany’s worsening fortunes only began to influence standards of normal soldierly behavior late in the war. The crushing defeat at Normandy may have convinced many soldiers that the war was lost, but they continued to believe that soldiers should fight bravely down to the very end. Only after the failed Ardennes Offensive did this imperative lose currency, as most soldiers realized that unconditional surrender was the only option, and Hitler largely lost his mythic aura.613 Masses of soldiers commenced a “tacit strike,” as General Edwin Graf von Rothkirch reported on March 9, 1945, in Trent Park: “They just sit there and do nothing when the Americans arrive.”614
This tendency should not, however, obscure the fact that some soldiers, depending on their situation and personal disposition, did put up fierce resistance to advancing Allied troops well into April 1945. If the social fabric of a combat unit remained intact, and if the soldiers felt they were still well equipped, they fought far more fiercely than one would expect in the final days of a lost war. An example was the performance of 2nd Navy Infantry Division south of Bremen in April 1945. The division consisted of leftover ships’ crewmen with little combat experience. Badly trained and equipped, they nonetheless fought with great energy and absorbed huge losses.615
The higher an individual was ranked, the more difficult it was for him to divorce himself from the framework of military values. In Trent Park, German generals argued quite emotionally about what the Wehrmacht should do in the face of the catastrophic military situation. In late January 1945, General Heinrich Eberbach concisely summed up the basic poles of opinion:
